Poster Poetry Launch in Dunedin

Phantom Billstickers Poetry Poster Launch

Monday 16th November

12 Noon

468 George Street

Dunedin

(by the Obelisk)

Michele Leggott will be officiating.

The posters will feature these poets:

Sandra Bell

Jay Clarkson

Sam Hunt

Robert Pinsky

Marcie Sims

Joe Treceno

Brian Turner

This is the fourth of the Phantom Poetry Poster Launches this year. (First Auckland, then Wellington, then Christchurch, now Dunedin.) The Christchurch Launch was held on Janet Frame's Birthday (28th August) and involved a party and poetry readings at Al's Bar.

The Janet Frame Poem "The End" on a Phantom Poster

The French Connection

A panel discussion to commemorate
the 40th Anniversary of the Menton Fellowship

Sunday, 22 November 2009

1 pm - 2.30 pm

Dunedin Public Art Gallery

http://www.dunedin.art.museum/

To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, now known as the New Zealand Post Mansfield Prize, Dunedin Public Art Gallery hosts a panel session with Owen Marshall, Philip Temple, Fiona Farrell and current Burns Fellow, Michael Harlow.

These prominent South Island writers will talk about their experiences of living in France, writing in a room at the Villa Isola Bella where Mansfield once lived, and about the impact this unique fellowship has had on their literary career.

Chair: Richard Cathie

This session is dedicated to the late Janet Frame,

a previous holder of the fellowship.

All Good Bookstores

Spotted this staff recommendation at the big Auckland City Whitcoulls branch on the corner of Queen and Victoria Streets:

"Janet Frame is one of our most incredible writers. Her works are intense & emotive. A joy to discover."

There was a brilliant display of all the "Janet Frame Collection" at this bookshop. The Auckland CBD Borders shop is similarly generously stocked.

Every single one of Janet Frame's 12 novels is currently in print from Random House New Zealand, as well as most of her short stories and both her poetry collections, and the children's book she wrote. And the three volumes of autobiography are in print separately, along with an omnibus edition!

Quality independent and university bookshops will usually have a good supply of Janet Frame's books (along with other literary fiction).

Alas not all of the mainstream stores have such a good offering of Janet Frame books on sale, especially out in the provinces, where they only seem to know about Dan Brown and Harry Potter. Surely not every brain cell is confiscated when citizens leave the large cities?

Quite often I will be browsing in a bookstore that is selling a book like "501 Great Writers" - which features Janet Frame - but try looking for a representative sample of her work. You're likely to be disappointed.

I'm often asked by visitors to New Zealand why it seems to be so hard to buy Janet Frame's books here in the very country that produced such a great writer on the world stage? It's a good question...

The pictured double edition containing INTENSIVE CARE and DAUGHTER BUFFALO is a particular treasure. It weighs a kilo and the novels are both deep and significant, major works of literature, but they're not any harder to read than any other work of literary fiction.

As Stephanie Dowrick once commented, "It is impossible to call yourself well-read if you have not yet discovered Janet Frame" (Sydney Morning Herald). I could extend the sentiment to say that someone who hasn't read Intensive Care or Daughter Buffalo or Living in the Maniototo can't claim to know Janet Frame's work well.

Save the Clutha

Heaven's Gate, Upper Clutha

Photograph: Lewis Verduyn

Save the Clutha

Janet Frame loved the magnificent Clutha River that flows through her home territory in the lower part of the South Island of New Zealand. In 1958, in London, once her birth name "Janet Frame" had become too well-known for her to be comfortable living with it on a daily basis, she changed her name by deed poll to "Janet Clutha". In this way she was able to live anonymously for the rest of her life, reserving the name "Janet Frame" for publishing and literary purposes only.

As it has often been pointed out, she was fairly unusual in that she wrote under her proper name and lived under her pseudonym! It is not of course unusual for those who have achieved celebrity or notoriety to use assumed names in the attempt to avoid publicity and harassment, so that they can live as normal a life as possible. In Janet Frame's case, her apparent invisibility did help to serve the myth that she was some sort of anti-social recluse. The myth could not have been further from the truth, as anyone who lived in her neighbourhood or knew her as "Ms Clutha" (or more correctly "Dr Clutha") could testify, but it's true that it was one myth that Frame did not discourage as it meant that she had fewer interruptions to her work.

Janet Frame described her first view of the Clutha River in her autobiography:

From my first sight of the river I felt it to be a part of my life (how greedily I was claiming the features of the land as ‘part of my life’), from its beginning in the snow of the high country (we were almost in the high country), through all its stages of fury and, reputedly now and then, peace, to its outfall in the sea, with its natural burden of water and motion and its display of colour, snow-green, blue, mud-brown, and borrowing rainbows from light; and its added burden rising from its power, of the dead – withered or uprooted vegetation, the bodies and bones of cattle, sheep and deer, and, from time to time, of people who drowned.

After spending a year confined in the city, studying, writing, conscious always of boundaries of behaviour and feeling, in my new role as an adult, I now came face to face with the Clutha, a being that persisted through all the pressures of rock, stone, earth and sun, living as an element of freedom but not isolated, linked to heaven and light by the slender rainbow that shimmered above its waters. I felt the river was an ally, that it would speak for me.

I fell in love with Central Otago and the river, with the naked hills covered only in their folds by their own shadow, with their changing shades of gold, and the sky born blue each morning with no trace of cloud, retiring in the evening to its depth of purple.

1001 BEST THINGS TO SEE AND DO IN NZ

1001 Best Things to See and Do in New Zealand by Peter Janssen

(Hodder Moa, updated second edition, 2009)

This informative and interesting book has recently hit the shelves of bookstores, in time for the Kiwi Xmas and for the influx of summer tourism to our nation.

New Zealand is a small country but is packed to the rafters with a variety of attractions to suit every kind of visitor, and also to tempt the local citizen who hasn't yet explored all that is on offer in their own "back yard".

This useful book includes a recommendation to visit Janet Frame's childhood home at 56 Eden Street, Oamaru, which is open to the public every afternoon during the summer months.

More information on visiting this site of literary heritage is available from

Oamaru's I-Site:

1 Thames Street

Oamaru,

New Zealand
Phone: +64-3-434 1656,

Fax: +64-3-434 1657.

Peter Janssen has also featured the Janet Frame House in another of his books, Worth A Detour (2008).

Animals on Show

Animals on Show: A Critical Analysis of the Animal Entertainment Industry

A 'humane' educational resource:

~Focussed on the relationship between human and non-human animals.
~Designed for use within the NCEA framework for years 11, 12 and 13.
~Created and peer-reviewed by professional teachers and educationalists.

Animals & Us resources are designed to encourage critical thinking, advance knowledge and develop values of empathy and compassion.

The Janet Frame Literary Trust was pleased to support the aims of this resource by approving the inclusion of an extremely relevant excerpt from Janet Frame's novel Daughter Buffalo (in which Turnlung and Talbot Edelman visit Central Park Zoo in New York)

see www.animalsandus.org for more information.

World Premiere of New Song Cycle

Jenny McLeod's Peaks of Cloud, a song cycle for tenor and piano to poems by Janet Frame, will be premiered by New Zealand tenor Keith Lewis and pianist Michael Houstoun at the NZ International Arts Festival in Wellington on the 7th March 2010.

Keith Lewis & Michael Houstoun: Peaks of Cloud

Tenor Keith Lewis and pianist Michael Houstoun present this recital which spans over 300 years of song. Recognised early in his career as a Mozart specialist, Lewis’s performances are noted for their beauty of voice and interpretative skills. Partnered by the impeccable artistry of Michael Houstoun, this recital promises an evening of beautiful insights.
With the sweet Baroque of Purcell, the subtle, direct songs of Britten and the quirkiness of Barber, this programme spans a range of emotional and musical colour.

At the heart of the recital is the world premiere of Jenny McLeod’s Peaks of Cloud, which sets seven poems by Janet Frame and brings together four iconic New Zealand artists.

Wellington Town Hall

Sunday 7 March 2010

7.30 pm

Tickets on sale at Ticketek from 9 am 19th November 2009

FYI You can listen to a Radio NZ interview with Jenny McLeod about writing The Poet, another song cycle based on Janet Frame's poems, here.