A new stage show, a new collection of poetry ... Bill Manhire’s love affair with language continues, writes Shane Gilchrist.
New Zealand wordsmith Bill Manhire is celebrating the premiere of a show at Wanaka’s Festival of Colour this week. The problem is, he can’t say too much about it.
Tell Me My Name is based on a book and album package of the same name: a sequence of riddles by Manhire, set to music by composer and pianist Norman Meehan and sung by Hannah Griffin, whose voice is complemented by Martin Riseley’s violin.
"The audience will be given a sealed sheet of paper and can choose whether or not to open it and see the answer to the riddles. They can listen to the songs knowing the answers or try to work them out as they go along.
"The idea is to replicate the feeling we have about riddles. We desperately want to know the answer but once we know we feel triumphant yet faintly disappointed
"There is a narrative of sorts. One of the early themes is about birth or early childhood and, without giving it away, is about a headstone."
One of the guests at the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival in May, Manhire will be in Wanaka for the production. Actually, he’s part of the show.
"I’m like a narrator, occasionally poking my nose in to talk about the nature and history of some riddles. Wanaka is the first time the show steps into the world, so to speak, but I think it will have quite a big life after that.
"Norman Meehan, the composer, and I have a had a working relationship for quite a few years now and have done a few shows. One day we were talking and suggested we take the riddle idea into song.
"We’ve been working on this for about two years and have tried a few out at house concerts. Some have been dropped and we’ve been left with the ones we feel are strong."
In the notes of Tell Me My Name, Manhire cites a childhood recollection of his mother singing the folk song I Gave My Love A Cherry, which dates back to 15th-century England:
Come a riddle, come a riddle
come a rote-tote-tote
a wee wee man in a red red coat
a stick in his hand and a stone in his throat
come a riddle come a riddle
come a rote-tote-tote
He points out every culture has riddles. They keep company with runes, spells and party games. They entertain and challenge.
"As a poet, I’ve always been interested in the riddle-like nature of poetry. Some people might remember the downside of that, sitting miserably in a classroom wondering what the hell the answer was to a poem.
"But the riddle sits at the heart of poetry in the sense that poetry is language used to make the world more mysterious. There are some poems that, if you took away the title, would be like a complicated clue to its subject."
Brain-teasing aside, there is another intent that pulses beneath the surface of Manhire’s latest project, and that is to shake off any high-brow, obscure or uber-cool connotations surrounding poetry.
"I’ve always been a fan of any way to take poetry away from ... hmmm, I don’t know what to call it ... the intimidation of the classroom, as it were, where you’d sit anxiously wondering what the theme is, or how to spell onomatopoeia."
The point is, he emphasises, you can be too precious about such things. Perfection, attention to detail, to one’s craft is fine; pretension is not.
"When you listen to a song, as the audience does in a show like this, they are getting a more direct experience. Anything that does that — including initiatives such as poems on posters — is good.
"I see the show as part of that bigger movement to get poetry off the page."
Manhire is also celebrating a new collection of poems, Some Things To Place In A Coffin, the title of which is a reference to the death of artist Ralph Hotere in 2013.
"I think there was a point where I had accumulated a number of poems over quite a period and I saw that they all, without knowing about each other as it were, turned out to be cousins. Quite a few of the stronger poems touch on mortality.
"There is one that I was commissioned to write by the Imperial War Museum in London a couple of years ago. It’s called Known Unto God.
"There were a lot of unknown New Zealand soldiers buried in Belgium and France . . . I thought I’d give some of them a chance to say a little bit about themselves."
At 70, Manhire is regarded as one of the greatest Kiwi poets of his era: he was New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate (1997-98), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand; his awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, an Arts Foundation laureateship, and New Zealand Book Award for Poetry (four times).
A Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, he has an honorary doctorate of literature from the University of Otago and is a significant figure in the promotion of New Zealand poetry and literature, participating in numerous festivals both nationally and internationally. Manhire is also well known as the creator of New Zealand’s first creative writing programme through Victoria University, the International Institute of Modern Letters. However, he retired four years ago to focus more on his writing.
"I thought when I stopped teaching the floodgates would burst, that all of this stuff would come out, but I don’t think I’m much more productive than I was," he concedes.
"However, it has freed me up to focus on things such as this riddle show. I don’t think that would have happened if I was still buried in work on a university campus.
"Norman Meehan and I are working on a big project about bridges, which is pretty exciting. We have had a couple of run-throughs and might test it publicly later in the year.
"It also occurred to us that bridges are a better prospect for us all than building big walls."
The play
• The premiere of Tell Me My Name will be staged at the Central Lakes Trust Crystal Palace, Wanaka, on Wednesday. The book and album package of the same name is published by Victoria University Press, as is Manhire’s latest collection of poetry, Some Things To Place In A Coffin.
Fact file
• Born in Invercargill in 1946, Bill Manhire (70) grew up in small hotels in Otago and Southland. Since his first book of poems, The Elaboration (Square & Circle, 1972), he has published multiple award-winning collections of poetry.
• For poetry and prose, Manhire has been awarded many significant fellowships, including the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, France (2004). Through the Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship (1997), he is one of only a few poets to have reached the South Pole.
• Anthologies he has edited include The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica, The Best of Best New Zealand Poems and Are Angels OK?, a collaboration between New Zealand writers and physicists.
