James Brown • 1 November 2017
James’s poetry has been widely published in Aotearoa and abroad. He is a past winner of the Takahe Poetry Competition and former editor of Sport literary magazine.
credit: Robert Cross
James’s most recent poetry collection is Floods Another Chamber (VUP).
The first book to capture my imagination was ...
Dr Seuss’s I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew and If I Ran the Circus. I love his landscapes. The House at Pooh Corner and Winnie-the-Pooh were a bit later, but I can’t not mention them. I collect Pooh spin-off books … The Pooh Perplex etc.
The books and/or other writing that saw me through childhood were ...
My childhood reading was largely classic British children’s lit – The Famous Five, Rupert, Biggles, Doctor Who. I read US kids’ books like Danny Dunn through what you could buy through those book clubs at school. Our teacher read us The Outsiders by SE Hinton in Year 7, and I read a lot of her books, which made teen rebellion seem cool.
The character in a book I most wanted to be as a child was ...
Probably Biggles.
The book I studied at school that has stayed with me most is ...
Lord of the Flies. I reread it to my kids and it’s still a scary microcosm of society.
The author I am most likely to binge-read is ...
I don’t binge-read, but there are some authors whom I’ve read, or try to read, everything by: Donald Barthelme, George Saunders (except his novel), Bill Manhire, Jenny Bornholdt, James Fenton, Edward Gorey …
-“There are some authors whom I’ve read, or try to read, everything by: Donald Barthelme, George Saunders ... Bill Manhire, Jenny Bornholdt, James Fenton, Edward Gorey”
The book I am most likely to press on a friend is ...
Pobby and Dingan by Ben Rice. A fantasic novella. I buy it whenever I see it secondhand and have about five copies to share around. I’m not sure he ever wrote another book.
The book I most wish someone would write is ...
A poetry blend of Milky Way Bar (Bill Manhire), Hera Lindsay Bird (Hera Lindsay Bird), and Moving House (Jenny Bornholdt). Also, New Zealand might be ready for a hip new poets anthology.
The book I keep meaning to get around to reading but somehow never do is ...
Loads. But if you never get round to something, doesn’t that mean your desire isn’t really there? I’ll admit to Twentieth Century Pleasures by Robert Hass and Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec.
The book I have reread the most is ...
The Pooh books. Five Run Away Together. Mostly, I reread poems. I don’t understand why more people don’t cotton on to poetry because the rewards gained to time invested ratio is amazingly favourable.
If I were stranded on a desert island and could have only one book with me, it would be ...
The Concise Oxford Dictionary. There’s so much in it! And it would help me with my own writing, which I would cheerfully get on with, writing with a stick in wet sand, my dazzling lines erased by each high tide.
Bookmark, scrap of paper or turning down the corner of the page?
All of the above. Though I don’t turn down corners on books I value, which is most of them.
The first 50 pages or bust? Or always to the bitter end?
I abandon after 50 pages. Life’s too short. A confession: I love George Saunders but abandoned his novel Lincoln in the Bardo at the end of Part 1.
The book I am always on the lookout for in secondhand shops is ...
First editions of fav authors. I’d like the original edition of Malady by Bill Manhire and the Angry Penguins Ern Malley edition from 1944. Early Hone Tuwhare, Allen Curnow, JK Baxter, Ian Wedde, Sam Hunt, Denis Glover (Sings Harry and Other Poems), RAK Mason (The Beggar), Elizabeth Smither, Margaret Mahy. Pobby and Dingan. You still make the occasional discovery at school fairs.
My favourite cinematic adaptation of a book is ...
Winter’s Bone gets the harshness of Daniel Woodrell’s sentences. I remember watching the movie of James Joyce’s The Dead and about halfway through starting to fret about how they were going to capture the brilliant last paragraph. When the end arrived they had a narrator simply read it, much to my joy and relief.
The character in a book I’d most like to meet is ...
Jane Eyre. Smilla Jasperson. Connie Chatterley.
A line of writing I can recite from memory is ...
Pick a poet. Wallace Stevens? OK. I love the final stanza of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. “It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / The blackbird sat / in the cedar limbs.”
My favourite 19th-century book is ...
Hmmm, Wuthering Heights blew my brain when I read it at uni (also Jane Eyre). Such intensity and so many deeply flawed characters.
My favourite 20th-century book is ...
Too hard. I like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Forty Stories (Donald Barthelme), The Milky Way Bar (Bill Manhire), Moving House (Jenny Bornholdt) …
My favourite contemporary writers are ...
Ben Lerner, Joe Dunthorne (his poetry), Mary Ruefle, George Saunders, Alice Oswald, Hera Lindsay Bird. To be honest, I’m more into individual poems than individual poets.
-“To be honest, I’m more into individual poems than individual poets”
The book/s currently by the side of my bed is/are ...
Hard Frost (John Newton), Back with the Human Condition (Nick Ascroft), Beside Herself (Chris Price), Stag’s Leap and Odes (Sharon Olds), The Given and the Made (Helen Vendler), Poemland (Chelsey Minnis), Mr Mouth (Christopher Reid), Radi os (Ronald Johnson) (an erasure poem using the first four books of Paradise Lost), The Situation and the Story (Vivian Gornick), The Weather (Kenneth Goldsmith) (transcriptions of a year of weather reports from a New York radio station – weirdly engaging in small doses). The Best American Poetry 2016 and In the American Tree (an anthology of Language poetry that just keeps on giving). Poetry books allow you to build unmanageably tall bedside piles.
ARTicle has one copy of Floods Another Chamber by James Brown to give away. Email us by 10 November to be in to win.
James Brown’s poems have been widely published in Aotearoa and abroad. His most recent collection is Floods Another Chamber (VUP). Here he sheds light on his reading life.
