James Brown

JAMES BROWN lives in Wellington with his partner and two children. He is a contract writer/editor, and also works part-time at Te Papa. He would desperately like to find more time to write. ‘University Open Day’ comes from his latest collection, The Year of the Bicycle (Victoria University Press, 2006).

Brown comments: ‘I worked particularly hard on three aspects of this poem: the voice, the narrative and the form. The speaker is a school-leaver, so their voice couldn’t quite be that of an adult, but anything too teenage would have been wrong, too. The nature of the voice naturally placed restrictions on the poem’s language, reducing the scope for dazzling linguistic displays and, in so doing, placing extra pressure on the narrative as another way of engaging the reader. Like The Year of the Bicycle as a whole and many of its poems individually, ‘University Open Day’ is a journey. By the poem’s end the speaker knows a little more about the world than they did at the beginning. Four-line stanzas are the form I use most in The Year of the Bicycle — especially in sections one and two where the younger protagonists require more structure. (In section three, lists predominate, and, by section four, stanza-less free verse has really kicked in). In ‘University Open Day’ the form works like a series of rooms, through which the speaker and reader move, pausing just long enough in some to sample the various offerings. The offerings themselves are partly made up and partly based on experience.’

Poem: University Open Day

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