Lunching with Michele

"I hear you've done an assignment on one of my poems?"

Here I am. I am face to face with my favourite poet and one of my literary idols, Michele Leggott. And she's talking to me. Me! So, of course, my mind goes blank at the all crucial moment, robbing me of anything even mildly intelligent to say. Of all the times my mind chooses to stop working (and it does it with alarming regularity), why now!!

Bumbling idiot act aside, this experience of meeting Michele was one of the most outstanding and inspirational experiences of my entire life. She had come to Massey's Albany campus to give a lecture in the Chancellor's Series and what a treat it was. She read us five of her poems which are all the more beautiful when read out by their author; showed us her tokotoko (the ceremonial stick each Poet Laureate is given, each personally designed for them by Jacob Scott) and then spoke about her writing and its current connection to journeys.

If this was the closest I got to Michele Leggott ever again, I would die a very happy woman. However, our wonderful lecturers Mary and Jack (three cheers for Mary and Jack!!) arranged for us to have lunch with her afterwards. Which was where I found myself, directly opposite one of the women I admire most, barely unable to remember my own name, let alone the poem of hers I had written about. It was of course, a woman, a rose and what has it have to do with her or they with one another, a poem I have read many times and love dearly. My most sincere apologies to Michele for my appalling memory.

Over lunch, our group had the opportunity to discuss her work, her teaching, her Laureateship and her inspiration with her. I think the two things that stood out for me the most of all of the things she said were that she takes her inspiration from her journey through life (including trips to the shops as well as Portugal) and that, when I answered her question "Are any of you here writers?" with "I try to be" she said, "No, you say, YES, I am a writer."

So, YES. I am a writer. And I have Michele Leggott to thank for a boost of creative confidence. It doesn't get much better than that!

Poet Laureate's Journey leads to Albany

Michele Leggott

New Zealand Poet Laureate Michele Leggott was guest speaker at Massey University, Albany, on August 13 as part of the 2008 Chancellor’s Lecture Series. Leggott lectures at Auckland University, but has much in common with the Massey Albany campus, having worked on various literary projects with Drs Jack Ross and Mary Paul. In the picture above, Leggott is holding a fire stick, a ceremonial keepsake for being the Poet Laureate which was carved by Jacob Scott. A special coating on part of the stick is capable of creating fire through friction. Leggott’s tenure as Poet Laureate lasts for two years, and she says that she is already planning her next “journey” once her tenure ends. “As one project folds another unfolds,” she told a near-capacity audience, “I think I know how it’s going to happen.”

Pictured above with Leggott are students and staff from the Massey postgraduate paper ‘Recent Poets and Fiction in New Zealand’. From left, Anna Leclerq, Jack Ross, Michele Leggott, Kathryn Lee, Mary Paul, Bruce Craig.

Michele Leggott Seminar

by Anna Leclercq

[Michele Leggott, "Micromelismata." DIA (Auckland: AUP, 1994) 7].

Introduction

I am going to talk about two of Michele Leggott’s poems, WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ and ‘Micromelismata’. My main focus is on ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’, followed by a short commentary on ‘Micromelismata’.

Half way through the preparation of this seminar I had thought of ditching the subject and finding another one which would be less difficult, more straightforward, where I could quote from learned critiques which would give us all a firm understanding of what the poems were about. I found none such critiques in my research for these two poems, but they would not let me go. Like an abstract painting, their very unintelligibility kept pulling me back to have another look in an endeavour to find a meaning, any kind of meaning, to them.

What a person viewing an abstract painting sees in the finished painting is not necessarily what the painter has in mind whilst he is completing the work. Nevertheless, who is to say the viewer’s interpretation is any the less valid. It is on this premise, therefore, that I gave myself license to indulge my own imagination, delve into these two ‘abstract’ poems and ‘make my own connections’.

Michele Leggott’s book entitled DIA, published in 1994, is her third book of poems, the first two being Like This published in 1988 and Swimmers, Dancers in 1991. It comes in a red and white cover with a Minoan* mural done as a Maori weaving, the latter stamping the collection with a New Zealand imprint, however faint or unrecognised.

Like Susan Howe, Leggott has achieved a name for being an intellectual poet, and in her first poem in DIA, namely ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ she makes no apologies for that. She demonstrates her intellect by the use of Greek, French and Latin references, and of abundant use of polysyllabic and Latinate diction; her carefully chosen words are used as much for their beauty of sound and structure as for their meaning. Exactly what Leggott is telling us in this poem is obscure, yet the poem, I would like to think, does tell a story, and, as far as I can see, (which incidentally is another poem title of Leggott’s), on many levels.

"WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?" was originally a "ribbon text," which first appeared on the walls of the Wellington City Art Gallery, who had commissioned the work in the 70s. In its original form it was interactive in that the reader had to walk to read the poem, and the strung-together words from various discourses invited viewers and readers to make their own connections. I next found ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?” in a March 1991 edition of Landfall 45(1):3-24 where again it appeared as a ribbon beginning at the bottom of page 3 and continuing on through the pages to its end.

Now, in another incarnation, it has appeared as the first poem in DIA and keeps company with four other pieces, Micromelismata, which I will discuss briefly later, Blue Irises, Circle and Keeping Warm, all of which Leggott calls ‘heart poems, the ones that take one’s breath away or make tears and laughter come’. Blue Irises, Circle and Keeping Warm could well be described as less obscure in their meaning than the first two; but all challenge conventional lyric reading.

Douglas Barbour, in his ‘Essays on Contemporary Poetry’ states that ‘like Leggott’s poem, "Micromelismata,", ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ focuses on its materiality and on the fact of its production, encouraging us to "see" poetry in different frames from those in which we usually receive it’.

The word DIA comes from the Greek and means Goddess; it also means ‘through’ and it means two, couples; lovers, partners. Leggott, faithful to these interpretations, has chosen to display both ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ and Micromelismata in two parts being spread over two pages, and the voices, although both male and female, show a predominance for the female voices.

For ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ Leggott uses large unsophisticated capital letters, some bold, some in outline, some shadowed in parts or in whole, which compel us to view the words and phrases at the same time both ‘as advertising and art’, while requiring us to read them in what Douglas Barbour calls ‘their fragmented engagement with various discourses of power’.

For a number of years now Leggott has been suffering from two diseases of the eyes. Although she was not diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa until 1985, and then macular degeneration in the mid 1990s – long after ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ first appeared – it occurred to me that the unevenness in the density of each typed letter could be a representation of the dawning on Leggott’s subconscious of the fact that her eyesight was already showing signs of the onset of eye disease, and perhaps this was a way of displaying, in poetry, the changes in her vision. This is only a stab in the dark (sorry about the cruel pun), but I could find no other way of explaining this phenomenon .except for emphasis; and this I felt would be too transparent for Leggott. I would be interested to hear what others have to say on this point.

Andrew Johnston, in his work Entertaining Possibilities: Six Contemporary New Zealand Poets, states that Leggott’s poetry ‘explores the power of language to enact experience, rather than to formulate abstractions from experience’. He goes on to say that Leggott’s poetry is a ‘torrent of sounds, sentiments, situations and sensory detail (great alliteration there); it is the most colourful poetry being written in New Zealand.’ Mark Williams said of her earlier work: ‘Leggott is a sensualist of the word. Her poems enact sound, colour, taste, smell, movement’. I have to say I would agree with that, and the poems contained in DIA certainly reflect that point of view.

‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ contains no punctuation; the whole poem runs like a river and, were it not to begin with the word IN and end with the word OUT, it could equally appear circular, running back in on itself, like a river returning to its source, a snake wreathed in its own coils, a torque, a helix.

The work crafts wonderful sound pictures achieved by alliteration, assonance and repetition. ‘ALMOND ABEILLE AMYGDALA AH; COELENTERATE SOUP SIP SUP FOLLOW HER UP SPIRULA SPIRULA’. It also has great movement particularly when describing water, e.g. HYDROPHILE PURLING. You will see later what I mean when I give my interpretation of this word coupling.

Leggott appears to be having a good time playing with sound and rhythm, yet the meanings of the words are mysterious, hard to pin down. Once she has finished writing the poem she appears to have finished speaking. She then surrenders the poem, handing it over into the care of the reader who is charged with giving it its new life form.

A number of words written in bold type which, if linked together, read ‘IN DESIRE DESIRE ORAL DELIGHT DELIGHT OUT’ immediately stand out as though they should have some attention., and, like Jane Stafford in her article entitled ‘The panic of O’ (New Zealand Books Journal, Volume 4, number 3 (Issue 15) 1994), I saw them as a reinforcement of love and desire to underline eroticism in the poem. Stafford commented that these words would be ‘enough to get anyone’s hydrophile purling!’.

I wanted to find out if the poem as a whole did have any understandable meaning or message running through it, or whether it was just words strung together to create a sensuality of sound. What could I make of its meaning now that I, as a reader, was charged with giving it its new life form. A Latin dictionary, hardly used since school days, proved invaluable when tackling the Latinate diction. There did appear to be words that could be interpreted as signposts which might lead me to a coherent understanding of the poem. For example, ONTO LOGICAL = ONTOLOGICAL=the study of existence. PELAGIC = sediments deposited beneath deep ocean waters that are rich in the remains of microscopic organisms; INCUNABULA = the early stages of becoming something. Could she be speaking about the beginning of life?

Many complex English word couplings, such as ‘HYDROPHILE PURLING’ added to the poem’s complexity. ‘Hydrophile’, I discovered, is derived from ‘hydrophilic’, a chemical term meaning having a strong affinity for water or being able to dissolve in, or be absorbed or mixed easily with, water. ‘Purling’ has, as one of its meanings , flowing with a curling or rippling motion, and a soft murmuring sound, as a shallow stream over stones.

INCANDESCENT LACUNAE FLUORESCE AT A TOUCH DESIRE TORQUES DILOQUENT PEARL CURVES LUMENS CON BRIO ALIGHT. Doesn’t it sound wonderful? It is a torrent of sound, it is sensual, it has an atmosphere of love. But does it actually mean anything? A loose translation created the following:

GLOWING POOLS FLOW AT A TOUCH DESIRE SPIRALS UPWARDS THE SIGHT OF PEARL CURVES ILUMINATED BY RADIANT LIGHT ALIGHT (sets fire to).

I won’t go through the meaning of every word here, but if my amateur translation is correct, this poem appears to describe, the process of attraction, copulation and fertilization from the moment the male sets eyes on the female to the end of the process where fertilization takes place. The poem is layered: that is to say the story is told not just on one level, the human level, but also on a botanic level (DELIQUESCENCE describing the release of the spores from the mushroom, for example), and from a marine level ‘FISHTAILS DEEP TROPES SQUIRT SQUID SUCH OCTOPI PULL ANEMONES GULP; eroticism over Latinate structure over biology, over botany over storytelling of beginning of life (life as we know it having its origins in the creatures that crawled out of the sea on to land).

The unconventional presentation of the poem and the complexity of the words did hinder a smooth reading; and instances of words such as ‘sanglots’ (sobs – French), for example, refused to allow me to tease out the reason for being there. Perhaps they were there for their sound as much as their meaning. The lack of a smooth reading and difficulties with some of the words did take away a little of the poem’s magic. Not being able to find an official interpretation of it is also unsatisfactory.

Nevertheless, if I had to describe this poem I would say it is a celebration of words, rhythms, sounds which all relate to the process of procreation and the rhythm of life/death in the natural world. Whether I am correct or not in my interpretation we shall probably never know. My interpretation could be dismissed as pure whimsy; I can only say in defense of my conclusions that it does have a certain validity because Michele Leggott herself states, as I mentioned above, that we must ‘find our own meanings’.

‘Micromelismata’ .

Taking the words ‘BEE DESIDERATE MOUTH’ from ‘WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE?’ moves me conveniently on to Michele Leggott’s next poem in DIA. "Micromelismata" is an example of ‘concrete’ poetry. ‘Concrete’, historically, is a particular moment, largely in Europe, but extending to Britain and the United States also, within a wider context of shaped poetry, going back to the work of George Herbert (died 1633) in England. Herbert himself knew of at least one predecessor for his work, an edition of The Greek Anthology, Theocriti Idyllia, printed by P. Brubacchius, Frankfurt, 1545. This information comes from an essay entitled Poetics edited by Joel Kuszai.

‘BEE DESIDERATE MOUTH’ reminds me of the Marilyn Monroe type bee stung lips which the type forms within the two poem balls that constitute ‘Micromelismata’. The balls are identical in shape; the first ‘ball’ being made up entirely of Xs and the second made up of words, the letters of which correspond accurately to the placement of the Xs. According to Elizabeth Caffin in issue 4, September 2007 of ‘A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics’, indentation, spaces between words, use of italics or small caps were all matters affecting meaning and taken with great seriousness by poet and publisher.

There are many voices, many more female voices than male, in this poem: many ‘Is’, Iris is there (Robin Hyde), mother, mama, you, them, her, the female, Isis the Egyptian female deity, the goddess of myths and life. There is dance and music in this poem: Melisma, in music, is the technique of changing the note (pitch) of a single syllable of text while it is being sung. Music sung in this style is referred to as melismatic, as opposed to syllabic, where each syllable of text is matched to a single note; melodiously.

There are kisses, lips, berries, flowers….. This poem is like a reverie, dreams coming in flashes of a single word. It is emotional and reflective; again it celebrates sensuality – reflections on kissing - and nature; the beauty that is around us.

In regard to both WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE? and Melismata - which could be said to be bordering on the unintelligible,- Leggott has been accused of ‘sophism** , elitism and pretension’ (Jane Stafford The panic of O). I would like to be much kinder and put them under heading of experimental. I greatly enjoyed the challenge of delving into these two poems which represent my first experience of works of such unusual construction.

Although I am sure many codes and allusions contained in the poems have eluded me, and not being able to find an official meaning left me somewhat frustrated, as I said earlier, I remain astounded by her mastery of language, captivated by her dexterity of word placement, and seduced by her lyricism.

* Minoan: relating to the Bronze Age civilization on Crete that lasted from around 3000 to 1100 BC.

**An argument or explanation that seems very clever or subtle on the surface but is actually flawed, misleading or intended to deceive.

Sources

Allan, Guy. New Zealand Herald 3: 6; 8 Oct 1994.
Barbour, D. Lyric/Anti-lyric: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (Edmonton: NeWest, 2001).

Direen, Bill. Listener 146(2849): 65; 19 Nov 1994.
Jensen, Kai. Printout 9: 88; Autumn 1995.

Leggott, M. DIA. Auckland : Auckland University Press, 1994.
Landfall, 45(1): 3-24, March 1991

Mead, P. Landfall 189: 121-125; Autumn 1995.
Sharp, I. Evening Post p.7; 7 Oct 1994.
Stafford, J. New Zealand Books 4(3): 10-11; Sept 1994.

Weston, Tom. Press Sup.p.14; 17 Dec 1994.
Wilson, Janet. Quote Unquote 24: 31-32; June 1995.

Eyesight is not vision

This picture is my creative response to "a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another". I'll bring it in to class for people to have a closer look.

For me, this poem is about the horror of the descent into blindness. The page is divided into three sections. The top section represents what is being/has been lost: surefootedness (seen in the dancers in the maze), colour (seen in the flowers) and a place in the world – a place of independence, ease of enjoyment and words. For this reason I chose to paste in the line “Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky.”

The middle section, shaped like an eye, represents the blindness that Michele has. I used white tissue paper to create the feeling of blurry white, at the edges of the top and bottom sections can still be seen. Around this eye I have pasted the lines which I thought were most evocative of the loss of sight to this blindness: “Then a pair of taxis went head to head in a distant country so suddenly I didn’t see the difference but it was a wide white threshold.”

The bottom section is the horror of this blindness. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to lose sight and the ability to easily navigate this world, but the final line of this poem, for me, captured that sheer panic: “She is in the dark, perhaps four years old and the future does not exist, screaming and screaming and screaming.” When I first heard this line read out in class, it sent ice cold chills down my spine. The swirling darkness therefore is not the blindness itself but the panic and terror it evokes.

Within the middle of the eye-shaped whiteness however, is the idea that runs as an undercurrent through this poem: Eyesight is not vision. At first I thought this was a hopeful idea, but within this poem it is a terrible burden. The gift of vision, which must come at the cost of eyesight, is unasked for and feared, but is nevertheless a destiny. The journey towards the destination of this gift is laid out in this picture: the falling and then the panic. But what does this vision see? It lays behind the veil of blindness and it as yet unclear.

Reviews: Michele Leggott

Michele Leggott. as far as I can see. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

It’s always difficult to review books whose authors have undergone extraordinary or painful personal experiences. Wystan Curnow’s Cancer Diary springs to mind – or, going to a further extreme, the work of Paul Celan. I suppose, in the final analysis, it really highlights the dilemma of writing a review in the first place: the (inevitable) aching, raw, exposed nerves that characterise almost anyone who’s gone to that much trouble to communicate; the blasé indifference of the average reader. But a review is a reaction, really – description of a work, a reading in progress. The more magisterial it tries to sound, the less it does justice to the shifting moods and sensibilities which inform any reading of any book.

Michele Leggott is losing her “eyesight to the condition called retinitis pigmentosa,” she tells us on the back of this, her fourth book of poems, fourth in that stellar sequence running from Like This? (1988), through Swimmers, Dancers (1991), to DIA (1994). “Standard print is impossible, and I have found other ways to read.” On the personal level, the only possible reaction to this is sympathy: horror, too, at the prospect of losing one’s own access to the visual world. On the intellectual level, one wonders how the poet can deal with this in her work. Will her imagery shift from predominantly visual to tactile? Will memory take over where bibliography has left off?

The questions seem almost frivolous, but they have to be asked. I love Paul Celan, but the Nobel-Prize-winning Nellie Sachs, another concentration camp survivor, leaves me comparatively cold. Homer, Milton, Borges … and John Heath-Stubbs: there seem to be almost as many precedents for the sightless poet as there are ways of invoking the muse.

Do you see me? I am falling out of a blue sky where my days were as dancers in a maze, sure-footed and smiling. I stood in my garden pulling loquats off the tree and eating them to be full of spring.

These lines, from the sequence of prose-poems “A woman, a rose, and what has it do with her or they with one another?” are perhaps as good a place as any to start trying to read her new book. I say trying to read because I’m still not entirely sure how to read a Michele Leggott poem. To read these poems, at any rate. Nor have I found the other reviewers much help. Comments abut “exquisite sureness of touch” and “virtuoso command of language” may well be true, but they’re not really concrete enough to be useful.

Her phrasing fills me with questions. Why are dancers in a maze especially “sure-footed and smiling”? I suppose because they can see where they’re going (“Can you see me?”), so the cramped hedges don’t impede them. I don’t, myself, eat loquats to be “full of spring” – scrubby little yellow things. That reads like a cliché to me: imprecise and Tennysonian. I have to say, though , that those are the kinds of phrases the book is full of. They tumble out of the “book of tears”:

“the grasses of summer … together we make morning” (p.56)

“In their faces were our faces all dewy at the centre of the world.” (p.53)

“An afternoon flight. Hot rain. I spent months getting that right.” (p.54)

“All dewy”? It’s not so much Biblical – “the sons of the morning shouted together for joy” – as pseudo-Biblical: reminiscent of Thus Spake Zarathustra, or (more to the point) Robin Hyde’s pseudo-Nietzschean Book of Nadath. Why is “I spent months getting that right” in italics? Is it a quote (or “sampling”) from the Iris Wilkinson [Robin Hyde] papers at the University of Auckland (a procedure foreshadowed on her acknowledgements page)? DIA, too, was full of quotes, but more integrated into the texture of the poems. I take it, actually, that “I spent months getting it right” is a stepping outside the frame by the author, a way of getting us to look more closely at “An afternoon flight. Hot rain.” But it’s difficult to know.

So what? Do we have to know? This book of tears is undoubtedly full of things that are easy to understand (even in discussing it it’s notable how one’s critical vocabulary gravitates towards metaphors of sight: “vivid flashes” – “precise imagery” – “exact vision”):

At the ticket office my documentation was examined. Are you blind? The fuller’s boy asked. He was in charge of the fare. Yes I said I am. In the change was a small silver leaf.

This comes at the end of a long list of little-known constellations (Tucana, Vela, Volans) addressed to a “second person so recently singular”. Is this someone else who is bereaved, separated? Or is the poet simply speaking to herself? I worry, too, about that “fuller’s boy”. No doubt he was rude, insensitive, but he was hardly to know that he’d got it so terribly wrong. I feel a little sorry for him, despite the pain he undoubtedly caused. A terrible scene, but it’s described with such serenity, such poise. The silver leaf seems more personified, really.

Perhaps I’m making difficulties for myself where there are none, but I find myself curiously uninvolved in Leggott’s world of apples, beautiful children, boats, stars and sea. It seems, yes, imprecise and over-poetic. “The poet,” Hermann Broch tells us in The Death of Virgil, “is heeded only if he extols the world, never if he portrays it as it is.” I don’t really feel I meet many other people in there. The other characters are mostly reflections of some mood of the author’s (“second person so recently singular”). Sometimes there are word invocations which I recognise: “take me to the river” from a Talking Heads song, or “dance me to the end of love” from Leonard Cohen, but even then the point isn’t obvious to me.

“Much of what I have written here is an effort to remember seeing, something to put against the dark while I searched for other ways of understanding where it has put me,” she tells us, but the anguish of this experience seems masked, distant. That Fuller’s story has more the tone of anecdote than parable. Leggott, then, is no Borges the memorious, deep in the library of Babel, no Homer losing himself in gods and bright-greaved heroes, no Milton waiting in his armchair to be milked. Does she have to be? Of course not. She’s chosen to write this way for a reason – perhaps in order to sidestep the long twentieth century Modernist reaction to Romanticism. I can’t say for sure, but I think that Leggott is a natural Modernist (all those years spent poring over Zukofsky?) trying to construct a Romantic from within herself. Which is presumably where Ursula Bethell, Robin Hyde, and Mary Stanley come in – as important precedents.

Undoubtedly that’s an interesting project. But I’ll not resort to describing these as women’s poems, though they are obviously the poems of a woman. This heightened diction, combined with her usual formal complexity and inventiveness don’t really fit into any clear category of classification. She is aiming, I suspect, at no less than a new voice of feeling accessible to all.

I am a dream best left to the ache
and space of letters virtual
upon a screen

is how the first poem in the book begins. “Letters virtual” to me is like fingernails on a blackboard – that unidiomatic inversion of noun and adjective (“No poetic inversions!” thundered Ezra Pound in his famous letter to Harriet Monroe). What’s the point of a book, though, if it only tells you what you already know? Michele Leggott’s book challenges my notion of poetry to the limits – not by being hard but soft, not by being anguished but decorous.

That poem concludes:

yes wake

Perhaps this is our long-promised awakening. I would like to end more confidently, but questions remain. I feel a little distanced still, kept at arms-length; and yet there is so much here – sharpnesses of phrase, ingenuities of texture – that compels admiration. I’m afraid the reading has only begun.

- Jack Ross, JAAM 13 (2000): 158-60.

Michele Leggott. Milk & Honey. ISBN 1-86940-334-7. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. RRP $27.99.

My first impression of this book (once I’d got past James Fryer’s very cool cover: stark colours, hieratic tarot imagery, ceremonial theatrical profusion) was that it was nice to see so many old friends gathered together. A great deal of this work, including some pretty major pieces, has appeared in brief over the last few years. I was, however, a little disappointed that the “Cairo vessel” illustration we included in #29 (2004): p.6, had not been included. Turning to the elegy “I dreamed your book was written …” (included in brief 28 (2003): 103-4) I also missed the context given by our Brunton memorial issue: the Egyptian paraphernalia of his previously-unpublished short play “The Excursion:” Book of the Dead rhetoric and imagery.

That, then, was the second impression: maybe some of the pieces needed more back-up and explanation, of the type that their brief printings had been able to supply.

After that, I turned to and read the book through again: carefully, from beginning to end, instead of simply picking out the plums one by one, and began to see Michele’s design more clearly. The poems here are conceived on a large scale, and they’re very “poetic” poems indeed – Michele allows herself an enthusiastic rapturous diction which would be anathema to any card-carrying Modernist. Her interest, clearly, is in a poetry of transcendence, heady invocations of sex and romance, sun and sea and sand. Taken as a whole, I was astonished to find even cynical old me surrendering to it. The “I dreamed your book was written …” poem takes clearer shape as a joint Robin Hyde / Alan Brunton piece (the title, after all, comes from one of the poems included in Michele’s edition of Hyde’s Collected Poems), but also as a more general point of celebration on a kind of graph of the emotions charted by her book’s entire trajectory.

Longer than any of her previous collections, this one also strikes me as the most assured and relaxed. It’s hard to imagine her writing a better book than this, which might tempt us to hail it as a swansong. Actually, though, it leaves me keener than ever to see just what this poet will do next.

- Jack Ross, brief 32 (2005): 103-7.

Reminder: Reading on Wednesday 26/3

Firstly, I'm pasting in this email I've been sent by Michele Leggott, to remind you of her open invitation to the first in her ongoing series of readings by local and student writers:

POETRY READING
AT OGH LOUNGE 26 MARCH, 5-7 PM
ALL WELCOME!

LOUNGE #1 WEDNESDAY 26 MARCH
Old Government House Lounge, Princes St and Waterloo Quadrant, 5-7 pm

Featuring local poets and student writers:

Rosetta Allan
Helena Dunn
Rowan French
Bernard Griffen
Joanna Grochowicz
Tim Heath
Dena Pezet
Chris Price
Jack Ross
Kirsten Warner

Free entry. Food and drinks for sale in the Buttery. Information:
Michele Leggott
m.leggott@auckland.ac.nz
373 7599 x87342
POSTER: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/events/lounge01_poster.pdf

The LOUNGE readings are a continuing project of the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc), Auckland University Press and Auckland University English Department in association with the Staff Common Room Club at Old Government House.

Secondly, I've made a poetry tape for each of you to supplement the Course Anthology. I can pass them on to Mary to give to you at our next session, on Monday 7th April. Or, alternatively, if you'd rather not wait that long, I can bring them along to the reading on Wednesday. Whichever suits you best.

Poetry Session 1: Howe / Leggott

[Holloway Press]

"Into the Archive" was the theme of the session, and that's one reason why I brought quite so many books and papers along with me.

A close parallel can be seen between Susan Howe's work on Emily Dickinson and other "submerged" New England women writers and visionaries (not to mention ambiguous figures such as Charles Peirce and Herman Melville) and Michele Leggott's work on New Zealand equivalents such as Robin Hyde, Ursula Bethell and Lola Ridge (not to mention the sixties and seventies writers she and her fellow-editors Murray Edmond and Alan Brunton unearthed for Big Smoke (AUP, 2000)).

Susan Howe's complex layouts, visual sensibility, and methods of poetic sampling also proved useful when we attempted to read some of the more experimental pages in Leggott's DIA (1994), though the differences between their poetic projects become more and more apparent from this point on. Howe's obsession with the bloody implications of past repression and normalisation are quite tonally distinct from Leggott's more affectionate celebration of an overlooked past of gardens, beaches, family albums and romantic love.

We discussed, in this connection, "Dear Heart," from Leggott's second book Swimmers, Dancers (AUP, 1991), but then went on to examine her own version of the Ishtar / Persephone myth: the seven gates of the underworld in the form of meditations on her growing blindness in "a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with one another" (from as far as I can see (AUP, 1999)).

At this point, paradoxically, we noted an opening up and enlargement of Leggott's poetic work, in the expansive Milk and Honey (AUP, 2005) and (more recently) the deluxe art-book Journey to Portugal (Holloway Press, 2007). Gretchen Albrecht's colourful collages in the latter book also emphasise how much Leggott has continued to concentrate on the visual arts, rather than moving her poetic palette into imagery of touch and sound - as some reviewers seemed to expect of her after as far as I can see.

This - rather astonishing - enlarging of her poetry is the note we ended on. The next session will be on Nigel Cox, so make sure you've read Dirty Work before then.

[NB: I've put up some new links to sound recordings of Susan Howe and Peter Reading. Recordings of the New Zealand poets are all accessible in the AUP collections Classic and Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (2006-7).]

Leggott, Michele

[NZ Book Council Writers Pages]


Michele Leggott (b. 1956)

Author Pages:

Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive

NZ Book Council

nzepc

Bibliography:

POETRY:

Like This? Poems. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1988.
Swimmers, Dancers. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1991.
DIA. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994.
As Far As I Can See. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.
Milk & Honey. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005; Cambridge: Salt, 2006.
Journey to Portugal. Collages by Gretchen Albrecht. Auckland: Holloway Press, 2007.

PROSE:

Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

EDITED:

New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre. 2003–
Robin Hyde, The Victory Hymn, 1935–1995. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1995.
[with Mark Williams]. Opening the Book: New Essays on New Zealand Writing. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995.
Robin Hyde, The Book of Nadath. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.
[with Alan Brunton and Murray Edmond]. Big Smoke: New Zealand Poems 1960–1975. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000.
Robin Hyde, Young Knowledge: The Poems of Robin Hyde. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2003.