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    How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems
    How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems
    How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems
    Ebook166 pages1 hour

    How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems

    By Kate Camp

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    About this ebook

    A timely collection of new and previously published work by one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed poets, How to Be Happy Though Human introduces Kate Camp’s eclectic and musical poetry to international audiences for the first time.

    How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems is Kate Camp’s seventh book of poetry and the first to be published outside New Zealand. Incorporating a grouping of new, previously unpublished work and a selection of important poems from her six earlier collections, this volume introduces North American readers to poetry that has been described by critics as “fearless,” “mesmerizing,” and “containing a surprising radicalism and power.”

    Camp’s work is recognized for its wide-ranging and eclectic subject matter, its technical control, and its musicality, with pop culture, high culture, the domestic confessional, close observation, and found language featured as recurring elements of style.

    A timely retrospective that represents a new chapter in Camp’s career, How to Be Happy Though Human promises to gain a wide readership for this thoughtful, engaging, and popular writer.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnansi International
    Release dateSep 1, 2020
    ISBN9781487008383
    How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems
    Author

    Kate Camp

    KATE CAMP was born and lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of six collections of poetry and the recipient of all New Zealand’s major literary awards. Camp is also an essayist, a memoirist, and a literary commentator, known for Kate’s Klassics, a nationally syndicated radio program on classic literature that has been running on Radio New Zealand for twenty years. Camp’s work has appeared in many journals at home and internationally, including Landfall and Sport (New Zealand), HEAT (Australia), Brick (Canada), Arc Poetry Magazine (Canada), Akzente (Germany), Qualm (England), and Poetry (U.S.). She works at Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum.

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      Book preview

      How to Be Happy Though Human - Kate Camp

      Also by Kate Camp

      Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998)

      Realia (2001)

      Beauty Sleep (2005)

      The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010)

      Snow White’s Coffin (2013)

      The Internet of Things (2017)

      How to Be Happy

      Though Human

      New and Selected Poems

      Kate Camp

      Logo: House of Anansi Press Inc

      Copyright © 2020 Kate Camp

      Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

      www.houseofanansi.com

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Title: How to be happy though human : new and selected poems / Kate Camp.

      Other titles: Poems. Selections

      Names: Camp, Kate, author.

      Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200206125 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200206133 |

      ISBN 9781487008376 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487009076 (Kindle) |

      ISBN 9781487008383 (EPUB)

      Classification: LCC PR9639.3.C35 A6 2020 | DDC 821/.92—dc23

      Cover design: Alysia Shewchuk

      Cover image: Winter store of apples at ‘Cheslyn Rise,’ July 1908, by Leslie Adkin.

      Gift of G. L. Adkin family estate, 1964. Te Papa.

      Logos: Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council

      We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

      For my mother, Elaine Lynskey

      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Hallelujah

      Panic button

      Gulls

      Gulls again

      The law of expressed emotion

      Here’s the thing

      My father’s teeth

      Evening

      One train may hide another

      Organs of sense and voice

      Female family annihilators

      Catalogue

      How to be happy though human

      Walking up the zig zag

      Baffin Island

      Beach house

      from Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars (1998)

      Large heart fatal

      In your absence

      Postcard

      Picky

      Through hardship to the stars

      Learning exchange

      When animals attack

      Lazy eye

      Exchange

      Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars

      To tell myself seven stories about me and you

      from Realia (2001)

      Personal effects

      Unfinished love theorem

      Water of the sweet life

      Realia

      The spine gives up its saddest stories

      The Village

      A private geography

      New Year

      Mirage

      Admit one

      Stars without makeup

      from Beauty Sleep (2005)

      Lucky

      Guests

      Anyone can be a magician

      Hamilton International Airport

      A trip to Auckland

      Russian Caravan Tea

      The insomniac learns a lot

      Yuri Gagarin’s bed

      Six weeks

      Lawns

      Beauty sleep

      from The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (2010)

      The mirror of simple annihilated souls

      Mute song

      Deep navigation

      The tired atheist

      Gambling lambs

      Driving the bypass

      Don’t get me started

      from Snow White’s Coffin (2013)

      The loneliest ol’ song in the world

      On reading Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

      There is no easy way

      To myself

      One hundred and fifty-one thousand bridges

      Letter to a friend

      Snow White’s coffin

      Double glazing

      History as seen through the eyes of babies

      Spreepark

      The night sky on any day in history

      Interrupted world

      Untitled poem about my neighbours

      from The Internet of Things (2017)

      The internet of things

      Life on Mars

      Lightning

      Cherry blossom time

      The party

      Civil twilight

      Waster of three bowls

      Autumn, with your rare mn

      The Catskill Mountains

      Sleep is money

      Antimony

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Index of first lines

      Life has become complicated. Work is hard, and play is not easy. Thought is often painful, and even love has for many become a torment rather than a joy. The author, a well-known psychologist, explains in this stimulating book how the delicate human machine may be kept smoothly running, by adapting one’s own psychological equipment to one’s own needs. In the course of his discussion he touches helpfully on nearly every important problem of everyday life.

      —W. Beran Wolfe, M.D., How to Be Happy Though Human (1931)

      Nothing has changed.

      Except the run of rivers,

      the shapes of forests, shores, deserts and glaciers.

      The little soul roams among those landscapes,

      disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,

      evasive and a stranger to itself,

      now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,

      whereas the body is and is and is

      and has nowhere to go.

      —Wisława Szymborska, ‘Tortures’ (1986)

      INTRODUCTION

      It was my good luck to meet Kate Camp at an event we both participated in at the New Zealand International Arts Festival in March 2010. It was my first reading outside North America and I was both grateful and very nervous. Kate struck me as funny, unpretentious, tall, and comfortable in her own skin. The poems she read made perfect sense to me; apart from the accent, she could easily be taken for an established talent from Vancouver or upstate New York. I flew home with the book she launched that spring, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls. I was so taken with it I wrote an essay to run alongside two of Camp’s poems in the fall issue of the Toronto literary journal Brick.

      Fast forward three years. A package arrives: a copy of Snow White’s Coffin, Camp’s new collection. I put it on the reading list for my graduate poetry workshop. To my delight, the book also resonated with my student poets. How was it, we wondered, that this poet was largely unknown in Canada and in the US?

      To date, the chances of a New Zealand poet publishing a book in Canada are about the same as a Canadian being published in New Zealand – something very close to zero. But when I became poetry editor at Anansi, I knew I was joining a press with a history of publishing international poets. The most recent example, now, is How to Be Happy Though Human, published simultaneously by House of Anansi Press in North America and Victoria University of Wellington Press in New Zealand.

      Okay, how, then, might we situate Camp’s poems next to those of current North American poets? She has a little of Karen Solie’s bemused melancholy. She shares Mary Ruefle’s humility and philosophical bent. I once thought no one but Ruefle could write a

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