John Tarlton set to read from his new book, Poems for Lola, at Wardini Books Napier.
John Tarlton set to read from his new book, Poems for Lola, at Wardini Books Napier.
Q and A interview with artist and writer John Tarlton by Louise Ward, author and co-owner of Wardini Books.
Q: You’re originally from California. What brought you to Australia and New Zealand?
A: Yes, I was born and raised in Southern California, but I went east to go to university. Back in 1972, in a way I was a transfer student at Ilam Art School, University of Canterbury, from the State University of New York at Albany.
For that year in Christchurch, I studied painting with William Sutton, Rudi Gopas, and Phillip Trusstum. While there I published poetry in Canta (the University of Canterbury literary magazine, then edited by Gary Langsford) and a few other local poetry magazines such as Edge, (then edited by Don Long).
While in Christchurch, I met a girl who later became my wife - that is what really began my relationship with New Zealand.
Later in life, I took a job teaching manual design/fine art at the Southbank Institute of Technology in Brisbane, where I stayed for about 10-12 years before retiring to New Zealand.
Q: Have you always written?
A: As a child, I wrote little stories about cowboys and Indians or semi-historic battles in order to have something to illustrate. The stories were always secondary to the drawings. Art was my first choice.
Indeed, my kindergarten teacher wrote in my report card that “Johnny will not share the art board”. However, over the years, both writing and art became part of my overall practice.
I began seriously learning and enjoying poetry while in high school through the efforts of an excellent English teacher.
Artist and writer John Tarlton releases a book of old romantic poetry written for a past love.
Q: You have a long history in publishing, as a writer and illustrator. Tell us a bit about that.
A: Beginning in the mid-1980s and ending in the late 1990s, I published children’s picture book stories and illustrations for many publishers in New Zealand.
I have written/and or illustrated well over 30 books for houses such as Scholastic, Reed, Harper Collins, Heinemann, and Murdoch Books, among others.
In 1998, Gaelyn Gordon and I won the Children’s Choice Award in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. At that time, I was also part of the Writers in School Scheme and travelled widely around the country.
In addition, I contributed articles and illustrations, in a hit-or-miss fashion, over the years to the Listener, NZ Herald, and Auckland Star. I also wrote art-related articles and reviews for Art New Zealand and published poetry whenever the opportunity arose, mainly in Landfall and Poetry NZ.
My first volume of poetry, Myths in Aspic, was published in 1978.
Q: What were the joys and challenges of writing a volume so personal as Lola?
A: I wrote the Lola poems off and on for some years during the relationship and stopped shortly after it ended, consigning them to a box in a cupboard and putting them out of sight and thought.
Years later, having moved on, I stumbled upon them again. Looking the poems over, I thought that they might merit more than a lifetime imprisonment in a shoe box. I decided that they warranted finishing - for a closure of sorts, for a proper polishing into a publishable format to respectably say my long-delayed goodbye.
So, I decided to see if I could fashion the unruly drafts into a sequence of love poems that would not only have personal meaning for me but might also have a general resonance and verisimilitude for readers who had also experienced such a heightened emotional connection. That was the major challenge - to give them a universal appeal yet retain a personal intimacy.
I poured over the poems for several months, refining the better ones and editing out those drafts that I deemed half-baked, pitiful, redundant in style or metaphor, or just missing what I really meant to say and could not put right.
I found that there is a kind of bravery in baring one’s soul from time to time. Indeed, writing love poetry is not for sissies. But as I have said before, for it all to work it should go beyond being simply confessional.
To that end, all my abilities at understanding and employing the craft of writing poetry went into creating this collection of 29 poems. They stand on their own.
In the end some will get it, some won’t. Poems for Lola is intended for those who get it - the ones that share the belief that you are never more alive than when you are truly in love. Winning or losing has nothing to do with it.
