ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Brown’s ‘I come from Palmerston North’ first appeared in Turbine 03, before finding its home in The Year of the Bicycle (Victoria University Press, 2002). His newest book, Warm Auditorium, was also launched by Victoria University Press earlier this year.
Jan Wagner is a German poet born in 1971 in Hamburg and currently living in Berlin. He has published the poetry collections Probebohrung im Himmel (A Trial Drill in the Sky, 2001), Guerickes Sperling (Guericke’s Sparrow, 2004), Achtzehn Pasteten (Eighteen Pies, 2007) and Australien (2010) and co-edited the comprehensive anthologies of young German poets Lyrik von Jetzt: 74 Stimmen (Poetry of Now: 74 voices, 2003). A selection of his essays, Die Sandale des Propheten: Beiläufige Prosa (The Prophet’s Sandal: Incidental Prose), was published in 2011. He represented Germany at Poetry Parnassus in London in July 2012. In September, following a four-week residency in Sydney, Australia, he visited New Zealand at the invitation of the Goethe Institut. Jan Wagner writes: ‘Quickly, in fact already while being in Australia, the city of Palmerston North came to be something like the golden thread of my journey to New Zealand, meeting people from there, people who had gone there and also people who said that they had never gone there and saw no reason for doing so either — so that when we finally arrived in Palmerston North I had the strong feeling that this might be the place fit for a poem. I found out soon, of course, that this poem already exists, leaving me no choice but to translate James Brown’s ‘I come from Palmerston North’ into German.’ The poem was first published in Turbine 03.