Raiment: A memoir

by Jan Kemp

Pioneering New Zealand poet Jan Kemp’s memoir of her first 25 years is a vivid and frank account of growing up in the 1950s, and of university life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It tracks from an innocent Waikato childhood to the seedy flats of Auckland, where anarchic student life, drugs, sexual experimentation, and a failing marriage could not keep her away from poetry. She became one of the few young women poets of her era to be allowed into the then male poet club. Weaving its own patterns and colours, Raiment shines a clear-eyed light on the heady, hedonistic hothouse of our literary community in the 1970s and reveals what it took, back then, to be an independent woman.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published April 7, 2022

About the author

Jan Kemp was the sole woman anthologized in The Young New Zealand Poets (1973), and in 1979 co-starred with Alistair Campbell, Hone Tuwhare, and Sam Hunt on a national poetry-reading tour. During the next two decades, while the gender balance among New Zealand poets spectacularly changed, she taught in universities in the South Pacific, Asia, and Europe. For nine years she was based at the National University of Singapore. More recently, married to eminent professor and analyst of postcolonial literature in English, Dieter Riemenschneider, she and her husband shuttled between the two hemispheres, with bases in Frankfurt and Auckland, finally settling outside Frankfurt in September 2007.

Kemp's poems bear the evidence of her cosmopolitan career. They are prompted by diverse places, people, events, and objects, but the outer world around which she moves always shades into an inner world of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Kemp has an eye for the tiniest detail and an unusual capacity to enter into other lives, even past lives: the towns and cities she visits are peopled with the dead as well as the living, so poetry may be sparked by snippets of information about historical figures who inhabited them. Kemp is adept at reading signs and hearing sounds. She delights in the quirkiness of language, its rhythms and tones, as words echo and chime, forming patterns. Her poems are made to be heard. She herself is their ideal performer.

Working with Jack Ross, Kemp edited Classic New Zealand Poets in Performance (2006) which includes 27 of New Zealands most celebrated poets reading their works in more than two hours of recordings. Since then, she has edited two further collections with Jack Ross of poetry in performance, entitled Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2007) and New New Zealand Poets in Performance (Auckland University Press, 2008)

Jan Kemp reading from her poems was released in 2008 by The Poetry Archive, U.K. Samples of her poems can be heard and read on their website: www.poetryarchive.org.

Kemp is a long-standing member of the NZ Society of Authors (PEN), and since she moved to Germany in 2007, has become a member of PEN-Germany.

Reviews

[Mia Farlane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like reading about a writer’s journey, so I was looking forward to this memoir, Raiment. Also, I heard Jan Kemp read with Kevin Ireland at Birkbeck in 2011, I’ve read JK’s poetry over the years, and this book was being discussed by my London-based NZ book group.
I found Raiment a delightful book. I appreciated the kindness, honesty and humour behind the writing. Reading it was, at times, like reading a string of short stories – I especially love the competition/bicycle story, how it unfolds, that the reader discovers things at the same time as Jan Kemp did – and I found the ‘sports jacket’ moment very touching.
For me, it was also interesting to read about various writers I know and/or whose work I have read. Guess who this renowned author is: ‘with his clear, stainless-steel mind he would cut right through any observations Miss Kemp might have’ – p.135. The memoir ends in the 1970s - I’m looking forward to the next installment.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Kemp's poetry, her memoir of the first 25 years of her life is lyrical and engaging and honest. It's a beautiful little book, covering Kemp growing up in small town New Zealand in the 50s, attending university in Auckland in the late 60s/early 70s, her early marriage & divorce, and of course her writing and her encounters with the other New Zealand poets of that era.

It's also surprising in its lack of bitterness. A woman poet of the 1970s might be justifiably bitter; she mentions how her first book was completed in 1972, yet stalled by the publisher until 1976, "as he wasn't certain a book solely by a woman poet would sell". But that's an aside, and you never get the sense that Kemp feels hard-done by or as though she faced particular battles in becoming a successful poet. She just wrote her poems.

I hope she's writing the next volume(s) as I'd love to read more.