Guest of the ilb 2001
Michele Leggott was
born in Stratford, Taranaki, New Zealand in 1956. She graduated
in English from the University of Canterbury with a paper on the New
Zealand author Ian Wedde. She then attended the University of
British Columbia for five years and wrote a doctorate paper on the
American poet Louis Zukofsky. From 1980 Leggott published several
poems in magazines. After an initial small collection of poetry,
her first major work, 'Like This?', including poetry she had produced
over the previous ten years, was published in 1988. It was
honoured with the PEN First Book of Poetry Award.
Leggott has
been teaching English at the University of Auckland since 1986.
She has also worked as an editor, for example for the magazine
'Landfall' from 1991 to 1993, and she publishes essays on contemporary
poetry and poetics. In 1998 she appeared in a video called
'Heaven’s Cloudy Smile', which was shown at film festivals in Auckland,
Montreal and Rio de Janeiro. Since 1999, Leggott has been leading
a group researching the life and works of the female New Zealand writer
Robin Hyde (1906-1939). Leggott’s work has appeared in
numerous anthologies of New Zealand poetry. 'DIA', her third
volume of poetry, which was published in 1994, won her the New Zealand
Book Award for Poetry. In her latest book, 'As Far As I Can See'
(1999), the poet deals with the painful experience of losing her
sight. The New Zealand Foundation for the Blind presented her
with a prize for this work. As a poet Michele Leggott is clearly
influenced by her academic studies of the tradition of experimental
poetry in North America and New Zealand. The influence of
Zukofsky is evident in her compact, short-lined poems with cleverly
formulated plays on words and a musical rhythm, yet she also produces
poems of up to seven pages, with much longer lines. Her 1991
work, 'Swimmers, Dancers', interweaves her childhood memories with her
own experiences of starting a family in a kind of verbal photograph
album. Her cycle 'Blue Irises' (from 'DIA') constitutes a homage
to the history of women writers in her country, as well as a protest
about how their works have been neglected. In these 30 poems
Leggott experiments with the sonnet form, adopting the standard length
of 14 lines, but not the rhyming scheme. The author describes her
last book, which also includes some of these free sonnets, as an
attempt to "remember seeing, something to put against the dark while I
searched for ways of understanding where it has put me." In
the cycle 'a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her or they with
one another' she reflects on her situation in prose poetry with very
free rhythm patterns.
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