Bill Manhire and a very long cat

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” – Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio.

I’m a huge fan of the work of Bill Manhire, New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate and unquestionably the leading New Zealand poet of his generation. Manhire was Poet in Residence at StAnza 2009 here in Scotland and is published in the UK by Carcanet, his most recent collection Lifted came out in 2007. I am shamefully ignorant of all but the most visible of Kiwi writers, and I’m sure I’m not alone here; very little poetry of the antipodean variety makes it to our shores. Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, James Baxter and Auckland-born Fleur Adcock all achieved international acclaim, but there are few contemporary New Zealand poets that have enjoyed similar reach. Manhire’s poetry has made the leap, and deservedly so, it's playful and poignant with an immediacy and availability that draws you in and holds you tight. His writing has a transparency, a smoothness of expression and lightness of touch that is very accessible, he’s not a poet to rage and burn, but he smoulders quietly, even insidiously. I first came across him when I was at a lecture Marina Warner gave at the Edinburgh Book Festival a year or two ago, promoting her really wonderful book Phantasmagoria. She quoted Manhire’s poem ‘Kevin’, the final poem in Lifted, and it’s stayed in my mind indelibly. Have a read here.

Warner was connecting Manhire’s poem to ideas about the emergence of radio – of wireless technology – and the early twentieth century precoccupation with spiritualism, something I’m really interested in. The disembodied voices from the wireless seemed to come from a mysterious “ether”, linking us to a larger, supernatural realm and tapping into the late Victorian longing for a contact with the spiritual world, with something transcendent. Here’s Susan J. Douglas in Listening In:

Wireless fanned long-standing fantasies and, from its earliest introduction, evoked psychic metaphors. It worked, wrote the New York Herald simply, “like magic.” Being able to speak to others through the air in an electromagnetic voice “would be almost like dreamland and ghostland,” concluded one writer in 1902. It seemed the technical equivalent of telepathy. Popular Science Monthly observed that, through wireless, “the nerves of the whole world [were], so to speak, being bound together.”

It might seem strange now, accustomed as we are to technologies that operate invisibly, but if you really stop and think about the way we are connected to each other – by the internet, by mobile phones, making distance irrelevant – there is much to wonder at. “Any sufficiently advanced technology” said Arthur C. Clarke, "is indistinguishable from magic.”

In ‘Kevin’ Manhire wonders where the dead go, and sees the faraway dark spaces within the “heavy radio” as a good a place as any. There’s an eeriness, an uneasiness to that “dark, celestial glow” of the dial, even as it connects us to those distant voices clamouring in space, giving a primal sense of a bond to “the cave, the hive”. It’s a poem about mortality, and uncertainty, both consolatory and disquieting. The idea of being suddenly ‘lifted’, by death, or as a child by parents “we barely know”, is unsettling, but there’s also a comforting side to that image, the child trusting the hands that lift them. There’s a sense in the poem of that longing to be connected to others, part of “the cave, the hive”, but there’s also something more than a little terrifying in that uncertainty and mystery of the far away places beyond us, and the promise that one day “we all shall go / into the dark furniture of the radio.”

The idea of the radio as a connection to a spiritual realm isn’t a new one, it preoccupied the Modernists and shook up their writing (see the fragmentary, cacophonous style of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Virginia's Woolf's The Waves, Ezra Pound's Cantos and have a read of Kipling’s short story 'Wireless'). I like the idea of poems as voices in the dark, ways of connecting with kindred spirits. A last word from Manhire, interviewed in theage.com.au: “I certainly believe there's a big universe out there and everything that's ever broadcast on the radio is travelling through space – and books and poems are part of that. There are ways in which we survive our own endings.”

And a bonus, here's Bill Manhire reading 'Love Poem', the first poem from his first collection:



Download mp3. Buy Collected Poems here.

//Explore some more radio poems here. // The Scottish Poetry Library website has a great selection of NZ poets introduced by their Scottish contemporaries over here. //

Photo: Bricolage.108.

daily poem: Introduction to Poetry / Billy Collins

I love Billy Collins, one of those rare genuinely popular poets who has a real evangelistic approach to poetry, and who manages to be funny and lyrical and very accessible. His brilliant Poetry 180 project is all about getting poetry-for-pleasure into the classroom, with a hand-picked collection of 180 poems - one for every day of the school year - selected on the basis of “their willingness to deliver immediate injections of pleasure.” It's also a great introduction to contemporary poets, including many not especially famous. You can read the poems over here and there's a handy teacher's guide here.


Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a colour slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
And feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.


Buy Poetry 180 here. // Buy 180 More here.

Photo by marrian.

welcome!

So…here it is. The first bite of the apple. Welcome to The Portmanteau! This is my blog, it’s going to mostly be about poetry – writing it, reading it, being excited and baffled and unsettled and bowled-over and grabbed by the throat and shaken by it. I’m Laura, your friendly companion and tour guide as we journey through the challenging, wonderful and occasionally treacherous hinterlands of all things poetical.

Let’s go!

I like the idea of a poem as a journey – the way it opens up in front of you, building in impact, becoming aware of its cadences, the rhythm of it; and the way meaning emerges, which can sometimes feels like an uphill climb – but then you stand at the top and look back and say yes, I see it now! I’m currently reading Ruth Padel’s so-far excellent The Poem and the Journey, which packs in sixty discussions of contemporary poems and seems like an excellent primer for anyone looking for a way into the world of contemporary poetry, a world that can often seem a daunting, exclusive and difficult place to be.

I want to redress this, not because I feel particularly qualified to do so – (I’m a recent(ish) grad with a Masters in English Literature, have had a few poems published, won a prize or two, organised a small creative writing group and worked in publishing) – but because it’s something I really feel a need for. The contemporary poetry world is very much alive and thriving – there’s heaps of poetry readings in every city, hugely successful book and poetry festivals, oversubscribed creative writing courses, excellent journals, zines and online communities, and many, many brilliant poems published every year. But so much of that exists in what can seem a quite exclusive and intimidating world that can be difficult to access, especially for those who may have little experience of reading contemporary poets or who have preconceived notions as to what contemporary poetry is like (obscure, difficult, self-indulgent, irrelevant, inferior to ‘classic’ poetry, etc.).

Studying English Literature at university, I was really surprised how many of my fellow students were dismissive and resistant to any kind of poetry. They probably wrote their own plaintive post-adolescent poems about being pseudo-bohemian, socially awkward, prematurely embittered, misunderstood geniuses of undetermined sexuality (I know I did), but many, maybe the majority of those I studied with, just didn’t ‘do’ poetry - didn’t get it, or like it, or see it as being as worthy of consideration as the novels and plays we studied.

So, if even Eng Lit students don’t want to read poetry, then there can’t be much hope for everyone else, right? Well, I think a lot of the problem is the way poetry is taught in schools, you remember – all that critical analysis and interpretation, (What is the effect of Keats’ use of alliteration in the final couplet? Discuss Larkin’s attitude towards religion. Compare and contrast Heaney’s use of metaphor in any two poems…and so on and so on) picking apart every word of a poem until it lies lifeless in front of you, murdering to dissect. In Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled the inimitable Mr Fry laments this tendency and quotes a well known joke:

The way poetry was taught at school reminded W.H. Auden of a Punch cartoon composed, legend has it, by the poet A.E. Housman. Two English teachers are walking in the woods in springtime. The first, on hearing birdsong, is moved to quote William Wordsworth:

TEACHER 1: Oh cuckoo, shall I call thee bird
Or but a wandering voice?

TEACHER 2: State the alternative preferred
With reasons for your choice.

Funny, but all too familiar. I hate this. I hate that the same poems are trotted out year by year in schools all over the country, I hate this emphasis on interpreting everything, as if all poets are just trying to be clever – or showing off – by speaking in endless metaphors and similes, all wrapped around the ‘meaning’ that must be rooted out and analysed. Here’s Neil Astley in his foreword to the brilliant Bloodaxe anthology Staying Alive:

One of the greatest disservices to poetry has been the modern tendency to read poems in terms of their paraphrasable meaning…These kinds of misreadings of poetry are the inevitable result of botched teaching: first the killing of poems by careless dissection at school, then their intellectual “decoding” as so-called “texts” in universities by literary theoreticians.

Poems should live and breathe, they should seep under your skin or grasp you by both hands, they should simmer and burn and boil over, they should knock your socks off. So this is a blog about poetry (although I reserve the right to squeeze in a few things non-poetical along the way). Because I love it and because I want more people to get the chance to enjoy it, I don’t pretend that this blog will achieve that but I want it to be a place where I can explore and discover and share all kinds of writing, new and old, famous and not-famous-yet, published and unpublished.

So…are we ready? I’m packing a thermos of tea, some peanut butter sandwiches, my moleskine, and the aforementioned Staying Alive, which, along with its sister anthology Being Alive, is the one book, above all others, that I’d recommend you invest in for the journey. It’s published by the terrific Bloodaxe Books, purveyors of poetry of the highest and coolest order, and it’s the book that really turned me on to the awesomeness of contemporary poetry.

Here’s the two quotes borrowed from its epigraph, and I can’t think of better ones to welcome you to the poetical adventures of The Portmanteau:

One should only read books which bite and sting one. If the book we are reading does not wake us up with a blow to the head, what’s the point in reading? A book must be the axe which smashes the frozen sea within us. – Franz Kafka

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. – Emily Dickinson