Encountering Mīharo | Panoramic view of the Aratiatia Rapids
The 30 students in the MA (Creative Writing) workshops at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters visited Mīharo Wonder. Our ‘Encountering Mīharo’ blog series will share students’ thoughtful and eclectic responses.
Writers encounter Mīharo Wonder
Wonder is a place where writing often begins — and each year, during the first six weeks of the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters, we set exercises designed to unlock the kind of wondering unique to each writer. In April 2021 we brought the MA students to the Mīharo exhibition in the hope that some of the resonant objects, images and artefacts might prompt stories, poems or essays. We gave them no brief other than to choose an exhibit and pursue the lines of imagination it prompted.
For these writers, encounters with the past have become acts of invention as well as recovery and re-evaluation. The exhibition becomes an observatory in which old stories give birth to new, the past is encountered with fresh eyes and transformed through the lens of the present. The writing presented here is only a sample of the work produced, and we imagine work by other writers will come to fruition in future. We’re grateful to National Library staff Peter Ireland, Anthony Tedeschi and Fiona Oliver for providing additional insight and background to the exhibition and to Mary Hay and Jay Buzenberg for publishing the student’s work on the website. And we hope you enjoy the wondering Mīharo has produced.
Chris Price, Tina Makereti and Kate Duignan
"While Mīharo Wonder is moored to the walls and arrested in its cases, its imaginative scope ranges freely – here is the best possible evidence of that." — Peter Ireland, Mīharo Wonder co-curator
Panoramic view of the Aratiatia Rapids | Jiaqiao Liu
after ‘Aratiatia Rapids, New Zealand. No 146’, taken by Robert Percy Moore
Panoramic view of the Aratiatia Rapids
after ‘Aratiatia Rapids, New Zealand. No 146’, taken by Robert Percy Moore
a key turns a lock hisses a piston lifts a gate
three times a day
(four in summer).
fielding guests at her wedding, i confess, yes
i am unfaithful
to sentimentality. i was
born like this: no
sense of time
and a mean streak too. the gears
shriek godly in my head. to sink
is to splinter
the lines of sight
serrating wool
starched cotton
skin
muscle
bone.
no
heart to hold or give away
in my waking state i was
a barrel no, body
carelessly tossed
willingly
given
back to myself. so, stepladder
on right up. observer
of the highest order.
watch the watcher
watch the river. in this picture
identify and label the living
dead. the river
asks no questions i cannot answer
keeps nothing i cannot unsee
a key turns a lock turns a body up on its back
to life. the watcher
never sees the same river twice
is never seen by the same river twice
eyes up
let’s go. escape route
out of visible light.
a mind steeped
in the deepest green. supine
and still, constellations
a lying lurid red
what
foams up white
& goes down dusk?
do not enter
the spillway
even if
no siren sounds
deluge
pushed
punched
shoved through
a single channel of luminance
Note: This piece grew out of learning that despite the many photographs Robert Percy Moore took — of the Waikato but also other natural landscapes in Aotearoa —the only photo of him is a wedding group shot.
The image that inspired the poem
The panoramic image that inspired Jiaqiao Liu's poem. Aratiatia Rapids, New Zealand. No. 146, taken between 1923 and 1928 by Robert Percy Moore. In the gallery the image is 4 metres wide by 60cm high.
Aratiatia Rapids, New Zealand. No. 146, by Robert Percy Moore, taken between 1923 and 1928 Ref: Pan-0365-F. Alexander Turnbull Library.
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