Poetry
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by Peter Simpson
The making of the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive
Listening to audio recordings of poets reading has a respectable pedigree. There is a scene in the movie Sylvia in which the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes sit around in their Devon farmhouse with their fateful London visitors listening raptly to the American poet Robert Lowell reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” in his unmistakable Bostonian drawl. To hear a live reading is even better, of course. I vividly recall a reading that Lowell gave in 1970 in Toronto of his brand-new History sonnets; for me his work has ever since been suffused with memory of his physical and (especially) vocal mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. Live performance is the ideal, but what Jan Kemp calls the “voice print of the poet”, such as an audio recording supplies, is the next best thing. Many of my generation, I imagine, were turned on to poetry by the sonorous organ tones of Dylan Thomas reading “Fern Hill” on record, or even by the drily precise Anglo-American voice of T S Eliot intoning Four Quartets. How much it enhances appreciation of William Carlos Williams’s poetics to hear him reading, in his New Jersey twang, “The pure products of America/go crazy …” (“To Elsie”). Similarly, listening to Denis Glover, James K Baxter, Bill Manhire, Dinah Hawken or Ian Wedde read forever affects the way one “hears” their work on the page.
A conviction of the aesthetic and archival value of recording poets reading their own work lies behind a huge project recently brought to completion by a team led by Jan Kemp. Stretching alphabetically from Adcock, Fleur, to Yelich, Sonja, no fewer that 171 poets – can there be that many in the country worth listening to? – have each recorded up to 30 minutes of poems for an audio (and accompanying print) archive, which will be held in libraries in four “collection centres” (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin). Already the archival value of the project is evident from the fact that several of the readers have since died, among them Alan Brunton, John Caselberg, Allen Curnow, Lauris Edmond, Janet Frame, Kendrick Smithyman and Bill Sewell (though in some of these cases the archive drew on already existing recordings).
Kemp, one of the so-called “Young New Zealand Poets” of the 1970s, collaborated with Alan Smythe and Jonathan Lamb in 1974 to compile an earlier archive of New Zealand poets, preserved in a three LP set by Waiata Recordings that sold widely to schools and libraries, and included precious recordings of several poets since deceased, including R A K Mason, A R D Fairburn, Glover, Charles Brasch, Baxter, Peter Hooper and Gloria Rawlinson. Kemp subsequently spent several decades living overseas and returned home in 1999. She instigated the new project – the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive – in 2002. It has taken over two years to cobble together the funds – largely from the University of Auckland, whose library will be the main depository, and Creative New Zealand – and the technical resources, including suitable recording studios, to make it all happen.
Regional compilers were found to facilitate recording in Wellington (Elizabeth Alley), Christchurch (David Howard and Morrin Rout) and Dunedin (Nick Ascroft and Richard Reeve). Jack Ross joined Kemp in Auckland to act as editor and co-director. As well as the audio recordings (2100 tracks collected onto 40 CDs), corresponding textual files were assembled, plus photographs, and biographical and bibliographical notes, amounting to some 3500 pages of text.
The list of those invited to take part was deliberately inclusive; any poet who had demonstrated competence and seriousness of purpose to the regional compilers was let into the ark(ive). Editorial control has been kept light. Poets made their own selection of work to record, some choosing a range of published work, while others selected new and unpublished material. Janet Frame, for example (who because of illness was, like Hone Tuwhare, recorded at home rather than in a studio) chose previously unpublished poems.
A preliminary sampling of the archive was presented by Kemp and Ross in July at a symposium held at the University of Auckland, organised by the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre and now available for viewing and hearing on their website: www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz (see “12 Taonga” under Features). The poets sampled are a representative cross-section of lesser and better-known names: Julia Allen, Alistair Campbell, Lynda Chanwai Earle, Riemke Ensing, Janet Frame, Rob Jackaman, Jenny Powell-Chalmers, Olivia Macassey, Lewis Scott, Bill Sewell, Apirana Taylor and Richard von Sturmer,
The archive will be celebrated at the Going West books and writers festival in Titirangi on September 12, where Janet Frame’s important recordings are featured in a session chaired by Kemp, followed by readings from a number of poets whose work is in the archive.
