New Zealand Writers
KEMP, Jan
The ultimate message of her verse is optimistic.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
KEMP, Jan (1949– ), is a poet, short story writer and accomplished public performer of her work, whose career has been mostly expatriate.
Born in Hamilton and graduating in English from the University of Auckland in 1974, she has since lived in Canada, the Pacific region, Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany, writing and publishing poetry and teaching English as a second language.
She was first published by Arthur Baysting in The Young New Zealand Poets (1973), and was the only woman among nineteen poets from the Freed group.
In the late 1970s she toured New Zealand, once more as the only woman, with the ‘Gang of Four’, the others being Sam Hunt, Alistair Campbell and Hone Tuwhare.
She became known as a warm and lively public reader of her verse. Yet despite her public prominence at a time when this was still relatively rare for women poets, she has never been an overtly feminist writer. With their unmistakably feminine voice, many poems are confessional and concerned with discovery of self and the world through engagement in les affaires de coeur.
By making herself vulnerable to love’s dangers, she projects a personal drama of sexual desire and disappointment. But the ultimate message of her verse is optimistic—less about the failure of love than about the illuminations that the challenge to discover intimacy can bring.
Her public poetry is often flamboyantly exuberant; showing an ear for mimicry and an ability to incorporate into a distinctive rhythm, fragments of other languages, street cries, animal noises, the diverse sounds of exotic environments.
Her volumes are Against the Softness of Woman (1976), Diamonds and Gravel (1979), The Other Hemisphere (1991) and two pamphlets, Ice-breaker Poems (1980) and Five Poems (1988).
Known more recently for her prose readings, she has published a number of short stories in journals and anthologies. She was awarded a PEN-Stout Fellowship at Victoria University in 1991.
JW
Updated Information
After living overseas for most of the last twenty-five years, Jan Kemp has returned to New Zealand.
Only One Angel (2002) is a collection of 32 poems that move around the theme of a personal journey towards an intimate relationship.
In the preface to the book, Mac Jackson writes: 'Kemp, though absent, has not been silent, and now she is back. Only One Angel shows the maturing of a highly original talent.'
Jan Kemp was one of the authors on the Book Council's 2002 Words on Wheels tour of the Waikato.
Kemp was chief instigator behind the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive, launched at the Going West Festival in 2004. The archive is housed in Special Collections at the Library of the University of Auckland and in the Alexander Turnbull Library, and features recordings of 171 New Zealand poets reading their work. It comprises 2,100 tracks collected onto 40 CDs and is accompanied by corresponding textual files, photographs and bibliographical notes about the poets.
Jan Kemp was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature at the 2005 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Dante's Heaven was launched in 2006. It is available via Puriri Press. Email John Denny for information or to order a copy.
Working with Jack Ross, Kemp edited Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006) which includes 27 of New Zealand's most celebrated poets reading their works in more than two hours of recordings.
Writers in Schools Information
Jan Kemp is available for school visits as part of the Book Council's Writers in Schools programme. She is happy to discuss anything to do with poetry and a poet's working life. She is available to talk with any age group and would prefer to work with small classes.
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