Former
United Kingdom Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion (left - Photo by David Rose) joins current New Zealand Poet
Laureate Ian Wedde, Bill Manhire and Bernadette Hall for an evening of poetry
on the subject of place.
Ian
Wedde reflects on the topic thus:
‘Poetry
is often associated with places; and it occupies a place in cultures and
societies. Are these kinds of location related, and if so how?
Aboriginal
song-lines, Horace’s Sabine farm, Wordsworth’s Lake District, Robert Burns’
Ayrshire, the burnt-off country of Blanche Baughan’s ‘Bush Section’, Elizabeth
Bishop’s Brazil, Pablo Neruda’s Chile, Judith Wright’s Australian ‘Blood
Country’, Robin Hyde’s Island Bay, the Gallipoli of Paraire Tomoana’s ‘E pari rā’, Allen Curnow’s Lone Kauri
Road, Kendrick Smithyman’s Tomarata, Mahmoud Darwish’s Galilee, the ‘my
country’ of A.R. Ammons’s The Snow Poems,
Ted Berrigan’s New York City, the place of exile in Bei Dao’s poems, the view
from Jenny Bornholdt’s work-shed window, the ‘environs of the goat’ in Sophie
Loizeau’s poems ...
All
these lead to another sense in which poetry is placed: how and where is it
placed in culture, what role and significance does it have? Is it an object of
delectation in the literary salon, the anthem of popular uprising, the
etherised patient of academic forensics, the repository of community memory,
the lyric downloaded from iTunes, the challenge at a poetry slam? What kind of
esteem does poetry command in the cultures of different societies? And how does
this esteem – this cultural location – relate (or not) to that other meaning of
‘place’, to physical location?’
Venue:
Te Wharewaka o Poneke, Wellington
waterfront. Thursday 30 August, 7.30 for 8pm start.
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