Jul 6, 2022 | Blog
Kia ora koutou
Pain
(A Play in Two Acts)
Stagehands whisk, flick, smooth all serene
open doors to a milky sun — hold hands in corners
know that this moment you’ll stir and stretch
your eyes spark as Prompt calls for your entrance
the end of quiet — beginning of Act Two
and on cue, my familiar, my black cat, my lover
one of those road signs from the past
not quite placed until
this bright instant, when —
oh yes —
the zigzag of your touch along expectant flesh —
your pace as slow as dust motes
falling towards the exact spot now I remember
this is Act Two
the lines go aah and aah and aah
Renée
Jun 29, 2022 | Blog
Kia ora koutou,
About twenty years ago I was in Unity Books looking around — it was one of the things I loved about living in the city — everything I liked was in walking distance — when I saw the cover of a book. The Book of Old Tarts. The Book of Old Tarts? I smiled as I picked it up. Elizabeth Hodder. Not a cookery writer I knew but, with a title like that, it was obvious I’d want to get to know her. So I walked out with the book, scuttled to the apartment, made a cup of tea, sat down, opened The Book of Old Tarts and read not only the recipes but the histories of tarts.
It starts with the Roman origins then Making Pastry followed by British Tart Baking, Savoury and Sweet, and their histories. Its out of print and a collector’s item now but the title never fails to make me smile. I admire the author, not only because of the recipes and histories inside but because she got the title so right.
Titles are very difficult, or at least I find them so. Once in a blue moon there’s a click and the title just comes and other times it takes ages and I’m never entirely sure. These are often the titles someone says to me, ‘What a great title’ and I think ‘Huh?’
And naming babies — if books or plays or short stories are hard, naming a baby is right out of the square. Naming characters is hard enough but at least I can change them when I see they’re not right for the character. Only a few brave people change their names and I applaud their courage.
Have you ever wanted to change your name?
I’ve already told you about the period in my life when I wanted to change my name simply because no–one pronounced it properly. Some did it on purpose because they thought it was an uppity name for a working–class kid, that Reeny was more appropriate and some genuinely didn’t know how to say it. There’s Renées all over the place now but for about fifty years I seemed to be the only one except in books about Paris before and during the second World War when someone called Pauline Mary Tarn actually changed her name to Renée Vivian. She was an English woman who wrote poems in French and like a few wealthy upper class British lesbians fled to Paris where they could be out, live normal lives and be part of the Parisian café scene, rub shoulders with notables like Simone de Beauvoir, Existentialist and Philosopher and her lover Jean–Paul Sartre. This all sounded a little bit exotic to a girl living in Greenmeadows but it seemed to give my name some authenticity. I mean if a poet living in Paris changed her name from something else to Renée then maybe it was okay?
As for book titles? I think you’d go a long way to beat Book of Old Tarts.
Have you got a favourite title?
Renée
Jun 22, 2022 | Blog
Kia ora Koutou, it began like any other day — its winter and the day lived up to that — cold, grey with intermittent showers, so entirely unsurprisingly I decided to do the washing and pegged it out in the damp chilly air where it added to the overall mood of the day by hanging sullen and limp and looking like it would wait until Spring before it deigned to dry.
I came inside, went to the bathroom and discovered the toilet wasn’t flushing correctly so I texted the drains man who texted back immediately and said he’d be there right after lunch. He’s the same one who’s fixed drains problems ever since I moved here.
I decided to make a cup of tea — everything is better with a cup of tea — and discovered there were no teabags in the store cupboard. I’d used the last one in the jar for my first cup of the day which I’d sipped lying in bed listening to RNZ. I had another look. Through the dim gauze of my eyesight I saw the three containers of tea leaves were still there. One was green tea and the other two were gumboot. I didn’t know how old they were but thought, well, they have boiling water poured over them so would have to be okay wouldn’t they? Just to be on the safe side I asked Mr Google and read that as long as they’d been kept dry and in clean containers I was safe so that left only the question of which to choose.
Two tins and one glass jar. There were no labels on any. I sniffed at them. They had a dry faintly off hay–like smell which apart from being very unattractive told me nothing about the actual tea.
‘Oh come on,’ I told myself, ‘this is not a matter of life and death, if you don’t like one you can chuck it and choose another.’
I wondered about Mr Google. What did he know? Then I thought don’t be silly, there is no Mr Google, its just a name you made up because that’s the search engine and you feel better about using something that has a name rather than a mysterious infallible being who knows everything.
I put boiling water in the teapot, rinsed it, emptied it, then put a heaped teaspoonful of leaves in it and poured boiling water over them, left it to draw.
It was like drinking old dry hay that had had boiling water poured over it. I decided that plain boiling water was preferable.
Then I thought what about some soup? A cup of tasty hot soup would be delicious. I got the soup out of the fridge, stuck some in a cup, put it in the microwave, set the timer and pressed the little button. There was a flash and the microwave stopped and so did the fridge and freezer.
I rang the electrician who was nice and sympathetic but all the guys were out on jobs so it’d be around four hours before one could call. ‘Sorry Renée,’ he said, ‘its possibly the switch in the outside box,’ then he added, ‘but you can’t see well enough so better not touch anything because it might not be the right one.’ I’ve had the services of the same electrician all these years and they know about my eyesight because they put in brighter lights for me for that reason and, like the drainlayer, I knew someone would turn up, just not right now.
The computer had stopped too so there was nothing for it. I would have to lie on the bed and read. Oh dear. What a nuisance but someone has to do it I suppose. I decided I might as well go the whole hog so I got the cheese crackers and lathered them thickly with peanut butter, crunchy of course, then added some jam, because someone had given me a jar the day before. I got a glass of water, picked up the plate of biscuits, grabbed the iPad and retired to bed
Some days…
Renée
Jun 8, 2022 | Blog
Kia ora Koutou,
I was involved with the online launch of I Will Not Cede, a collection of poems by the late Heather McPherson (pub Spiral) last Sunday. It made me reflect how often, through the centuries, we have gathered to hear poets speak their words, writers read their stories, groups act out their experiences or to listen to someone tell us about a poet and her work. We have sat around campfires, by the lights of candles, under the latest modern lighting systems, and in the darkened auditorium.
It seems something deep inside us likes the feeling of gathering together to show our love and respect for those whose placement and arrangement of words has touched something deep inside us. As humans we respond to these skills. The success of weekend gatherings like next weekend’s Featherston Booktown, which presents writers in conversation and as presenters, is another example of this.
Think of people in the time of Charles Dickens, gathering in groups outside the newspaper office on the day his latest weekly chapter was published, someone grabbing the still warm paper, giving it quickly to the one who could read, who then read out loud the latest chapter of say, Great Expectations or Nicholas Nickleby, to the eager group of listeners. The listeners would gasp, laugh, look horrified when the villain was creeping around doing his evil deeds, or clap their hands and cheer when the ending was happy. They walked away afterwards shaking their head or smiling or looking anxious. Dickens was a master of the old maxim — Make ‘em wait, Make ‘em wait, Make ‘em wait ’ — and his chapters often end at a point where that group of listeners could speculate about what might happen next. The characters, Bill Sikes (or Sykes), Mr Squeers (so scary I have never been able to read Nicholas Nickleby since), Miss Haversham, Joe Gargery, and all the others became real people – what would happen to them? What would they do next? Would Good triumph over Evil? Would the innocent young (and sometimes rather dull) young maiden, be swept up into the villains’s clutches, or would she end happily in the (heroic but sometimes deadly dull) hero’s arms, looking forward to a deadly dull but somehow blissful future…?
We forget that only people who could read would buy or borrow Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) or Middlemarch (George Eliot). This left the rest of us reliant on the kindness or goodwill of others. When I was a kid and up until I was around twenty I often came across people who could not read. The man who had to get his daughter (still at school) to read him the latest Best Bets so he would know which number to say to the bookie. And the woman whose eyesight had been damaged from hours of sewing and knitting by candlelight whose two daughters took it in turns to read her the romance novels she loved.
It was not until reading was taught to everyone that novels, newspapers, nonfiction became truly available. And then along came Films and TV so if you wanted to, you could cut out reading altogether. Even now there are those among us who cannot read as the people who go into prisons and teach reading will testify. If you can’t read, you can’t get a driver’s licence. Think about that. What it does to the person who has probably already got strikes against them in terms of a warm home and a decent income.
From way back, poets, lyricists, writers of fact and fiction, have made us sing and lightened our mood because although they show us inequities and painful circumstances, they also make us smile — sometimes they bring tears to our eyes and other times they make us dance — but possibly the best times are those when a crowd of us gather together to pay homage to a writer who arranged words in a way that made and makes us think, laugh, act — smile and remember. Thank you Heather for being one of those.
Renée
Jun 1, 2022 | Blog
Kia ora Koutou, thanks to the angel who keeps my garden weed free I have some pansy plants and other delights which will bloom in spring…I tried staked tomatoes last year (having always planted the ground hugging ones before) and they were great and fruitful so I might put some more in this season. I remember that In 1924 Ursula Bethell, with her partner Effie Pollen, started their garden at Rise Cottage, Christchurch. Ursula began writing poems when she was fifty and her first collection was published the year I was born, 1929, but I didn’t read it till many years later. I didn’t read any poems written by women and especially not by women who lived in this country.
When I went to school we were taught The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes and we had to learn all 17 (or was it 19?) verses which we chanted in a singsong kind of way, terrified that if we forgot a line or a word the whole class would have to go back to the beginning and start again. I had a good memory and a sense of rhythm and The Highway man is a dramatic story so it was easy — there were these characters — the Highwayman, the Landlord’s daughter Bess, the soldiers who tied a rifle to her breast so that if she called out a warning the gun would go off…and of course, of course, Bess, with her long dark hair, called out a warning, the gun went off, the highwayman was warned and galloped away safe…and then…and then …he discovers that the beautiful Bess has died to warn him and he goes back in an agony of pain and disbelief shouting a curse to the sky and gets shot down like a dog on the highway…a bunch of lace at his throat…
And still on a winter’s night they say
When the wind is in the trees
And the moon is a ghostly galleon
Tossed upon cloudy seas
along comes the ghost of the highwayman…riding, riding, riding…
I loved every melodramatic line of it. No wonder I had a Mills & Boon phase when I was 12. I used to read them so fast, finish, start the next, read that, finish, on to the next… and then one day that phase stopped. Like when you eat great wedges of Coconut Ice, one after the other, there came a moment when I knew that if I ate/read one more M&B I would be sick, so I stopped.
Many years later when I began reading poems written by poets who lived in this country they were mainly by men. I didn’t find Ursula’s until the 1970s, forty or so years after that first collection was published.
‘Established’ is a good word, much used in garden books.
‘The plant, when established’
Oh, become established quickly quickly, garden
for I am fugitive, I am very fugitive….
I think of these lines every time I plant something, and then there’s the huge excitement when a seed I’ve planted shows its green tip, or the plant that someone else has planted stretches out another leaf or bud.
Oh become established quickly… quickly
Renée
May 11, 2022 | Blog
Kia ora koutou, I’ve been asked, as a favour, to publish this poem again on the Busk. It’s a while since the first time (and it is in my memoir) but hey, thanks for the kind words and yes, I agree, poems need to be read and read (and read) again so… here it is…
Tiger Country
You plunge off the cliff into Tiger Country
sleek and smiling tigers play hide and seek
slope around abandoned chairs, sad tables
silk cushions call encouragement from the sofa
an old painting turns its face to the wall.
Tigers lurk in old cards, beneath yours forever
snooze under Christmas lights that never worked
lope ahead to a destination only they know
signposts are suspect; there is no tunnel, no light
nobody pins a tail on these tigers.
Some nights after the sun has flamed
and seabirds search the pastures of the sea
tigers come out and lean gentle over your chair –
wrap you in a striped shawl of sturdy warmth
fold their paws and purr soft in the silent room
This is the danger time. Stand up. Walk slow.
Their eyes are on the game and you’re It.
Renée
