The joy of rhythm and rhyme

With national poetry day on Friday, Jessica Le Bas looks at the enduring appeal of the poem.

Poetry begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
- Robert Frost

I suspect I read poetry as a child because it extended the nursery rhyme experience for me, and the associated parental contact. There was too, my inability to read well. That this extended till I was almost 20, probably nurtured into adulthood my affinity with poems: those short, rhythmical narratives that one could sing and memorise. Poetry was manageable and mysterious.

Poems are small stories, tightly bundled.

They are puzzles, sometimes in foreign tongues. The pleasure of poetry can derive as much from the unpicking, the decoding, as from any notion of meaning. The sounds, that juxtaposition of rhythm and rhyme, are a far older joy than our need for logic.

Justin Paton in his superb essay How to Look at a Painting (Awa Press, 2005) says, "You don't put a new CD on the stereo and sit grimly wondering what it means.

Nor should paintings be subjected to this trial-by-interpretation. They're to be experienced, explored and returned to over time, not solved and abandoned."

So too with poetry. As American poet Bill Collins says, don't "tie the poem to a chair with a rope/and torture a confession out of it".

There is too the ambience of the poetry experience. You read a stanza of some new collection standing in Page and Blackmore's while your partner peruses the magazine stand.

You can't fathom a jot of what the poet is on about. Take that same poet reading at the Vic Rose or at Woollaston Estates, you with friends and a good wine, and the poem grows wings, of a sort, at least.

I was one of the lucky Nelsonians who heard Hone Tuwhare read some years back at the Boathouse. He was nearing 80 then, and got to the stage on the arm of fellow poet David Eggleton, looking frail and uncertain. It was Tuwhare-the-poet who opened his mouth and read magnificently. His thundering voice still resonates from the page, long after his death. Poetry is always more than it first appears.

There are poetry readings and performance poetry. A good poet on the page has been known to murder his or her own work on stage. There are some, like Sam Hunt, who can put blue skies under the cloudiest poem. If you heard Christchurch-born Tusiata Avia read her work at the Elma Turner Library a few years back, you'll know what I mean here.

If you want to write poetry, have a gander at Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (Random House, 2005). If nothing else, you'll laugh out loud at Fry's gibing. It's full of exercises that take you gently by the hand through form and function. Fry gives an entertaining spin on the history of poetry.

Robert Frost said that "writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down". For those more smitten with free verse, the contemporary scene, try American poet Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

Neither of these texts are quick fixes, nor poetry-by-numbers. Both are addictive.

You could form a poetry group, get a few inquisitive souls together and share your poetic likes and dislikes. The reading and-or writing of poetry in community forums is an ancient art.

For the more serious, perhaps, there is a growing proliferation of creative writing courses in tertiary establishments, many offering poetry electives. Nelson is no exception, with poet Cliff Fell facilitating a popular module at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology.

Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have edited a series, New Zealand Poets in Performance, each year now since 2006 - first classic poets, then contemporary poets. This month sees the launch of another, New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, $44.99), heralding new voices in the poetry scene.

What makes this series attractive is that each book comes with two CDs of the poets reading a selection of their work. Now you can stay home, with your cognac and your fire roaring (heat pump doesn't seem to have the same poetic cadence, does it?), and listen to Allen Curnow reading The Skeleton of the Great Moa, or Denis Glover reading his quintessential Magpies.

There's Baxter and Hunt in this series, C K Stead and O'Sullivan, to name a few good poets. In this latest collection, you can hear Glenn Colquhoun and Jenny Bornholdt. What better place to start sampling New Zealand Poetry?

Jessica Le Bas is a Nelson writer and teacher. Her first collection of poetry, incognito, was published by AUP last year.

POETRY DAY
Poetry day in Nelson on Friday will be celebrated with poetry readings in the city. Poets Jessica Le Bas, Cliff Fell and Rachel Bush and others will perform outside the House of Ales at the top of Trafalgar St at 5pm. There will be an open-mike session at the Elma Turner Library between 12.30pm and 1.30pm when all poets are invited to bring along and read one or two of their own poems. On the day, people are invited to leave copies of their poems, or their favourite poem, on a Poetry Wall at the library. Contact for these events is Mary Thornton, phone 545 8682.

- © Fairfax NZ News