Poetry in the City

To celebrate National Poetry Day, this month we took poetry out of the library and into the city streets, or more exactly, onto the city walls. The very cool Phantom Billstickers designed, printed and put up nearly a hundred poetry posters featuring works by Michele Leggott, Robert Sullivan, Selina Tusitala Marsh, John Newton, Murray Edmond, Alice Miller, Jack Ross, Ya-Wen Ho, and Makyla Curtis, stars of this year's Poetry Central, the gig we put on every year with nzepc on Poetry Day.

 

Here's a shot of Rutland St, where I loved seeing the poster of John Newton's poem "Kerouac, somewhere near Billings, Montana" juxtaposed with posters for "Sunset Road".

Summer, 1975. Rotorua, New Zealand … Jimi Hendrix, motorbikes, ika mata and dawn raids… it’s the scene of Tawata Productions’ new play Sunset Road, by Miria George.

is what the show's producers say about "Sunset Road".

Winter, 1949. Billings, Montana... Jack Kerouac, Greyhound bus, the memory of a girl, the night... it's the episode from Kerouac's journals which inspired this poem. 

is how John introduced his poem at Poetry Central.

And here is the poem, of which John gave a masterful reading before dashing out the door -- "Off to Moscow!" I heard someone say, and thought it was a reference to Ferlinghetti's "Moscow in the Wilderness, Segovia in the Snow", a friendly salute to John's artistic prowess, but it turns out he really is going to the white stone city. Still, the metaphor would hardly have been amiss.


Kerouac, somewhere near Billings, Montana

Beneath the outline of his face, in the smoky window
of the Greyhound bus, the atavistic continent,
its pitch-black mountains, its steel-grey rivers,
scrolls by him. Knight of the Dolorous Countenance.
Here is the west of his mislaid connections: neighbourhood
softball games under floodlights, a girl in bright denims
with strawberry hair, a fatherly face among the wind-beaten ranchers
at the card tables back in some beer joint in Butte.
In every valley there's a single light, and every light
is a family's love, and the inky night between them expands
in his chest. With his hand in his trousers
he comforts himself, adrift in the darkness and solitary joy
of an epic grief that could almost be real, that
could almost be something else, minor, too painful to touch.

-- John Newton

The poets with their posters at Poetry Central 2014

You can read about Kerouac's bus trip through Montana in his journals, published as Windblown world : the journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954. Deftly and unobtrusively edited by Douglas Brinkley, they make a great read for Kerouac fans, or, if you're not already a fan, might get you heading down the Kerouac road.

John Newton's books of poetry are Lives of the Poets (2010) and  Family Songbook (2013). He is also the author of  The double rainbow : James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem commune.

nzepc, which celebrated its thirteenth birthday at our Poetry Day gig, is the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre, an electronic gateway to poetry resources in Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific region, based at the University of Auckland.

To learn more about the Phantom Billstickers, visit www.0800phantom.

John Newton, National Poet

John Newton is another of the poets who will be reading at Poetry Central, our annual celebration of National Poetry Day. The appointment is for July 27, at 5:30 pm, at Central City Library.

Here's one of John's poems from his book Lives of the poets:

Townes van Zandt at the Mangy Moose
 
'Hey Townes, play us something cheerful!" Oh man,
how did it come to this (a restaurant in Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
each night the same bunch of snow-dazzled ski bums
and tourists)? Not that the hecklers mean any harm: he works it
into a small routine ('Hey, these are the cheerful songs --
you don't want to hear the rest of them!'). Fiction, of course.
There are no others. Each song's a miracle that makes him
feel primed like a piston. But once, just once,
he'd like to explain to them (C'mon, stick to the goofy jokes),
tell them the story of Skinny Dennis, dying on Sunset
Beach with his boots on. Or try out his version of Galveston
O Galveston (Damn, he always loved that song!),
how he doesn't remember the sea waves crashing,
only the chlorpromazine and the forked lightning.

Remembering James K. Baxter

I didn’t make it to Jerusalem
but I heard midsummer thunder shake the weatherboards
of a run-down villa in Grafton.
Once in Vulcan Lane he came toward me
a familiar stranger in the rain
a poet of Aotearoa
he fixed me with the obsidian eye of a leathery tuatara.
His beard was a worn-out broom that had cleared the road to Jerusalem.
The day I heard he died I flew my heart like a flag at half-mast
With no other way to grieve walked suddenly alone and desolate
beneath the Moreton Bay figs of Albert Park.

This is the start of Bob Orr’s poem “Jerusalem”, from his book Calypso. He's one of my favourite poets (I love the mix of somewhat stoned imagery and straight shots of emotion) and people (though I have only talked to him twice), and he came to read this poem at Poetry Central, our Montana Poetry Day event, where this year we were celebrating James K. Baxter with two brand-new books to hand.

John Newton was there with his book The double rainbow, the story of the Jerusalem commune, which he calls Baxter’s undiscovered masterpiece. “Jerusalem was never an alternative to the poetry; it was part of it, its logical destination, even its most vivid accomplishment.“

I find it a remarkable book, not just for how much I learned about people and times still largely unknown to me, but for how John’s driving desire to draw insight from “the vast reservoir of memory” out there is permeated by such absolutely genuine modesty. His one theoretical imperative, he says, is “that I should try to write a book that reads truly to the people represented in it.” And finally, “I hope it’s only a first telling of the story rather than a final one.”

The other book is an almost fit-in-your-pocket volume called James K. Baxter poems selected and introduced by Sam Hunt, another great poetry book from Auckland University Press after Fast talking PI and Mirabile Dictu.  AUP books are always well-designed, but when I found this book on my desk, I picked it up and just sat there with it in my hands, staring at it, running my hands over it, didn’t even get a chance to read it, ended up just stuffing it in my bag and taking it home.

When I did get to reading it the other night, the book kept me up until all hours, reading just one more and just one more, until there were no more to read. I turned off the light and had that same feeling that you get after a long journey with train rides, plane rides, all sorts of rides, vending machines, hard benches, watching someone who reminds you of someone, lots of coffees, magazines, finally you’re home, you take off your clothes with the stain from two cities ago, you climb into bed and close your eyes, but the thoughts keep whirling in your head. Who was that person? How did it go again what she said?

In his very, very good introduction, with its few, choice, simply told stories to laugh and cry about, Sam Hunt says that he picked only the poems which really work, the high-octane, read-aloud ones. The ones he can’t forget. Like this one:

Ferry from Lyttelton (1972)

These bare hills have their own non-human beauty,
A country made for angels, not for men.

And the slow bow wash of the ferry
Covers and uncovers the rocks

At the bottom of the cliffs. Always the feeling comes
That one might leap over the side

And sink in the cold water. Not, I think
A desire to kill oneself

But a longing to go back and rest
In the waters of the womb. So, brother,

Button up your coat against the night breeze
Or come and have some toast and coffee

At the curved bar in swivel chairs
Where the waiter is a friend of a friend of a friend.


James K. Baxter poems selected and introduced by Sam Hunt
 
The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem commune by John Newton

Calypso by Bob Orr

You can read the complete version of Bob Orr's “Jerusalem” on the AUP website