Poet Anna Jackson Live – Seeing Voices – A brief Review

Paul writes - Last Friday (22^nd July), New Zealand celebrated poetry – it was the Montana Poetry Day. I went to hear Kiwi Poet Anna Jackson read from her works. I was my first “live” poetry reading and I loved it. I discovered poetry is meant to be read out loud!

Jackson was brilliant, with wonderfully evocative word play. I’m now converted to multi-layered experience of poetry being read “live.” The experience is so much richer than my reading a poem off the page.

She framed each poetry selection with something of its story, and had a wonderful way of standing (one sleeve pulled up, arms crossed, poetry held in her right hand), moving (swaying, stepping, accompanying her poems)), and reading her poetry...I suspect the wonder of her voice was nerves (It could also be a type of stage-persona), but the effect was brilliant, raw, and evocative. She was animated (a kind of marionette) but not wild, and her voice – its breathlessness intonation, and nervous edge did some wonderful things to the words and the flow of the poem...BRILLIANT.

I was reminded of Jackson’s closing comments in a review of Christine Jeff’s film SYLVIA. She wrote, “Her [Plath] poetry might be shown to relate to her life, but [in the movie] it isn’t shown to have any relevance at all to ours. We are left as bewildered bystanders of a life and an art essentially irrelevant…”

We were not left as “bewildered bystanders.” Jackson drew us in and helped us make connections from her life to our own.   

Here’s one of the poems she read – Johnny’s Minute (from her collection, Catullus for Children).

It captures that wonderful little way I respond to my children when I’m in the middle of something; or they use with me when they’re doing something else more interesting – In a minute…:

You promise to have your bath in a minute.

Not now, because now

you are gluing a beach,

you are painting the sky,

and fixing three beasts

so they’ll stand

upright

on paper legs.

You don’t need a minute,

You need a life time.

I’ll have run a bath

as full as the

Pacific Ocean,

warmed your pyjamas

up to the heat

of the core of the earth,

and swept up

enough grains of dust

to make a new planet out of

by the time your world is ready for me.

Ó Anna Jackson, 2003

You can hear some short recording of Anna reading some of her poems here. Not in my view as good as Anna live!