David Howard (born 1959) is a New Zealand poet, writer and editor. His works have been widely published and translated into a variety of European languages. Howard was the co-founder of the literary magazine ''takahē'' in 1989 and the Canterbury Poets Collective in 1990. In

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

he held the

Robert Burns Fellowship The Robert Burns Fellowship is a New Zealand literary residency. Established in 1958 to coincide with bicentennial celebrations of the birth of Robert Burns, it is often claimed to be New Zealand's premier literary residency. The list of past ...

at the

University of Otago , image_name = University of Otago Registry Building2.jpg , image_size = , caption = University clock tower , motto = la, Sapere aude , mottoeng = Dare to be wise , established = 1869; 152 years ago , type = Public research collegiate u ...

Dunedin Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. Th ...

in 2013, the Otago Wallace Residency, in

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in 2014, and the Ursula Bethell Residency in

Christchurch Christchurch ( ; mi, Ōtautahi) is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand and the seat of the Canterbury Region. Christchurch lies on the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula on Pegasus Bay. The Avon River / ...

, in 2016. In more recent years he has been the recipient of a number of

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Residencies.

Life

David Howard was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1959. He worked for many years as a pyrotechnic and special effects supervisor. His clientele included the

All Blacks The New Zealand national rugby union team, commonly known as the All Blacks ( mi, Ōpango), represents New Zealand in men's international rugby union, which is considered the country's national sport. The team won the Rugby World Cup in 1987 ...

Janet Jackson Janet Damita Jo Jackson (born May 16, 1966) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer. She is noted for her innovative, socially conscious and sexually provocative records, as well as elaborate stage shows. Her sound and choreog ...

and

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. In 1989, Howard co-founded the literary magazine ''takahē'', named after the threatened New Zealand

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...

. ''takahē'' appears three times a year, publishing the short stories, poetry and art. He left the editorial board in 1993. In 1990, he co-founded the Canterbury Poets Collective. The collective organises poetry readings, open-mic evenings, and publications for young poets, all within the Christchurch area. In 1999 Howard retired from his role as a SFX technician to live and write in

Pūrākaunui Pūrākaunui (formerly spelt Purakanui) is a small settlement in Otago, in the South Island of New Zealand. It is located within the bounds of the city of Dunedin, in a rural coastal area some 25 km to the north of the city centre. Pūrākaun ...

, a small settlement north of Dunedin. At Pūrākaunui he lived in a purpose-built shed; his house "overlooks farmland and the blue screen of the South Pacific, onto which I can project my fantasies." Howard has also said that "at Pūrākaunui I enjoy the indifference of the world to my designs upon it." Though Howard has lived primarily in New Zealand, his work has taken him to many different countries. In February 2009, he attended the International Poetry Festival in

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as the recipient of a grant from the International Writers' Program. More recently, Howard made an extended visit to the

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, as part of his

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Residency in 2016 on the

Creative Cities Network The UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) is a project of UNESCO launched in 2004 to promote cooperation among cities which recognized creativity as a major factor in their urban development. In 2017, Howard was located in

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as part of his stint at the Writers House Residency. Howard was based in

Ulyanovsk Ulyanovsk, known until 1924 as Simbirsk, is a city and the administrative center of Ulyanovsk Oblast, Russia, located on the Volga River east of Moscow. Population: The city, founded as Simbirsk (), was the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin (born ...

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in September 2019 for another

Residency.

Work and reception

Howard published his first book of poetry, ''Head First'', in September 1985. A slim volume of eight poems over 32 pages, ''Head First'' included works that had previously appeared in ''Landfall'' and the ''

New Zealand Listener The ''New Zealand Listener'' is a weekly New Zealand magazine that covers the political, cultural and literary life of New Zealand by featuring a variety of topics, including current events, politics, social issues, health, technology, arts, f ...

''. Its second poem, "A Darker Purpose", which imagines a scene from the life of New Zealand missionary

Thomas Kendall Thomas Kendall (13 December 1778 – 6 August 1832) was a New Zealand missionary, recorder of the Māori language, schoolmaster, arms dealer, and Pākehā Māori. Early life: Lincolnshire and London, 1778–1813 A younger son of farmer Ed ...

, received first prize in the 1984 Gordon & Gotch New Zealand Poetry Awards. His second collection, ''In The First Place: Poems 1980-1990'', appeared in 1991. Several poems from ''Head First'', including "A Darker Purpose", reappeared in altered form. A segment on the Austrian artist

Egon Schiele Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele (; 12 June 1890 – 31 October 1918) was an Austrian Expressionist painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portr ...

, published in ''Head First'' as part of the poem "Consecutive Sentences," joined a group of new poems on artists, "The Portrait Gallery." Black and white photographs by

Paul Swadel Paul Regan Swadel (23 October 1968 – 18 March 2016) was a New Zealand film director and producer. Life and career Swadel nurtured a filmmaking partnership with James Cunningham that spanned fifteen years and four globally successful short ...

are interspersed among the poems.

James Norcliffe James Norcliffe is a novelist, short story writer, poet, editor, teacher and educator. His work has been widely published and he has been the recipient of a number of writing residencies. Several of his books have been shortlisted for or won award ...

wrote in ''The Star'', " oward'svoice is his own and unmistakable, and his love poems with their often surrealistic edge have a quality rare in New Zealand poetry." David Eggleton, writing in the ''

Otago Daily Times The ''Otago Daily Times'' (ODT) is a newspaper published by Allied Press Ltd in Dunedin, New Zealand. The ''ODT'' is one of the country's four main daily newspapers, serving the southern South Island with a circulation of around 26,000 and a c ...

'', described his poetry as "energetic, winningly acrobatic in the way it leaps from reference to reference, engagingly robust in the way it juggles ideas." Eggleton weighed in again on Howard's third book, ''Holding Company'' (1995), with a review for ''Landfall'', New Zealand's foremost and longest running literary journal. "Like

John Ashbery John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic. Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...

," wrote Eggleton, Howard "celebrates the technique of indeterminacy – open-endedness; unlike Ashbery, he doesn't do riddles or frustrate the exchange of poetic commonplaces to subvert meaning. His poems promote affirmative action – we can have a dialogue, we can connect – and they wear their eroticism on their collective sleeve." Eggleton concluded by predicting that "as oward'sbody of work continues to grow, we may confidently expect his vision to deepen and grow ever more original." Howard's next volume, ''Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000'' (2000), brought together most of the poems from ''In the First Place'' and ''Holding Company'', along with a selection of new and previously uncollected work. A series of images by New Zealand artist Jason Greig accompany the poems. Harriet Zinnes reviewed the collection for the ''

Denver Quarterly The ''Denver Quarterly'' (known as ''The University of Denver Quarterly'' until 1970) is an avant-garde literary journal based at the University of Denver. Founded in 1966 by novelist John Edward Williams. ''Publisher'' ''Denver Quarterly'' i ...

'': "Let him write. Let him take on – the whole shebang. And he tries, this important New Zealand poet who, in short stanzas and incisively written lines, actually looks at his world of choice, and writes." Howard himself had described his poems as "gnarled, metaphysical poetry which fosters rather than forbids tenderness." Zinnes disagreed, arguing that his love poems have "a kind of contemporary lyricism, that is, a lyricism that avoids excess but yet exudes tenderness and desire even as it questions their endurance, even their power." In 2003 Howard collaborated with the New Zealand photographer

Fiona Pardington Fiona Dorothy Pardington (born 1961) is a New Zealand artist, her principal medium being photography. Early life and education Pardington was born Fiona Dorothy Cameron in Devonport, and was brought up on Auckland's Hibiscus Coast, where she ...

to create ''How To Occupy Ourselves,'' consisting of eighteen poems and seventeen photographs. "What is extraordinary about this writing," wrote

Terry Locke Terry James Locke (born 1946) is a New Zealand poet, anthologist, poetry reviewer and academic. Background Terry Locke was born in Auckland and grew up in the suburb of Sandringam, the youngest of three children. He attended St Peter's Colleg ...

, "is the number of tensions it sustains without quite resolving, between the foreign (defamiliarised) and familiar, the present and the remembered, the soft and the hard, the fleeting and the permanent." He declared it "a difficult book to review," because "it simply doesn't allow one to feel that one has settled into a confirmed reading." Howard's next collection of new poems, ''The Word Went Round'', appeared in 2006. The title poem is a

dramatic monologue Dramatic monologue is a type of poetry written in the form of a speech of an individual character. M.H. Abrams notes the following three features of the ''dramatic monologue'' as it applies to poetry: Types of dramatic monologue One of the mo ...

in two parts, written from the perspective of an Irish Catholic tenant farmer who emigrates to

Otago Otago (, ; mi, Ōtākou ) is a region of New Zealand located in the southern half of the South Island administered by the Otago Regional Council. It has an area of approximately , making it the country's second largest local government reg ...

in 1874. The volume included images of six paintings by New Zealand artist Gary Currin, created in response to the title poem. In 2011, Howard published a second volume of collected works, ''The Incomplete Poems''. New Zealand poet

Michael Harlow Michael Harlow (born 1937) is a poet, publisher, editor and librettist. A recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship (1986) and the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship (2009), he has twice been a poetry finalist in the New Z ...

praised Howard for writing "poems that are very much animated by a thoughtful music: those moments of quick surprise that so often are stunning in their overall effect." David Eggleton called the volume "a revisionist take on Howard's earlier big book, ''Shebang: Collected Poems 1980–2000''.... Dates of composition for each poem have now been added, revealing that some of the poems in ''Shebang'' were written before 1980." "At times," Eggleton continues, Howard is "a kind of fossicking archaeologist, one who excavates telling language from Victorian journals and Scottish folk ballads, as well as superannuated rock songs. At other times, he's the laconic narrator forced to fall back on an embarrassment of unreliable words." Howard's edition ''A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie'' appeared in 2015. Howard compiled and edited the works of the late Cambridge scholar and Dunedin poet,

Iain Lonie Iain Malcolm Lonie (1932 – 18 June 1988) was a British-born New Zealand poet and a historian of ancient Greek medicine. His academic career was spent between New Zealand, Australia and England. He read classics at the University of Cambridge ...

(1932–1988). The 2013–2015

New Zealand Poet Laureate The New Zealand Poet Laureate is a poet appointed by the National Library of New Zealand to represent New Zealand's community of poets, to promote and advocate for poetry, and to produce a number of published works during their two-year tenure as ...

, Vincent O'Sullivan, declared the volume a "superb edition of Iain Lonie's poems." Auckland author

Peter Simpson Peter Simpson may refer to: *Peter Simpson (film producer) (1943–2007), often credited as Peter R. Simpson, a British-Canadian film producer and advertiser *Peter Simpson (Scottish footballer) (1904/05–1974), Scottish football striker who playe ...

named the volume as one of the best books of 2015: "In a brilliant act of literary resuscitation, Howard has brought together more than 200 poems, published and unpublished by Lonie, revealing him as important and unjustly neglected." ''A Place To Go On From'' demonstrated Howard's important role in ensuring that Lonie's works were not left to fade from memory. Howard remains an active poet, with his most recent collection, ''The Ones Who Keep Quiet'', published in 2017.

Bibliography

Author

*''Head First'' (Hard Echo Press, 1985) *''In The First Place: Poems 1980-1990'' (Hazard Press, 1991) *''Holding Company'' (Nags Head Press, 1995) *''Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000'' (Steele Roberts, 2000) *''How to Occupy Ourselves'' (HeadworX, 2003) *''The Word Went Round'' (Otago University Press, 2006) *''The Incomplete Poems'' (Cold Hub Press, 2011) *''You're So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me'' (Holloway Press, 2012) *''The Speak House'' (Cold Hub Press, 2014) *''The Ones Who Keep Quiet'' (Otago University Press, 2017)

Editor

*''takahē'' editions 1-16 with Sandra Arnold, Mike Minehan and Bernadette Hall (Takahē Publishing Collective, 1989-1993) *''A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie'' (Otago University Press, 2015)

Awards and honours

* Gordon & Gotch National Poetry Award, 1984 *Finalist Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition, 2001 *

New Zealand Society of Authors The New Zealand Society of Authors (PEN New Zealand Inc.) promotes and protects the interests of New Zealand writers. It was founded as the New Zealand PEN Centre (Poets, Essays and Novelists) in 1934. It broadened its scope and became the New Ze ...

Mid-Career Writers Award, 2009 *

University of South Pacific The University of the South Pacific (USP) is a public research university with locations spread throughout a dozen countries in Oceania. Established in 1968, the university is organised as an intergovernmental organisation and is owned by the gov ...

Poetry Prize, 2011 *

, 2013 *Otago Wallace Residency,

, 2014 *

Residency,

, 2016 *Ursula Bethell Residency,

, 2016 *Writers House Residency,

Croatia , image_flag = Flag of Croatia.svg , image_coat = Coat of arms of Croatia.svg , anthem = "Lijepa naša domovino"("Our Beautiful Homeland") , image_map = , map_caption = , capit ...

, 2017 *

Residency,

, 2019

References

External links

David Howard's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Howard, David English poets English writers Living people 1959 births