Professor spends her life creating worlds with ink
Curiosity has inspired a life in poetry. Christina Persico reports.
Michele Leggott paints worlds with her words despite no longer being able to see life playing out in front of her.
Originally from Stratford, the professor has made a life out of her love of poetry, and was back in Taranaki this week to read from her new collection, Vanishing Points. She has also been researching her new project on Emily Harris, a Taranaki poet from the 19th century.
Leggott now works part-time at Auckland University teaching poetry and creative writing around her research projects, but traces her love of the art back to high school.
‘‘Poetry is everything for me. It’s one of those things you can take all the way back to New Plymouth Girls’ High School. I had really amazing teachers. I didn’t really know what poetry was and they just put my feet on a path way back then.’’
Leggott doesn’t like describing her work - she prefers people to listen to it.
‘‘When I could see I loved reading poetry on the page but. ..you’ve always got to start by listening to the poem. You need to hear it aloud. Poetry is always oral; it started as song.
‘‘If you hear something, even if you don’t understand it, if you hear it and you like it and you want to go back and listen again, then the poem is working.
‘‘I wouldn’t describe it; I’d say would you like to listen to a short poem? If you like it that’s great, you’ll talk about it; if you don’t that’s fine.’’
Her poetry covers a wide range of topics related to life, particularly New Zealand life, and is fuelled from her own curiosity, she says.
‘‘I’m a curious person. There’s always questions popping up for me. Once I’m interested in something more questions arise and I want to answer them.
‘‘I’m curious about the world, people in the world and language.
‘‘For me that’s going to make a good poem.’’
Vanishing Points, her eighth collection and the third in a series, was published in October. The work is full of history and family, lights and mirrors, the real and the surreal.
‘‘Vanishing Points concerns itself with appearance and disappearance as modes of memory, familial until we lose sight of that horizon line and must settle instead for a series of intersecting arcs. It is full of stories caught from the air and pictures made of words. It stands here and goes there, a real or an imagined place. If we can work out the navigation the rest will follow.
‘‘There’s a lot of Taranaki material in it.’’
The first poem Leggott heard was probably a nursery rhyme as a child, but her real love for the literature began when she was around 14 or 15.
‘‘It was something about language and being able to handle language and make this amazing stuff that really appealed to me.’’
Her gradual loss of sight - she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, an eye disease that damages the retina, in 1985 - has not held her back. Leggott has won many awards for her work, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry, the New Zealand Order of Merit, and the inaugural New Zealand poet laureateship in 2007, and recently been named a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apa¯ rangi only the second poet to receive the honour.
‘‘I’m really lucky that the job has continued to support me. Because the loss of sight has been very gradual it’s something that I’ve learned to manage.
‘‘That gives you time to adapt to every small thing that you’re losing.’’
Leggott says she took her mother’s attitude of having a cry and then getting on with it.
‘‘If I was torn up with grief about losing my sight then I would never be able to transform what I have got left into something that makes it possible to live and work.
‘‘I’m a poet and I get to teach poetry and creative writing.’’
Leggott also has good support from her husband, Mark Fryer, and her adored guide dog, Olive. The couple have two adult sons, James and Robin.
She says that same life curiosity that sparks her poetry is what gets her going each morning - the thought of ‘what’s going to happen today?’
‘‘Is there any poetry?
‘‘I like being in the world. I’m privileged; I live with people whom I love and they support me.’’
She also wants to uncover more of Emily Harris’ work, working through Puke Ariki and asking around the region to see if anyone has any letters in their bottom drawers.
‘‘At the moment we only have a handful of her poems from the 1860s. How interesting it’s going to be to try and find the rest of her poems.
‘‘She wrote her poems into letters that she sent to her friends and family. She never published them.
‘‘There are families in Taranaki that she wrote to.
‘‘I need to get her story out there so that people know that name.’’
But she says even if she didn’t find any of Harris’ further works, it would still have made people look back through old belongings, which was a good thing.
‘‘It just gives us a bit of history that we knew nothing about and I think that’s really important. History’s never finished.
‘‘People are really interested in family history. One family might have had something to do with the Harris family way back when and you’ve still got it.
‘‘Discoveries keep being made all the time, so history’s not finished.’’
She says she doesn’t want people to think that poetry is a task or something difficult that they have to do.
‘‘When I write them I hear them and I want that experience to go to everyone else who is listening to it.’’
And she isn’t worried about the future health of verse.
‘‘There’s some great students out there.
‘‘In the last 50 years poetry readings have really taken off.’’
"You need to hear it aloud. Poetry is always oral; it started as song." Poet Michele Leggott