“Works in Progress: A Conversation with New Zealand Poet Ben Egerton”
"Poet in Residence" at the Rivendell Institute until the end of 2024, Dr. Ben Egerton is a poet, literary scholar, and academic from New Zealand, where he teaches in the Faculty of Education at Victoria University of Wellington. In addition to being widely published in journals in both hemispheres, he's the author of two collections of poetry: a is to b as c is to d, which was exhibited as an installation work at 17 Tory Gallery, Wellington (2014); and The Seed Drill (Kelsay, 2023).
The Seed Drill, in part documents, with raw matter-of-factness, a protagonist’s inability to procreate. The collection coalesces into intimate consideration of infertility and faith, one perhaps as metaphor for the other. In additional to this ‘confessional’ mode, Egerton enjoys working with fragments, and making short pieces, and poems written to extreme constraints and rules. He is interested in exploring how compositional relationships between art and music might inform the construction of poetry—the art of Antony Gormley, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, for example, or the music of Tim Hecker, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Penderecki, Messiaen. a is to b as c is to d follows the title’s rolling acrostic pattern across a sequence of 81 poems, each of nine lines and nine characters. The piece’s form is inspired by electronic music; the title is taken from the analogous phrase, and lifted from a Board of Canada track.
His works-in-progress include Antiphony | Anti-Phoney, a 26-poem sequence for which he's adapted serial music techniques to service poetic form (26 letters in each row, rather than 12 notes). A | A-P doesn’t necessarily adhere to conventional syntax but, rather, in (dogmatically) adhering to a strict form something new and (hopefully) unexpected emerges. He is also working on a long, but fragmented, poem about his baptism and the idea(s) of water.
At our Readers Colloquium, Dr. Egerton will share poems from The Seed Drill and a is to b as c is to d, as well as some of his works-in-progress.
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