The 92nd in this increasingly occasional series of reprints from Quote Unquote the magazine is from the
March 1995 issue. The portrait above of Jenny Bornholdt is by Annelies van der Poel. The poem
below, which ran alongside the story and is from the collection How We Met, is reproduced by permission
of Victoria University Press.
The intro read:
Jenny Bornholdt writes poems that are instantly accessible but can be read in a number of ways. “l like telling stories,” she tells RUTH NICHOL.
ON THE LEVEL
For most of us, the portable typewriter has taken on the status,
of a relic. It’s a quaint reminder of simpler times, something to drag out to
entertain the kids — providing the ribbon hasn’t
dried up. But as to actually using one, forget it. We’d be
lost without the delete button.
For Wellington poet Jenny Bornholdt, though, the portable
typewriter is an integral part of the writing process. She uses her little
Brother machine (a 21st-birthday present) to type up the final copies of her poems,
having written them in longhand first. And the whole, time-consuming ritual of
typing — inserting a new page, ripping it out to start again, getting out the
Twink — often helps her to refine a poem in ways she hadn’t thought of.
“Because I want to get a clean copy I often have to type
them over and over again,” she says. “It’s often when I’m correcting a mistake
that I realise I should do something else. I really can’t imagine writing onto
a computer. Using the typewriter is really part of the process.”
The method may be a little old-fashioned in these days of
CD-Rom and RAM, but the results are refreshingly accessible. Bornholdt’s work
is a tonic for all those poetryphobes who were force-fed fields of golden daffodils
at an early age. It’s user-friendly and popular. So popular that her first three
collections, This Big Face, Moving House and Waiting Shelter have sold out.
That accessibility comes to a large extent from the subject
matter. Bornholdt tends to write about the familiar, the everyday, in some
cases the positively prosaic. “Then Murray Came”, from her new collection How We Met, for example, is about
selling a car. The dramatis personae include Ray, the man from the AA (summoned,
yet again, to start the car), and the prospective buyer, Murray. Bornholdt’s
husband, fellow poet Gregory O’Brien, makes a cameo appearance, biking off to
buy petrol:
. . . Ray came down and took over
holding up the bonnet of the car.
What’s your name? he asked Murray.
Murray, said Murray. Well I’m
Ray, this is Greg and this is
Jen. Hello Murray, we said.
And then the car started.
It’s a far cry from golden daffodils.
“I love narrative,” says Bornholdt. “I know it’s not really
fashionable any more, but I like stories, and I’m interested in telling
stories.”
However, she is far more than an intellectual Pam Ayers. Her
work may be readable and unthreatening, but it is more than that. “People say
it’s accessible, and I like that. I also like the fact that it works on a
number of different levels.”
Bornholdt doesn’t know why she started writing poetry. In
fact, she’s not really sure why she started writing at all. It began tentatively;
the teenager who “loved English” took up journalism because it seemed a way to
write. However, a year as a reporter on the Waimate
Daily Advertiser turned out to be not quite what she had in mind.
But she did start writing poems, just a few. Not that she
ever thought that she might become a “writer”: “When you’re young you have this
idea of writers being romantic creatures who are in no way related to anyone
you might know.”
However, several years later, and by now armed with most of
a degree in English literature, she felt confident enough to apply — and be
accepted — for Bill Manhire’s writing course at Victoria University. That was
the turning point.
“It definitely started something. The course is terrific, it’s
started lots of people off. It gave me the confidence to keep writing, and put
me in contact with other people who were doing the same thing, and all of them
were just like you.”
She soon realised that she wanted to do more than just write
poetry; she wanted it to be read by other people, and she began sending her
work to publications such as Landfall
and Islands. “You do get to the point
where you want to do that. If you think something’s good enough, you want
people to read it.”
Eventually her first collection, This Big Face, was published by Victoria University Press in 1988,
followed the next year by Moving House
and Waiting Shelter in 1991.
Both have now sold out, no mean feat in the poetry
publishing business. However, the print runs were small — just 750 each — and
Bornholdt knows she will never make her fortune from writing poetry. She currently
works fulltime as a copywriter with a Wellington recruitment agency, and is
also working, along with Gregory O’Brien and Canterbury University academic
Mark Williams on editing the Oxford
Anthology Of New Zealand Poetry.
Those two jobs leave her with little time or energy for
writing poetry, but she tries to get up early every morning, so that she can spend
several hours writing. “That’s just enough to keep something going. It really helps
to keep writing every day. The times that I actually get things done are the
times when I write regularly.”
She admits that writing poetry takes less sustained creative
energy than writing prose. However, it is far from the easy process that many
people seem to think. “People have this idea that writing poetry is really easy,
that you can just fit it in between having breakfast and doing the dishes. It probably
does need less time than writing prose, but I think with poetry it is not so much
the time that you’re actually sitting down writing it that’s important, it’s
the time that you spend thinking about things.”
Often by the time she actually sits down to write a poem,
much of it is already formed in her head — or jotted down on scraps of paper.
She’s leamed that it pays to write down ideas as they come to her, rather than
relying on .her memory: “If you don’t write it down you can spend ages trying
to think what on earth it was.”
Inevitably she goes through periods when she stops writing.
The 18 poems which make up Estonian Songs
in her latest collection, for example, came after just such a period.‘ She was
looking for something to get her started again, and was intrigued by the song
titles on the cover of a CD she was listening to — such as “Sang The Mother, Sang
Her Daughter” and “My Mouth Was Singing, My Heart Was Worrying”.
She decided to use them as a way of getting back into
writing again. “They just seemed to be incredibly suggestive. But it turned
into more than just an exercise — it kind of fed off itself. The titles
suggested things to me, and I found that things I’d written down over the last
year or so actually fitted themselves into it.”
Bornholdt is rather pleased with the title of her latest
collection, How We Met. It came to
her after all the poems were finished, and it wasn’t until later that she realised
it was also the title of a column she very much enjoys in the Independent On Sunday magazine. She
thinks it’s very apt: “The book is about relationships, relationships between
people, and between people and things, about meetings.”
Like her previous collections it will have a small print
run. The poetry-reading public is small, but Bornholdt believes it is getting bigger.
She points to England, where poetry festivals are now becoming popular. And while
writing prose — short stories or a novel — might bring her a bigger readership, she has no intention of
‘switching allegiances. Poetry offers all the freedom she needs.
“I’ve written really short poems, I’ve written longer poems,
I have written prose poems which are somewhere between poetry and prose. I don’t
feel constrained at all. That’s what’s so wonderful about it, it’s really
liberating.”
A son or a daughter
On a night when the
moon moved solemnly
about the sky
a third daughter was born.
The unhappy doctor
went to the father
I’m sorry, he said,
it’s another girl.
Girls are good luck
said the father.
If you don’t have a daughter
you only know you’re alive
because your shoes move.
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