ESAW Poetry Prize 2017 awarded
August 27, 2017
Versin’ Safari (ESAW, 2017)
At this year’s Winter Readings in Paekakariki, “Versin’ Safari”, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop published an anthology of the six readers (with photography by John Girdlestone), and awarded its annual poetry prize to Mary Maringikura Campbell, a surprise award.
Versin’ Safari held at St Peter’s Hall on 6 August 2017 was a tribute to the pop group The Beach Boys and an event continuing the return of a popular poetry reading series in the Wellington region organised by HeadworX Publishers and ESAW 2003-2008 and 2016.
This year’s attendance was up on the previous year and the participants were Nelson Wattie (also MC), Marilyn Duckworth (reading from The Chiming Blue: New and Selected Poems (VUP, 2017)), Paekakariki poets Mercedes Webb-Pullman and Damian Ruth, HeadworX editor Mark Pirie (reading his own and several poems by MaryJane Thomson from a recent HeadworX release, Songs of the City), and ESAW publisher Michael O’Leary reading from his newly released Collected Poems 1981-2016 (HeadworX).
Musician Francis Mills, a special guest, performed songs as a musical break between the poets.
Writer David McGill, one of this year’s cover artists along with Francis Mills in the Beach Boys photo shoot, was also acknowledged through Mark Pirie’s reading of limerick about the Beach Boys (a coda to the event).
At the conclusion of the event, Mary Maringikura Campbell received this year’s ESAW Poetry Prize for her collection Maringi.
Mary Maringikura Campbell
FISH
Fish, there is nothing fishy about you
nothing flawed or perverse
only pink and green tides
yellow moons and sleepless nights
Fish, no one compares to you
I could eat you raw
Fish, how can you measure
the depth, the volume of the ocean
My love for you is immeasurable
Fish, I will never hide from you
deep in the belly of the ocean
under the seaweed
it is murky and my vision is impaired
Fish, I am your paua
you are my rock
my moon
my blackest pearl
and I am stuck on
you.
Poem copyright Mary Maringikura Campbell 2016
Maringi (c2016)
[The Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize began in 2007, when the Earl, Michael O’Leary, awarded a prize to an emerging artist’s poem on the Poetrywall at that year’s Winter Readings taking place at the City Gallery. Evelyn Conlon, a young poet, won the prize.
Further awards were given to collections published by the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop: Will Leadbeater 2008, Jill Chan 2009, Robin Fry 2010 and Barry Southam in 2011.
When ESAW went into hiatus, apart from a few publications in recent years, the prize also went into hiatus.
Last year saw the reinstatement of the award at Winter Readings 2016: Poetry Gees dedicated to the Bee Gees, with the Otago-based writer Jeanne Bernhardt being awarded the prize.]
Michael O’Leary’s New Zealand cricket novel, Out of It, republished by HeadworX in 2012 [original first edition by Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 1987], has been reviewed by Benjamin Golby in The Cricket Monthly, the international cricket magazine online. Check out the article at the link below:
http://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/1086778/fantasy-cricket
Michael O’Leary’s books available at Lulu
April 8, 2017
Michael O’Leary’s books published by HeadworX are now available at Lulu’s leading online bookstore:
Collected Poems 1981-2016
eBook $AUD12.99
Hardback $AUD40.00
paperback $AUD24.95
Out of It: A Novel Cricket Novel
eBook $AUD8.99
Hardback $AUD35.00
paperback $AUD18.95
Main Trunk Lines: Collected Railway Poems
eBook $AUD8.99
Hardback $AUD35.00
paperback $AUD18.95
Toku Tinihanga: Selected Poems 1982-2002
eBook $AUD8.99
Paneta Street
eBook $AUD8.99
Make Love and War
eBook $AUD8.99
Sounds of Sonnets, with Mark Pirie
eBook $AUD8.99
Dylan Cohen tribute concert in Paekakariki
January 22, 2017
Michael O’Leary has organized a tribute concert to the late Leonard Cohen and to Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize for Literature 2016).
Here is the start time and running order for the concert:
COHEN / DYLAN Tribute Concert : St Peters Village Hall
7.45pm Saturday 4th Feb 2017:
First Half: COHEN.
Michael O’Leary
Gilbert Haismann
Meg Prasad
Michael O’Leary
Ebony Lamb
Debbie James
Nada Mills (Elan Mills / Ray Butler / Andy Christianson)
Danilo Blaza
Helen Dorothy (Janet Holboro)
Jason Johnson
5min tribute video.
Second Half: DYLAN.
5min tribute video
Michael O’Leary
Peter Ware
Holly Ewens
Francis Mills (Gary Allen / Ray Butler)
Jason Tamihana
Rob Hack
Shayn Wills (Zephyr Wills)
Jason Johnson (Chris Winter / Nick Brown)
Finale: “Knockin’ On Heavens Door”
ESAW publishes Ride the Tempest by Mark Pirie
January 14, 2017
ESAW published a new title in December 2016: Ride the Tempest by m r pirie [Mark Pirie].
m r pirie was Mark Pirie’s original writing name in the early 1990s, and the book collects three groups of poems from his uncollected notebook poems during the period 1993-1995 at the ages of 18 to 20.
ESAW publishes his book as an archival edition to complete the publication of Pirie’s early poems. Pirie has been one of ESAW’s most prolific authors over the years since his booklet The Blues was published by ESAW in 2001.
Pirie also took the cover photo of a friend bodyboarding at Mahia Peninsula in early 1992.
Copies can be ordered from the publisher: pukapuka@paradise.net.nz
Ride the Tempest by m r pirie [Mark Pirie], Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, Paekakariki, December 2016
Title: Ride the Tempest: Uncollected Early Poems 1993-1995
Author: m r pirie [Mark Pirie]
ISBN 978-1-86942-168-7
Price: $25.00
Extent: 66 pages
Format: 148mmx210mm
Publication: December 2016
Publisher: Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop
Michael O’Leary’s tributes to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen
January 14, 2017
Michael O’Leary recently contributed his poem and the below drawing (Blonde on Blonde) in honour of Bob Dylan, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an elegy for Leonard Cohen, to Poetry Notes, Spring 2016 (Newsletter of the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa).
The Bob Dylan poem also appears in Phantom Billsticker’s Cafe Reader, Summer 2016, and the Cohen elegy in Tony Chad’s Valley Micropress, December 2016.
Bob Dylan drawing by Michael O’Leary, 2008
Michael O’Leary
BOB DYLAN, A VISITATION
(10/9/1998, Wellington)
With my ear to the future
And my mind to the past
Sitting twenty rows back
and up high
I could feel the real visions of Johanna
From the ancient times
When the nuns had us sing
The answer is blowing in the wind
the Jews and the Catholics
Have fought pitched battles over my soul
And out on Highway Sixty One
Or along any lonesome railway track
The songs remain like freight cars
to be sung or shunted
Along the weary lines of a human face
Echoes of Mr. Yeats’ hymn
And a thousand singsong others
Expressing in thought, word, music
like your friend, Woody
The all too familiar taste of dust and death
Recalling the desolate row
Of houses in Margaret Street
Now either destroyed or gentrified
must we really move
Into the Ponsonby of the new, shallow mind
Later, you entered the ‘her’
Part of my life also
With a precious angel
now gone, but then
I was the man in the long black coat
From all you need is love minus zero
To being sick of love
Then, on one more night
you took us from Maggie’s farm
To forever young, as a simple reminder
Now there’s even talk of
Cranking up the Oldsmobile
For so long stuck inside, and
up the central plateaux
To Auckland, the Great Arsehole, sacred
Okay, Mister Room Man
Play a song for us
Say a prayer too, as you
wing your own way
Earthbound, heavenwards soaring beyond
For always talking the blues
To your Jews and Gypsies
All those masters of war
old Hitler, Stalin, and yes
The President of the U.S. does sometimes stand naked
Through all the years’ confusions
Of ideas and people and events
To this present listening
so many things have happened
While you just keep on singing to my sister’s alarm
I’m glad to come and see you
To tip my hat to the master’s hand
With my rainy day woman
asleep on my shoulder
Times have changed so much, they’ve remained the same
SO LONG LEONARD COHEN
Beginning life as a middle-class son
Comfortable in your Jewish Catholicism
Tailor-made for the family’s business
You chose the more difficult artist’s path
Through the Montreal poetry scene
You played youth’s favourite games
Slim volumes proffering Flowers for the Führer:
Eichmann’s normal human perversions
More polite than the gutter snipe
Rock and rollers, who said they joined
A band to get laid: young Cohen said
He played music to meet women
In the late 1960s when every belief
Came to an end: when The Beatles’ apple
Turned to pulp without the future fiction
You came along with a song from a room
A muse, in the real sense of ‘to amuse’
Someone who spoke openly about thought
And feeling, perhaps here was a poet
Who wasn’t alive a hundred years ago
Who wasn’t ‘beat’ or rock ‘n roll, exactly
But came so far, with a Spanish guitar,
With a seductive voice and lyric to match –
Existential, if you’ll pardon the expression
So all our Suzanne’s took us all down
To our own lands of rags and feathers;
Remembering well that Chelsea Hotel,
New York and the tragic taste of success
You went into God’s Hamburger Bar in
The city of Angels, wanting nothing but
‘One with Everything’ . . . becoming a Buddhist
Monk to escape the world of pain and love
Old songs and new could not be suppressed
So you returned to the world to bring them,
To sing them to audiences old and new
Hallelujah, Hallelujah: from below and above
Dancing to the end of love, you twirled
Full circle, singing so long Marianne, by e-mail
As she lay dying, remembering Greek Isles
Sunshine and smiles, farewell dreaming
It’s now as dark as you want it, Leonard
But remember, there’s always that crack
Perhaps you really have come to understand
Now, that’s where the light truly gets in . . .
Poems and drawing copyright Michael O’Leary
ESAW Christmas Surprise 2016 released
December 20, 2016
In the spirit of the Beatles who put out a Christmas record for their fans, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, the Poetry Archive of NZ Aotearoa (PANZA) and HeadworX offer to you, our friends and clients, this small token for your enjoyment.
Poems on David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, surfing, tennis, Christmas, poems in ‘inscriptive text’ by Niel Wright, and a short play by B. E. Turner.
Contributors: Michael O’Leary, B. E. Turner, F. W. Nielsen Wright, and Mark Pirie.
Download and view the free pdf of this book (file size 479KB):
http://markpirie.com/books/esaw-christmas-surprise-2016
ESAW Christmas Surprise 2016 edited by Mark Pirie
Michael O’Leary in Jacket2
August 6, 2016
Recently, Michael O’Leary appeared in Jacket2, USA, in the series of commentaries written by Vaughan Rapatahana on the small press poetry and performing scene in New Zealand.
Michael was interviewed for the article on Māori male poets:
‘Ngā Kaituhi Whiti Tāne Māori — Māori male poets‘ by Vaughan Rapatahana, in Jacket2 Commentaries, USA, 2015
Vaughan Rapatahana’s articles also covered the Poetry Archive of NZ Aotearoa that Michael O’Leary co-founded with Dr Niel Wright.
“One such example of sterling input is the invaluable Poetry Archive of New Zealand. As Mark Pirie points out to us, ‘I co-organise the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (with Dr Michael O’Leary and Dr Niel Wright, the founders) collecting poets back to the nineteenth century. There are more good poets than people realize reading mainstream historical anthologies of New Zealand poetry. I have realized this fairly recently after wasted years of looking at and learning from selective, academic anthologies ever since I was a student. Since 2010, I have edited the quarterly Poetry Archive newsletter Poetry Notes. This has featured many forgotten historical New Zealand poets and presented highly original research by myself, Rowan Gibbs, Niel Wright, and Michael O’Leary. The National Library of New Zealand online research tools like Papers Past have been vital to this rediscovery of early New Zealand poetry too. Poets like Robert J Pope, Ivy Gibbs, and A. Stanley Sherratt have had their work republished.’ It needs to be made clear that these three guys receive no emolument for their earnest endeavours and do rely on donations of both funds and poetry texts to proliferate their resource, ‘so very good historical and contemporary poets don’t get missed.’ Stalwarts all, indeed.”
Article: Slam, slam … & thank you Mams, Vaughan Rapatahana, in Jacket2 Commentaries, USA, 2015 (https://jacket2.org/commentary/slam-slam-thank-you-mams).
Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize 2016 awarded
July 21, 2016
At this year’s Winter Readings in Paekakariki, “Poetry Gees”, Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop published an anthology of the six readers (with photography by John Girdlestone), and reinstated its poetry prize.
Poetry Gees was a tribute to the pop group Bee Gees and an event marking the return of a popular poetry reading series in the Wellington region organised by HeadworX Publishers and ESAW 2003-2008.
The Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize began in 2007, when the Earl, Michael O’Leary, awarded a prize to an emerging artist’s poem on the Poetrywall at that year’s Winter Readings taking place at the City Gallery. Evelyn Conlon, a young poet, won the prize.
Further awards were given to collections published by the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop: Will Leadbeater 2008, Jill Chan 2009, Robin Fry 2010 and Barry Southam in 2011.
When ESAW went into hiatus, apart from a few publications in recent years, the prize also went into hiatus.
This year saw the reinstatement of the award at Winter Readings, with the Otago-based writer Jeanne Bernhardt being awarded the prize.
Jeanne read a mixture of new and old poems and was surprised and pleased to receive the award – kept secret – at the end of the event.
Other readers were Rob Hack (also MC), MaryJane Thomson reading from Lonely Earth (HeadworX), HeadworX editor Mark Pirie, Basim Furat (currently visiting New Zealand from Sudan), Siberian-born Polina Kouzminova, and ESAW publisher Michael O’Leary.
Poet and Poetry Archive co-founder Niel Wright attending the event was also acknowledged through Mark Pirie’s reading of his Bee Gees poem ‘Staying Alive II’.
(From Beattie’s Book Blog, 20 July 2016)
Mark Pirie, Basim Furat and Michael O’Leary outside St Peter’s Hall, Paekakariki
About Jeanne Bernhardt
Jeanne Bernhardt is a former recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary from Creative NZ in the late 1990s, and the author of 7 books, including Wood and Fast down Turk from Kilmog Press, Dunedin, and Baby is this Wonderland? and The Snow Poems/your self of lost ground from HeadworX. She was included in the ESAW mini series of poetry booklets. Painter of mountains, drawer of leaves and comix, felt maker and wood carver, likes to roam, solitude and being in nature.
Poem by Jeanne:
How is the Writer?
(words for my father)
Eleven years since you died.
I stare at things
Imagine they are broken
The centre of old rocks
Live alone
Content
Divorce is a strange concept
Separation
A little death
Sometimes I imagine you turn up at my door,
I do not immediately invite you in,
We pause there
Assess the sky, the situation
Your car still running
It is a fleeting visit
You were in the neighbourhood, so…
Your watch and glasses still working,
Ah, I say
For time and shock
Reluctance
All the time in the world
But no space
I have eaten my heart
Like an adult
How are your brothers and sisters? you ask
How is the writer this morning?
Calling out through the years
And sunlight
Shadows of a gone tree
Try to be happy.
Jeanne Bernhardt
New publication: Die Bibel by Michael O’Leary
July 20, 2016
Title: DIE BIBEL being the authoritative history of Dr Michael John O’Leary, Earl of Seacliff
Author: Michael O’Leary
Publisher: Steele Roberts
Launch details: Sunday, 24th July 2016, 3pm at Paekakariki Railway Station – special launch price $30 per copy
Description:
In 1998 the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature described Michael O’Leary, the Earl of Seacliff, as a publisher, poet, novelist, performer and bookshop proprietor who has made a colourful contribution to the literary scene: “Under his Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop imprint he has published his own prolific output as well as various other writers, both alternative and main stream.”
The Companion noted that Michael’s poetry and novels explore his heritage, “the poetry more conventionally, the prose in an alternative vein which owes something to Joyce and Beckett.”
Since that time Michael has completed masters and doctoral studies in New Zealand publishing and literature at Victoria University, and has continued to write, publish and sell books from his seaside earldom at Paekakariki.
Throughout Die Bibel he often uses his poems to express his thoughts and feelings, and to pay tribute to extraordinary people and events in his life. One of many highlights is Psalm 34, ‘It’s not the leaving of Wellington’, an odyssey around the capital city.
Die Bibel is the lively, candid journey of a man who has lived a singular life in Aotearoa New Zealand and has made an indelible contribution to its literature.
Back cover author photo (at Paekakariki Railway Station): Lindsay Rabbitt
Front cover: Nigel Brown’s portrait of the Earl of Seacliff
