How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems

By Kate Camp

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 Incorporating a grouping of new, previously unpublished work and a selection of important poems from her six earlier collections, this volume introduces North American readers to poetry that has been described by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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anansi International
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781487008383

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.

Book preview

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