Well here we are, Monday morning and I’ve just got back from a week in a caravan at Whangapoua beach on the Coromandel. Having spent a couple of hours surgically attached to the washing machine I thought I’d check to see if Auckland poet Paula Green had responded to the e-interview I sent to her before we went away.

I first met Paula when I had just barged in on a conversation she was having with Fergus Barrowman of VUP at the Going West festival earlier this year. Fergus introduced us and mentioned that Paula was the current Auckland University Literary Fellow, a fact I was rather embarrassingly (and let's face it, a tiny bit drunkenly) unaware of. I made a mental note to remedy this ignorance. I’m very glad I finally did and pissed off that it took me so long.

I have to confess I’m still a novice poetry reader – apart from brief but tumultuous affairs with TS Eliot, then John Donne, then e e cummings when I was about 17, I’ve read novels almost exclusively. Crap, I know. But Paula’s work has made it very clear to me all over again the emotional upheaval, or breathless, beady-eyed focus that good poetry can bring about.

Paula was born in Auckland, spent the requisite time overseas but came back with partner Michael Hight in the early nineties, and they’ve been out here in the Waitakeres creating ever since. Or not – with two daughters (12 and 9) around there’s always a fair bit going on. But still they manage to produce work that astonishes me with its brilliance. In fact, I’ve spent a fairly large part of this interview trying to weasel out of Paula exactly how she managed to have such creative output right through having small children. Her responses are inspiring.

Hopefully this will put a bit of zest into your Monday, as it has into mine.

First up Paula, how’s your holiday going? Been away?

Day trips for us these holidays. Most days out to beautiful Bethells, some days out to the equally beautiful Tawharanui Regional Park. I do a lot of writing in my head at this time of year!

How are you feeling about having finished your year as the Auckland University Literary Fellow? Has it been productive having your own space?

A fellowship is such a gift, financially yes, but having a physical space of my own is a rare treat, plus I really loved working alongside staff and students.

Let’s go back to the beginning for a while: the comparatively short time you spent in Italy seems to have been an extremely important period in your life. You have taught in the Italian Department at University, Italy is encountered in much of your poetry, you have a PhD in Italian – Italy was a obviously a life-changer for you. So what got you there in the first place, and what’s the chord it strikes in your soul? Italian in a previous life?

I think there are a thousand ‘Italies’ really and a small portion of them have occupied my imagination. Italy, for me grew out of reading and learning the language as opposed to living there. So I do see my Italy as an Italy of the imagination. I loved reading Italo Calvino and madly decided I wanted to read If On a winter’s Night a Traveller in Italian. Plus I read a very haunting book by Francesca Duranti called The House on Moon Lake. Once I started studying Italian I couldn’t stop. I never had a big plan. It was one year at a time. I love so much of the writing of the C20, but also Dante, the women intellectuals, the renaissance poets, the films, the food, the wine, the architecture, the art, and above all the people. Out of that there is some kind of Italy for me.

And when you came home, was it, like most of us, the thought of having children on the other side of the world that brought you back?

No. Michael and I returned from living in London to escape nuclear issues, bombs, war effects. More than anything I wanted to be near the bush and beaches again. Children came later.

For most of us our domestic life, especially if we have children, brings us down to earth often with a bit of a bump, but when you got back to a new domestic situation in NZ, you seemed to be able to combine your professional literary creativity with your domestic life to come up with the goods. In your first book, Cookhouse (1997) for example, food is the key to your state of mind, e.g.

oven baked salmon

I like my fat cooking pot
I like my fat wild heart

I wondered, can you extract inspiration from vacuuming, or doing the washing?!

I am terrible at housework but I love cooking. Cookhouse is all about making one’s self at home in the world which in part involves domestic rituals (particularly when you have children), in part involves a nourishment of relationships, and for me, the whole writing process.

Has using the things that come to hand as a mother and domestic goddess been a process you’ve had to work at to allow your craft to survive, or does it come naturally?

This might sound cliché-ish, but writing gives me energy to do everything else. For me, the bliss of poetry is that it fits in the little gaps. It is also why I have written lots of long poems. I like to carry something enormous in my head that is made up of small pieces that I can undertake on a daily basis. Thus writing and domestic rituals are both acts of survival.

In what way was Cookhouse a response to the situation and environment your were in at the time – back home from travels, going back to routines at university, having children, but still with travel memories tugging at you?

I wasn’t responding to my current situation as much as to a world of ideas and my historical baggage. This collection hints at my personal gains and losses. With Cookhouse, I used food as a refrain (in the titles of the little poems) and as a device to hook up memories. I liked the idea that food and writing both sustain us. With my afternoon tea poems I wanted to acknowledge that I am a reader and that my writing emerges out of a poetry community not a void.

Emma Neale said in her review of Chrome (2000) that your style (at that time) had a ‘rebarbative, stuttering effect’ because you did away with ‘conventional syntax, punctuation, the logical progression of a thesis’ and also that ‘meanings blend and blur, contradictions will not be resolved, and this is the nature of self and home.’ In her opinion further, this was ‘not only deliberate and desired, but possibly an indication of an intrinsic impasse within the poetry itself’. Was this your state of mind at the time?

What an intelligent and thoughtful review that was! I never quite knew whether Emma liked the book and it didn’t matter a bit. I loved reading her analysis. Yes, with Chrome, I wanted to write in a way that resisted the neatness of linearity, and instead reflected the hiccups and stutterings of my daily life. This was even more so with Cookhouse. I wrote Cookhouse whenever Estelle slept as a newborn baby, so I was constantly writing myself out of this deep-seated tiredness. Perhaps the indeterminacy, the gaps, the displaced conventions constitute an impasse for some readers but there are other ways of viewing it. Cookhouse attracted a tiny whirlpool of debate in terms of so-called ‘women’s writing.’ Andrew Johnston was bored/alienated/disparaging of my approach and, in response, Murray Edmond recuperated writing that has some kind of domestic allegiance or debt (see Landfall). I think I ended up producing a whole doctorate on these issues! Good on the blokes for joining in!

Chrome looked at issues of identity and parent/child – especially mother/daughter relationships – and one poem I read made me, as a mother of daughters, completely lose it and weep helplessly (always nice to hear as a poet, I’m sure!). Here is the last powerful, tender verse:

in giving life
you remain alive
the little girl
again born
born as daughter
born as mother
I am blinded by myself
I am lightened by myself
born again
the little mother
and in repeating ourselves we see ourselves

(Full poem here). I guess the point of my last few questions is trying to trace a timeline of your writing and the effects on it of various stages of your life. From traveling the world, through ’important’ relationship to having babies and being fully tied to the home, I’m interested in how women like yourself (and myself, any of us!) stay sane and motivated and creating throughout the whole thing.

Again, my doctorate explored the notion of women writing home and goes into great detail on an intellectual level. On a personal level, Michael and I ‘create’ at home, yet we also carry out all the rituals and routines of daily life. All the grime and splendour, all the harmonies and the dissents, are part of our lives. Motivation and sanity comes from ‘just doing it,’ whether we have five minutes a day or five hours. I think expectation is important, I expect to write, but I also expect life will constantly interrupt my writing and that is good because writing also interrupts my life.

Moving on to your very strong links with art now. NZ artists and writers so often do seem to have symbiotic relationships (see Main Trunk Lines) and in your case particularly there seems to be a strong link, much to the delight of many artists, I’m sure. I loved the North Western Line, where one of your poems meandered through the rooms of the Corban Arts Estate Gallery, studded with pieces of glorious art from such respected artists as Gretchen Albrecht, John Pule, Judy Millar and their ilk. Your books have always been lusciously punctuated by work from Michael and in your latest book Crosswind you came up with a brilliant idea for further art/literary conversation. Can you tell us about that and where the idea came from?

I am really drawn to the aftertaste of art, I love the way a work can haunt, perplex, or move you. It can be as you walk out into the street or as you cook dinner that night. The tiniest detail can provoke cascading reactions. So I decided to catalogue this aftertaste in the form of poetry over a period of time, the art could be anywhere, not necessarily in a gallery. After a time I sent a bunch of poems out to the artists and invited them to produce or select a new work that would appear opposite the poem in the book.

It must have been hugely exciting to see the artists’ responses to your poems…

I was truly overwhelmed by the response.

What is your personal vision of how art and literature relate?

Hmmm! That’s a big question! I just like the idea of a conversation ensuing between and within various communities. For me it is close and intimate as I know half the artists but it is also mysterious and distant and even slightly scary as I don’t know the other half. I’ve just finished a glorious book by Justin Paton, How to Look at a Painting. I guess my collaborations are a provisional attempt at how to look at art through writing poems. I tend to be the slowly rather than the suddenly spectator to borrow Justin’s vocabulary.

What’s the usual process when you collaborate with Michael in your poetry? What comes first, the poem or the artwork, or is it an evolving process in which you are both inspired by the other’s work?

Usually we have parallel lives, off on our own tangents, keeping our work fairly private (harder for him than me!) but with Cookhouse I got him to do those delicious drawings when the poems were finished and with Crosswind he joined in along with all the other artists. I have written some articles on some of his exhibitions too. The girls and I feel extremely blessed with his paintings emerging around us all the time. I can stand in front of one of the beehive paintings and feel restored (if I am feeling weak or disgruntled).

I’ve been loving Crosswind and as a co-Westie the Waitakere bits twang a certain wild chord that makes me, and no doubt our redoubtable mayor Bob Harvey, shiver – this from Waitakere Rain:

…
In my city the rain you get
is made of massive kauri trees, the call of forest birds
howling dark oceans and mangroved creeks.
I taste constancy, memory and yet
there’s the watery departure of words
from the thunder-black sand at Te Henga Beach.

Grrr. That poem made the Best NZ Poems 2004… what you said in your comment about it, ‘Above all, I love the notion that the world is plump with unwritten rain poems’ made me laugh and repeat the word ‘plump’ to myself several times in a loose-lipped, Mr Bean kind of way – one of my favourite words I’m happy to admit.

I must also quote this wonderful poem from the book:

The Remarkables

The alabaster snow absorbs all grace.
The alabaster snow absorbs all movement.

The alabaster snow absorbs all pain.
The alabaster snow absorbs all ghosts.

The alabaster snow absorbs all sky.
The alabaster snow absorbs all land.

Magnificent and ruthless. You have incredibly diverse styles Paula, from total stream-of-conciousness, zero punctuation paragraphs (slightly scary) to this very stately hypnotic repetition of a phrase, and everything in between (there is a question on it’s way, never fear). You also said in your comment above that you sometime test out your ‘crossings’ in traditional poetic forms. So what is your view on traditional forms of poetry versus contemporary – where does each have its place for you? I asked Andrew Johnson this about his mad sestinas (see Main Trunk Lines again) and he said the short answer was because it makes him write longer poems!

I love tradition and I love innovation. My life and my writing are made up of resistances and homages. I certainly don’t want to vegetate in one particular school of poetry. I get as much inspiration from Dante as I do from Richard Reeve. I go along with Virginia Woolf in that I only break in order to create. I think poets are turning to traditional forms, tropes and features and replenishing them as opposed to abandoning them. Take the most recent books of Richard von Sturmer, Murray Edmond, and Michele Leggott.

The third section in the Crosswind is brilliant too, it’s fun spotting the seventies songs in the poems. A question regarding the titles – they’re all place names, e.g. Ocean Beach, Whangarei Heads; Mt Eden, Auckland (my favourite – because the night). Are these places you associate with the music, or is it where you wrote the poem?

Yes, places I associate with the music. Nowadays I listen to Trinity Roots, Salmonella Dub, Fat Freddy's Drop, Bic Runga, Edmund Cake etc etc amidst all the overseas stuff but in my 70s record buying days, NZ music barely got a look in beyond Split Enz. These 70s music poems tap in perfectly to your previous question. When I played the albums I was stunned to find I remembered all the words and sometimes appalled at the lyrical content. So I set out to make my task more difficult; after playing each record I tried to relocate the seventies sentiments in a traditional poetic form such as a Petrachian sonnet or a cinquain, for example. And what fun! When I perform these poems it feels like I have the album playing in my head.

You’ve been very public spirited for many years now in organising and participating in public readings and events – the wonderful Alba readings back in the nineties, Fringe readings at the Strata Café in conjunction with the Readers and Writers Festival, Poetry on the Pavement etc. Do you think Auckland needs more of this? I seem to have been writing up pieces for Wellington every five minutes last autumn! Why do they have more than us? Are Aucklanders just not as arty on the whole as Wellingtonians? Big question, this…

Gee I’m a huge fan of NZ poetry in all shapes and sizes: from Michele Leggott to Jenny Bornholdt to James Brown to Dinah Hawken to Bernadette Hall to Bill Manhire to Anna Jackson to Brian Turner to Richard Reeve to Karl Stead to Gregory O’Brien to Alistair Te Ariki Campbell to Robin Hyde to Murray Edmond to Robert Sullivan to Tusiata Avia to Anne Kennedy to Janet Charman to David Eggleton to Wystan Curnow to Meg Campbell to Kate Camp to Richard von Sturmer to Cilla McQueen to Hinemoana Baker to Michael Harlow and so on and forgive me for all those I love and left off my itinerary. I can’t abide the tyranny or fiction of City Ascendancy in literature. I believe we have pockets of activity all over NZ. Perhaps Victoria does get a lot of media attention but so what! Bill and his writing programmes have served us jolly well. I also think Michele Leggott makes endless and often unlauded contributions to the poetry community. NZEPC (The New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre) is a great online resource. Michele has started a series of symposiums in other centres that draw upon a range of poets from a range of places. The next one is in Bluff with Cilla McQueen and David Howard as co-organisers. Poets are coming from all over NZ (April 2006). I am ALL for making connections and I welcome any chance to hear, communicate, and acknowledge a broad base of poets. Yes, activity takes place in universities and other institutions but it also occurs at all kinds of other grassroots levels not necessarily publicly documented. PHEW! Speech over for now!

In the same public-spirited line, your latest book out with AUP next month, is a collaboration with your daughters’ school. After doing workshops through the whole school, you took a bunch of children round the zoo on a 'poetry trail', teaching them various bits of poetry craft and getting them to write as they went. So we get Flamingo Bendalingo, (hardback, $34.99) a children’s art/lit crossover with your poetry, the childrens’ poetry and Michael’s drawings, together with ‘a lively glossary of items from the 'poetry toolkit', poetic terms, techniques, devices and forms, all illustrated with zoo poem examples.’ It sounds fantastic! But haven’t you heard that thing about never working with children or animals?

Never thought of that! I finished my doctorate and wanted to do something utterly different …. thus children and animals. I do love teaching in any context but working with children on this was great. Plus it was fun writing poems for a different audience and then testing them out. Michael also tackled something completely different with the illustrations. When I approached the school, I wanted to give all children a chance to write poems and not just the handpicked ‘writers.’ That worked well as reluctant writers often took wonderful linguistic leaps of the imagination when they wrote their poems.

Finally, what’s in the pipeline for you? I’ve heard tell about a novel that is going back to your research from your thesis – an ‘exploration and search for the father on many levels.’ What’s that about and how’s it going?

The novel is a huge risk but I love writing it. I have copyright issues I am sorting out as my novel is a wayward translation of a novel written by Elio Vittorini in the sixties. I am currently working on a Frances Hodgkins piece. Michele and I are doing a conversation/poetry reading in the Hodgkins’ exhibtion at the Auckland Art Gallery on February 12 (watch this space for more info). However, mostly I keep my backlog of ideas and works-in-progress hushhush until they are a near complete legible draft on paper.

Thank you for your time Paula. It’s been a huge pleasure and privilege finding out a bit more about such an extraordinarily talented writer and amazing woman. I’ve got a lot more reading to do!

It is always a pleasure to converse with someone who has read (not just my work) but much else. Thank you!