Haha … what has stuck with me is my adult nephew, who was a builder’s apprentice at the time, telling me that every Friday his builder mates would tell him, ‘All good, bro, it POETS day today!’ When he asked them what they were talking about they replied, ‘It’s time to Piss Off Early … Tomorrow’s Saturday!’ Every poetry day I remember that.įirst there were rhymes, the same words repeated in the same sequence, the chime of rhyme, the skip of rhythm, belying their terror.
That might be a misquote, but it’s how I remember the line of hers. “When I hear what is coming toward me / I would be afraid / even if I were dead.”
Also shown in the house were small “books” made of birch bark on which gulag prisoners had written out her poems from memory with the blackened end of a twig. In this way her poems were smuggled out in the minds of her friends, reassembled, and published out of the country. While they pretended to discuss banalities, the friend would memorise a line or two, then Akhmatova would burn the scrap of paper in this ashtray. Assuming that the apartment was under constant surveillance, her only way of writing poetry was to memorise lines, and then write them on scraps of paper when a friend came to visit. She spent decades under house arrest, banned from writing, awaiting the knock at the door that would take her husband or her to the gulag or death. I love house museums anyway, but this one was just astonishing. In 2012 I visited the apartment of Anna Akhmatova in St Petersburg. ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that,’ he said, as if I’d confessed to considering spending lunchtime smoking weed on the roof of the horticulture prefab. “I remember telling my seventh-form English teacher (who told us his favourite film was Easy Rider who had an amiable weary expression whenever I submitted a practice essay whom I liked) that I thought I might write on poetry in the Bursary exam. Kapka Kassabova (see all the awards her Border won) Richard Reeve (no relation and still to me NZ’s best poet)
On St Kilda beach in 1996 are some of the main poets of the Robbie Burns pub readings and soon to be the progenitors of Glottis magazine. But here’s an image of a time in Dunedin writing that feels, at least to me, important. I have many namedropped stories of poet encounters.
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