Author / Poet
As convenor and judge in 2023 Ockham Poetry Awards, here is a link to me, discussing the shortlist, of Sedition by Anahera Maire Gildea, Always Italicise how to write while colonised, by Alice Te Punga Somerville, We’re Made of Lighting by Khadro Mohamed, and People Person by Joanna Cho
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/nights/audio/2018881004/poetry-prize-four-women
Every Now and Then I Have Another Child
Every Now and Then I Have Another Child was published in the middle of Lockdown. A strange time to launch a book, with no means to launch it into the world. However, sometimes the quietest babies grow into the noisiest ones.
I began this book soon after my previous book, Taking My Mother to the Opera was published. I had the most extraordinary dream and woke up at the right moment to get it all down as a poem and name it Every Now and Then I Have Another Child. Even though I tell my students not to write about dreams as they are usually of interest only to yourself, I nevertheless got caught up in the characters of the dream and wanted to follow them. They certainly took me on an exciting journey. I think you’re toying with the reader, Vanda Symon said in a radio interview. Well maybe, but the characters were toying with me. I had no idea where we would end up, but I was having so much fun, I just ignored all doubts.
It’s a complex book to talk about, as it’s all in poetry form but adopts some fictional elements including plot, dialogue, characters and a chapter structure. The main narrator is Joanna, a single woman with grown-up sons, one of whom lives in London, the other who lives in the North Island. She’s a creative writing teacher as I wanted to explore some of the aspects of teaching creative writing to adults. So far, so normal but then she finds a baby in a hotel room and takes it home. The baby requires no feeding or changing of nappies, but she occasionally takes over the narration. Another character who inserts herself into the story is Anna, a doppelgänger version of Joanna. She is stalking Joanna but is she dangerous? There are other characters, including the Boy on the Wall, and a missing mother.
It was great fun to write, so I hope it is great fun to read.
How I came to write Every Now and Then I Have Another Child
Every Now and Then I Have Another Child was published in the middle of Lockdown. A strange time to launch a book, with no means to launch it into the world. However, sometimes the quietest babies grow into the noisiest ones.
I began this book soon after my previous book, Taking My Mother to the Opera was published. I had the most extraordinary dream and woke up at the right moment to get it all down as a poem and name it Every Now and Then I Have Another Child. Even though I tell my students not to write about dreams as they are usually of interest only to yourself, I nevertheless got caught up in the characters of the dream and wanted to follow them. They certainly took me on an exciting journey. I think you’re toying with the reader, Vanda Symon said in a radio interview. Well maybe, but the characters were toying with me. I had no idea where we would end up, but I was having so much fun, I just ignored all doubts.
It’s a complex book to talk about, as it’s all in poetry form but adopts some fictional elements including plot, dialogue, characters and a chapter structure. The main narrator is Joanna, a single woman with grown-up sons, one of whom lives in London, the other who lives in the North Island. She’s a creative writing teacher as I wanted to explore some of the aspects of teaching creative writing to adults. So far, so normal but then she finds a baby in a hotel room and takes it home. The baby requires no feeding or changing of nappies, but she occasionally takes over the narration. Another character who inserts herself into the story is Anna, a doppelgänger version of Joanna. She is stalking Joanna but is she dangerous? There are other characters, including the Boy on the Wall, and a missing mother.
It was great fun to write, so I hope it is great fun to read.
I have recently taken over as Poetry Editor for The Mix in the Otago Daily Times, which involves selecting a weekly poem from Otago residents. Here’s an article about it and below a poem I wrote to express what I was looking for in submissions
The Mix Poem Manifesto
What do you want in a poem
to appear on a Saturday morning
along with your porridge
or croissant or toast?
Consider nourishment
for the heart and mind
a bowlful of words
to crunch between teeth.
Best if it’s sprinkled
with some new ingredient
you’ve never tasted before,
spicy or sweet notes
to keep you replete. Ideal
if it engages in conversation
prompts you to wonder
if there’s something
more between the lines
to sit with you all week
your tongue tracing
the surprise of it.
Diane Brown
.
My Poetry of the Year taken from Paula Green’s Poetry Shelf:
http://nzpoetryshelf.com/2015/12/15/poetry-shelf-poets-choice-diane-brown-makes-her-picks/
Most mornings my husband and I, (which sounds like the Queen, but I can assure you is not) read poems to each other. It’s a lovely way to start a day of mostly words and brings a focus back to the interior after reading the newspaper.
It takes a while to get through collections this way. You could call it slow poetry. At the moment we are reading Emma Neale’s Tender Machines and Vincent O’Sullivan’s Selected Poems, Being Here. They are Dunedin based poets at different ends of their poetry careers, but what treasures are contained in both books. Vincent’s cool, sardonic, intensely observational eye and Emma’s brilliantly executed white hot wordplay as she explores family life in all its intensity and moves into global and environmental concerns.
The book we have finished and both laughed and wept over from the first page to the last is The Bees by Carol Ann Duffy. It’s an amazing collection of poems with a wide variety of subjects: love poems; moving elegies to her mother; rollicking drinking poems; angry political poems and. throughout, bees hover, fragile life-givers, whose existence along with ours is threatened. And apart from the bees holding all these poems together is the way every poem sings a love of words, with internal rhymes, alliteration, repetition, but in a way that is completely natural, sometimes angry, sometimes joyous. If you know someone who is mystified by poetry, try them with some of these poems. Yes, she’s a popular poet who may not appeal to readers who laud the esoteric and experimental, but she writes intelligent poems about important subjects and issues, the stuff of life. In a short poem, Spell, Duffy says, ‘I think a poem is a spell of kinds, / that keeps things living in a written line.’ Her poems are charming in the true sense of the word, burrowing into your brain and, most importantly, your heart as you breathe them in.
A few lines from the tremendously moving poem, ‘Water’, about her dying mother.
Water.
What a mother brings
through darkness still
to her parched daughter.’
Diane Brown