Well, lucky readers, first up this week, we have a special report on Bluff 06 from some of those who were there. There’s lots to read, from Paula Green and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. So without further ado, I’ll let Cilla McQueen, one of the main organisers with David Howard, Brian Flaherty and Michele Leggott, give the intro – but not without a rousing cheer to all of the above for putting in a huge amount of blood, sweat and tears to achieve what was, by all accounts, a magnificent literary event that was also a bit of a life-changer for many. Now. Over to you, Cilla:

In Bluff's Te Rau Aroha Marae (gloriously pictured, at dawn, with special thanks to Alison Hunt) the spectral art works created by Cliff Whiting express the vibrant spirit of southern Maori ancestors and legend. From April 21-24, the wharenui's finely-crafted walls absorbed readings, meditations and dissertations by a couple of dozen leading New Zealand poets and academics who met here for the symposium entitled Bluff 06.

Over four days of readings, launches and discussion in Bluff and Rakiura, poetry was variously the subject and the means of discussion and communication of new work and thinking. Writers put faces to names, heard the voices of poetry in practice, celebrated the spirituality of language, "the controlled insinuative inferences expelled by the body's muscles in the spoken word." (Tuwhare.)

Valued contributions from poets Rob Allan, Tusiata Avia, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay McKenzie Cooke, John Dolan, Martin Edmond, Murray Edmond, David Eggleton, Cliff Fell, Brian Flaherty, Paula Green, Michael Harlow, Bernadette Hall, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Therese Lloyd, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Cilla McQueen, Emma Neale, Richard Reeve, Jack Ross and others. Co-hosts with Howard and McQueen, the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre launched the on-line anthology Oban 06 during the final reading.

Here's what Paula Green had to say about her Bluff experience.

Bethell’s Valley: quarter to five and I stand under our outdoor shower, with the moon and the morning star overhead. This perfect moment of breathtaking quiet and darkness, and then I’m off to the glorious South, to Bluff and Rakiura for a poetry symposium. Poets are coming from all over to read to each other: from Sydney, Auckland, Waiheke Island, Wellington, the Moutere Hills, Alexandra, Christchurch, Twizel, Dunedin, and Bluff. I can’t wait, but I feel like I’m leaving a foot or a hand or an eye in our magic valley.

Last year, I went to the poetry symposium in Christchurch, managed to get terribly lost in the one-way maze and lose half my pages before reading my head-injury poem, but what a treat to meet and hear Bernadette Hall, Graham Lindsey, and Michael Harlow!

This time I am grounded in the fog on the Auckland runway and have oodles of time to contemplate the days ahead. I read of Hinemoana’s search for her whakapapa in her tour notebooks and David Hill’s musings on WOW in Northland. I am not seeking out my whakapapa in terms of bloodlines but I need to do something about the crowd of poetic voices that jostle before me as I sit and write. After sixteen years doing Italian degrees at the University of Auckland, I have let all the strings loose and it feels like the entire New Zealand poetry community has taken up residency on my desk. This is good (what a bunch of fine voices) and bad (I can barely hear myself think).

A few hours later, I am stranded in Christchurch and won’t make my exploration day in Bluff so after occupying the stand-by spot for hours, on the spur of the moment I fly to Dunedin so I can drive through the honeyed hills. Feels like I am tearing the poem sheets off the golden highway, stop off in Balclutha to buy some cheap CDs and let them ring out full blast: “Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick up, start a brand new day!” Wouldn’t have minded a bit of Salmonella Dub in this light.

Twelve hours after leaving home, I arrive at The Anchorage in Bluff; most of the poets have already settled into kaimoana and conversation. I hug Michele Leggott, Bernadette, Michael Harlow, and meet Cilla McQueen and Cliff Fell for the first time. The warmth and conviviality fades in and out, I spot Martin Edmond across the table, and then John Dolan, Jack Ross, Murray Edmond. I feel like a ghost.

The next afternoon we are warmly welcomed onto Te Rau Aroha Marae where most of the poets are staying and most of the symposium is held; a tight huddle of poets slowly makes its way up to the wharenui, drawn by the woman’s call, deeply quiet. We exchange songs and speeches; we mark the powhiri with our diverse and willing presence. Richard Reeve gives a keynote speech, the words cascading into the room of the tangata whenua like shifting weather patterns. Wind farms and hydro dams, he says, demonstrate the continuing public blindness to poetic mystery. There lies our keynote question: what mystery do we poets make of the land? Or I wonder, which poets land the mystery? How do we do mystery? Richard’s examples (Cilla, David Howard, and David Eggleton) are in the room listening to Richard dig out the “rock, stumps and streams” from their poems. If poems are ground up over time (as Richard says), poems are also remade over time (take Dante for example). Should we be emphatic voices? Should we be possibilities? In my cosy valley, I sway between the comfort of certainty and the intrigue of its opposite. As I echoed Eileen Duggan in Crosswind, I am famished for the land.

Before dinner (and what a divine feast the Marae offers!), we are joined by a swag of locals for a CD and book launch: David Eggleton’s Fast Talker and Cilla McQueen and the Blue Neutrino‘s Wind Harp. I definitely needed Cilla’s CD as I drove along the golden highway, what a revelation to hear her layered voice retraced by the music. Magic! On the other hand, David returns me to urban junctions and I am grateful that some of us have the courage to speak out with a political edge. Too often I hear or read that politics is not the property of poetry and yet I want those boundaries pushed and played with. I love the way David, Robert Sullivan and Selina Tusitala Marsh are testing out the ground they speak from, the voices they carry, causing us to pay attention to where and who they speak from, differently. This, then, is one of the phantoms at my desk, the political phantom that demands courage to resist the lazy river of the status quo.

After dinner, we are in for a treat as we sit in the wharenui, embraced by 360 degrees of images that represent the stories of the Marae. Dean Whaanga is humble about his ability with words, but like all good storytellers, lets them dance from his mouth as he brings the images alive for us. The next night, Jacqui Hodge responds to the requests for more stories and captivates our attention in the wharekai. I haven’t let go Italian yet, but these two word magicians make me want to learn Maori now.

Time for the evening readings and the performances are as varied as any good diet should be. Local poet and Marae host extraordinaire, Jacqui gets the night off to the perfect start with her lovely local lines, and then Murray Edmond reads The God Play from his collection, Noh Business. It was so magnificent I wanted him to read the whole book (usually I’m all for poets keeping to the right time and get all hot under the collar when they hog more than their fair share!) Murray lifts the words off the page and lets rip with mystery, recognitions, repetitions, weirdness, and memory. But I move on and love hearing Cliff for the first time, having enjoyed The Adulterer’s Bible, the words swing through air as finely as they sit on the page. Brian Flaherty, ever full of surprises, and to our great delight, picks up a guitar and sings us an entertainingly vigorous song, Therese Lloyd’s poems make me laugh out loud (an enviable skill, I always feel so serious in my poems but I adore the poet who gets me giggling), after hearing Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and his immensely diverting sheep poem I wanted to go and get his book, The Late Great Blackball Bridge Sonnets, and Selina, who poetically and pragmatically reminds us she writes and performs out of a tradition of Pacific women writers, is a song for my ear.

Catch up with Michael Harlow at breakfast and we talk about Flamingo Bendalingo, didn’t know he had written a book for children years ago but now, rare as hen’s teeth, its impossible to get, with copies even pilfered from libraries. Must get some second-hand book whiz to try and find a copy for me now I have entered the world of books for children.

Saturday morning and Jack Ross leads a group of us in a writing activity, we are split into small groups, handed a poem in translation, an anonymous poem, a random topic, and told to come up with a poster poem. He was very cool, got us all working together for several hours, without any bickering or sulkiness. I was with Cliff, Hilary Chung, Jacob Edmond, Bei Dao’s Chinese poem (where the title is longer than the poem itself), an instantly recognisable poem by Michele, and the topic “Land’s End.” Two Chinese experts in our group, but we went for some kind of intuitive response to the “imageness” of it all and tried to make a ripple poem based on the Fibonacci number series. Felt like we were in the single-word poem without emerging into the real world for days and it was fun.

At the lunch table Jack, Richard, and I thrashed out the “how to review NZ poetry books” topic and I was one hundred percent behind Jack when he said he can’t see the point in reviewing books or poems you are tone death deaf to, whereas I think Richard prefers a more vinegary debate. When I read a review I want it to open up gateways, to broaden my reading horizons, to get me testing out new directions (but I am not up for the sycophantic reviews of little clubs). Interestingly, a few hours later I get a text to say the review of Flamingo Bendalingo in the Herald’s Canvas is not very nice, and I do feel terrible for the fifty children who are my co-poets, but on the other hand, book reviewers are not with the other phantoms scrutinising my pages!

Feel a bit exhausted after the big journey, the late night, the first workshop, and the constant human contact so the afternoon presentations wash over and through me, have already heard Selina on the Pasifika web site that is starting out under the umbrella of nzepc, and Michele on the mysteries of Lola Ridge (both magnetic), but miss Jeffrey’s research and Murray’s close reading. Wasn’t sure if I would make the Bluff symposium after my slow return to the land of the living, but had packed some vegan supplies, a bottle of grape juice, and booked into the Foveaux Hotel in case I needed sleep retreats. Maybe that’s why the insistent poetic pack took up residency in my room this year, as for months, when I could neither eat nor write I would dwell on lines of poetry. As I wrote in my poem for the Oban 06 online anthology, “everyone’s latest books are divine.”

I try to restore my disembodied state by heading off around the coast, walking into the salty air and feel right at home with the waves thrashing the rocks just as they do at Bethells. What a great place to walk! Back at the Marae I am made even more at home with the special dinner: mussels, oysters, mutton bird, pork, and vegetables. Then it’s time to settle back into Evening Reading #2, and I relish the tender and sharp edges of Tusiata, the extraordinary and rather personal minutiae of John Dolan’s poetics of the negative, David Eggleton’s bad (prize-winning) Dunedin poem, Michael’s thoughtful gems, Bernadette’s terrific tribute to her dog (it’s in the online anthology), but the highlight for me is Emma Neale. Unlike the preceding poets, I have never heard her read before and the trilogy of poems that mark the first three years of her son are a triumph. I love the way the language folds about the central image, the way her personal focus renders the subject, unexpectedly, delightfully, movingly. That is another phantom at my desk, the phantoms of the personal; those haunting poets who translate experience with a lightness of touch that yields complexity, mystery, and heart.

When I came up with the idea for Flamingo Bendalingo, I imagined the book, and I imagined reading it to children, but I never in a million years imagined reading from it to a group of poets on a Sunday morning in Bluff. Nevertheless, I do it and in the same session take great pleasure from Bernadette reading from her Joanna Paul anthology (we couldn’t wait to get our own copies), Jack talking about the trails and tribulations of his novel where a bloke has amnesia and keeps this alphabetical notebook to help him find his way in the world and out of forgetfulness (I ordered a copy instantly), and Murray on the new online journal Ka mate ka ora at nzepc.

In the next session Michael presents his thoughts on translation, he calls it “original repetition,” and I take away another phrase, twisting and tuning it in my head to put the “words down” in translation and “awaken the beautiful resonance of their history.” I have let loose the strings of the Italian scholar but still feel the distant thrill of Stage One Chinese Poetry as Hilary and Jacob extol the pleasure of reading Yang Lian’s New Zealand poems.

After lunch Alison Hunt and Bronwyn Lloyd, with exquisite teamwork, whet my appetite for Rakiura with “Robin Hyde in the South” and Martin Edmond sets us giggling again with his witty account of an Australian mystery poet: “Ern Malley; the Autobiography of A Fiction.” Time to leave Bluff. We are farewelled and we farewell but some of us are heading over to the island for the final performance.

The disembarking passengers tell us it is a challenge out there in the Strait and to have the sick bags ready. Sound advice. Strangely enough, in the midst of vomiting my guts out, I find my way into reflection. Bluff 06 was the result of the hard work and deep love of poetry of David, Michele, Cilla and Brian, the generous hospitality of the locals, and the generous energies of the poets. I do feel like a shapeless ghost, with my strings let loose, and my words flying all over the place searching for a way to be at home in the world again, or a little more at home as opposed to feeling alien, but three days of presentations and readings has given me sustenance.

The final night, Evening Reading #3, and a pile of firsts: getting to hear lots of the Dunedin poets read is great, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay McKenzie Cooke, David Howard, Richard Reeve, and then my old favourites from Auckland: Michele and Jack. Gwen Neave adds local presence to the lineup and does a great job as the MC. The Oban 06 online anthology is splendidly launched. We are fed a magnificent meal in the hall by the Toi Rakiura trustees. Most of the others head for night caps and dancing in the local pub but I crash out in the backpackers. After the linguistic and intellectual intricacies of Jack Jeanne Martin Richard and Michele (and what sublime fun they are!) and the grounded lilt of Kay (how it holds me to a particular place), the voices of my phantoms flood back. These too are my phantoms, the intellectual trapeze artiste, the linguistic gymnast, the lyrical auditorium.

A small group of us spend the day walking on Ulva Island and listening to the birdcalls before we go our different ways. I have one night alone in Bluff, eat Blue Cod at the Anchorage and head off early before the RSA men arrive for a big Anzac breakfast. I am flying home, can’t wait to see my family, can’t wait to read the new books, can’t wait to stand under the shower with the early morning stars, and can’t wait to face the phantom poets still in residency at my desk. Must thank Cilla David Michele and Brian. I will sing their praises, high and low. Must thank all those divine poets. Thank you! Grazie! Kia ora!

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman had a spiritual close encounter with the marae, and what's more, his granny's walking stick felt right at home. (Again - see Hinemoana's diary - we must apologise for being unable to reproduce the proper maori macrons. We're working on it. If anyone knows an easy way, let us know). Jeffrey:

Travels with my Tokotoko: marae diary, April 2006.

Oysters galore and a bucket of birds: that was Bluff 06 for me, along with poets, powhiri and the chance to stand on the southernmost marae in the world, ending with a once in a lifetime trip to Rakiura, Stewart Island. Not that I pigged out on the shellfish, or even tasted a titi (muttonbird): I’m just not big on kaimoana, sorry, and the birds in their sealed tub were for a hui up at Ruatoki the following weekend, a koha to sweeten a Tuhoe birthday party at Ngahina marae. You can have my share, and welcome.

But I did have my fill of all the aroha on offer from the tangata whenua of Te Rau Aroha marae, with their long lineages, Waitaha, Kati Mamoe, Ngai Tahu and of course, via whalers and sealers since the early 1800s, Ngati Pakeha. We had a full-on powhiri, with Jeanette my wife answering the karanga as we were called on, and then I stood and spoke for us in answer to Dean Whaanga’s warm mihi. A bit scary – there were no Maori on our side to fill the need, so we stepped in. But what a privilege, and to stand in that splendid new whare rau, opened with great ceremony in 2003, surrounded by Cliff Whiting’s amazing carving and figures (think, Te Papa). Too much. Go there before you die, it’s a living work of art near the end of the world, created and sustained by a flax-roots local community effort. Where else can you sleep and eat in what amounts to an art gallery that tells stories everywhere you look? How much we Pakeha have still to learn.

Yes, it was a moment to savour, as I carried on my granny’s walking stick, my tokotoko, to support me when I stood to thank our hosts, mihi to the carved female ancestors, and the figures of those who had signed the Treaty. They had pens in their hands and so did we; we had some poetry in our packs, they were poetry in motion. My old kuia’s stick is cherry they tell me, brought here from England when she came out to join us in 1952. Her bones now lie in the cemetery at Karoro, in Greymouth, and I have taken up her stick because I carry her stories. It’s a talking stick, and now, like the rest of us who were borne here by sea and air, it lives in an atmosphere permeated by the very present Maori past that Cliff and the people of this marae expressed in the building of it. It has been carved by John Rua, mokopuna of Te Rua himself, Rua Kenana of Maungapohatu: the teardrop shaped head of the stick now sports the face of a tohora, the southern right whale, whose oil and ambergris drew the Pakeha south to these hard bleak shores. It has paua eyes, carved flukes and tail, and I think how apt it is that the first time I speak on a marae, it is one that celebrates whalers as well as waka navigators, Pakeha ancestors as well as Maori tupuna. So much to learn.

What is even sweeter is that when I first went to see John and have the stick carved, I asked him to carve a dragon, as my maternal ancestors are all Welsh. John is profoundly deaf: he looked at my sketch, thought I said “whales” and quickly roughed out the image of the tohora. I knew it was no accident, so I didn’t try and put him right. I call my stick Hona (Jonah), after the man who was swallowed by just such a leviathan in a figure of death and resurrection.

So what has this to do with the weekend of poetry, feasting and presentations of weighty matters that followed after the welcome? Well, as David Howard wrote to me afterwards, “Poetry is a way of knowing; I hope we all know a little more now”. The marae was writing all over us, in the welcome, in the stories we were told by Dean that night, and Jacqui next day – we were getting to know what it means to live together. Yes, there were good raves and readings: David Eggleton and Mark Tyler (you won’t have heard of him, the Bard of Twizel I christened this guy, who had read about the hui and drove all the way to join in). Yes, there were rich presentations of research papers: Michele Leggot on Lola Ridge, Michael Harlow on translation – but the best thing of all was being there, having our hearts inscribed by the wairua of a place I can’t begin to describe. Better go there, soon. Na reira, tena koutou katoa.

Finally, here is a taste of some of the results of the poetry workshop run by Dr Jack Ross to which Paula has alludes:

Letter to a lost friend

One hundred years from now
inside your self-portrait

How the rain falls
on empty houses

One hundred years from now,
to lift the frail child reckoning

how laughter sounds
like a letter to a lost friend ...

Ideograms are children
chasing leaves

The currency of cut-down autumn
The red shout of your laughter.

*

rhapsodia autographia
(for Mandelshtam)

luscious demonstratives

doubliest tendermost

afeared scrivener

defeated and forfeit

fox-fire blue blaze

bolt hole of the holt

phlegm throat-rip

exhausted Dostoyevsky

hostage collusive

*

Trafiggere

Down lies the light sta solo
body swollen over evening drapes

she is diving diving her breasts traffito
raggio hips a small house bale

Down lies O'Shaughnessy arms in the coffin
cousin from the buried Somme

Queenie queenie at the edge of Temuka
meant to run run though the sera

Folded rifles her fingers then hands
Ognuno della terra lies down

Participants in the workshop included:

Rob Allan, Jeanne Bernhardt, Hilary Chung, John Dolan, Jacob Edmond, Cliff Fell, Martin Edmond, Murray Edmond, Brian Flaherty, Paula Green, Bernadette Hall, Michael Harlow, Jeffery Paparoa Holman, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Emma Neale, Jack Ross, Helen Sword and Lisa Williams ...

Poems and interlinear translations for the exercise were provided by Hilary Chung, Jacob Edmond, Cliff Fell, Bernadette Hall, Scott Hamilton, Michael Harlow, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Jack Ross and Gabriel White.

Thanks to Jack for getting these extraordinary poems to us, and special thanks to Paula and Jeffrey for taking the time to let us vicariously partake in Bluff '06 in such lyrical ways. Should keep you going for a couple of days, I'd say? I suggest re-reading it over a tub of Bluff oysters for the full experience. And I for one would quite like a turn in Paula's outside shower, with free moon included, thanks.