Celebrating Poet Anne Kennedy
The 2021 Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement for Poetry went to Anne Kennedy. I have enjoyed her work since her first collection Sing Song. The poems’ setting is in the domestic life of a family of four, told from the mother’s perspective: moving house, the gruelling experience of a child’s eczema, the pressures of a bicultural household, and encounters with healers of many kinds are some of the subjects of these poems. Kennedy can be gently self-deprecating while describing hardship. The struggle with the eczema is resolved when, to their horror, the family runs out of the aqueous cream which they had been using to soothe it and the rash disappears no longer inflamed by the salve.
Seventeen years later, her 2021 collection, The Sea Walks into a Wall, has moved away from a family focus to a much wider vista. ‘Light on the Garden’ is likely to go down well among tertiary teachers with its theme: ‘the guys on the exec team hate art’. The art school they are administering is ‘loud, fun and shocking, and history and memory, tragedy and beauty, argument and experiment, grief and comedy ...’ It is not at all to do with what the managerial textbooks prepare them for.
The poem includes a shrewd insight into generic management.
The very reverend executive team all live as far away from the polytech
as it is possible to live
while still being technically domiciled in the supercity because unfortunately
the polytech is situated
in a part of town that is quite problematic for a modern major executive.
...
The executive officials are therefore forced to live far away from
the community they serve,
from people who pay with their hard-earned, three job, clean-up-your-shit
taxes
…
the executive-sized salaries that spill down the shirt fronts of the pro-vices.
You might wonder
how the guys on the exec team manage to score a job where they earn
gigabytes of dollars
making decisions about a community they live a conurbations worth
of ks away from
geographically, culturally, squeamishly – especially decisions
about art –
when they hate art?
Later, the seven-page poem comments
Imagine a member is driving home over the bridge
before dark
(In case he turns into a brown person)
The last poem, ‘Sea Wall Canticle’, is an affectionate tribute to a neighbour who ‘won the same scholarship as Kiri Te Kanawa’ but turned it down to stay home with her husband and never went to London or on to La Scala or who knows where? Instead she was the epitome of the good local, not quite a mute inglorious Milton but an unheard of, and unrecognised, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf except in Island Bay.
The poem which most captured me was ‘An Hour’ about the life of an anonymous worker. There is no hint of the subject’s gender, ethnicity or age but each mundane hour of the work day is reported, finishing in the refrain ‘the person of the hour just earned the minimum wage less tax’. The 71-line poem is too long to set all down here. It opens
The person of the hour remembers a model of an atom
The person of the hour learned Japanese at school
The person of the hour used to grow peppers
The person of the hour sees that it is 8 o’clock
The person of the hour just earned the minimum wage less tax.
And so winds on with the ordinariness and monotony of the person’s life until after 8 o’clock in the evening:
The person of the hour hopes their kid is in bed
The person of the hour remembers a hit song from 2006
The person of the hour drives to their other job
The person of the hour unlocks the door for the night shift
The person of the hour just earned the minimum wage less tax.
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way from dawn to dusk much as he did a quarter of a millennium ago. Fortunately that is not true for all of us, but we should not forget the others – on the minimum wage less tax.
I doubt that there will be many accessible reviews of this collection. Reviewing is a dying activity, especially since the government cut its modest funding to New Zealand Books. And having insulted the New Zealand reviewing and literary community, the government awarded $500,000 – about 30 years of its grant to New Zealand Books and ten times the Literary Achievement Award – to a website Narrative Muse, of uncertain purposes although it explicitly excludes male writing and hardly promotes New Zealand books. The decision-makers sound as though they could be on the executive of a polytech.
So you’ll have to buy the book. You might have the chance of hearing Kennedy reading from it. I was privileged to hear her read from her previous collection, Moth Hour, at the 2020 Auckland Writers Festival with Sarah Watkins playing Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations around which the book was written.
I wont say ‘pleased’; the poems have a sombre background. In 1973, Kennedy’s older brother Philip was partying on a hillside when he accidentally fell to his death. Fourteen-year-old Anne lay on the red rug in the sitting room and listened to Beethoven’s Thirty-Three Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli – over and over because it was there. Philip left a poem which begins ‘Come catch me little child / and put me in a jar’; Kennedy riffs off it – thirty-three times, just like Beethoven.
T. S. Elliot described poetry as ‘the right words in the right order’. Certainly transcribing Kennedy’s above lines I was struck I could not improve them; I often can with prose. But the sentence from which the much quoted phrase comes from opens ‘All [the poet] can do is to try to think clearly to know one's feelings’. Yup.
Yet the poet does something else, capturing and transmitting that truth in a way which invaluably changes the viewer’s perception – be it of generic managers, mute Schwarzkopfs, today’s ploughmen or whatever. As long as they do this, holding truth to power, I support the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry.