Had to put this up right away, thanks Mary McCallum for sending it in so promptly:

'The Writers on Monday session at the Wellington City Gallery this week was abruptly halted when US poet Dora Malech fainted while starting to read a love poem [or it might have been a poem about love poems – she’d just introduced it by refuting Rilke’s advice to the young to avoid such abstract excesses saying that it was a waste of good hormones].

Malech had been reading and talking about her poems for no more than 15 minutes when she suddenly collapsed. There was no sign anything was wrong before then; in fact the young poet (mid 20s?) had charmed the lunchtime audience of 45 or so people with her clever, playful poems that had the shine of youth still on them, and her amusing introductions to each one. She was only going to read for five minutes more and then she was to have sat down and had a conversation with poet Andrew Johnston.

After the poet fainted, the audience was told to leave but I found myself up at the front of the room telling Damien Wilkins (who had just called the ambulance) what to do with a fainter. I told him I knew because my daughter was one. Only much later did I realise the irony of that conversation. Anyway, the good news is that Dora was seen walking from the building supported by friends. I’m sure everybody at the event wishes Dora well and hopes her fainting is not symptomatic of anything more serious. There is talk that she might be recalled to read again – fingers crossed.

Dora Malech is currently Bill Manhire’s replacement at the International Institute of Modern Letters while he’s on leave. A Yale graduate, she has an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received other honours for her poetry including the Capote Fellowship and the Glenn Schaeffer Award.

I’ve looked in a desultory fashion on the web but can’t find the poems we heard today so I’m assuming they’re new ‘kiwi’ works – which is interesting in itself. Drinking coffee at Nikau afterwards, my table managed to piece together one of the poems we especially liked that was about the way we possess the things we love: poems, bodies etc. Apologies to Dora if we’ve got it wrong but it started something like this…

the lungs were mine
the shins were his
the breasts were mine
but he agreed

… and it went on down to Mr Winky (his name not hers) and finished back up on the heart, which they couldn’t name even in the dark.

I’ve brought home a more permanent reminder of Malech’s work in the form of a poem exquisitely printed in black and lilac on cream card by Wai-te-ata Press. Only $15 each and a limited edition of 50. It’s called Our Bearings and is about Wellington. Here’s some of it:

The only constant coordinates here
are the going and the gone, axis
atilt without lodestone or polestar,
leeward a fancy, windward a whim.

Ah, that’s it. Get well then Dora.

You can find some of Dora's poetry on Turbine.'