On reaching the status of professorship, Anna has reflected on her journey through academia, motherhood, and her fascination for the written word.
As a child, Anna was always interested in thinking about the ways we use words, especially as artistic expression. She completed her Master’s degree at the University of Auckland, and soon afterward she received a scholarship to continue her education and study towards her DPhil at Oxford.
Anna moved her life to the UK and embarked on her research, but, more importantly, she took the scholarship as an opportunity to start a family.
“In some ways it wasn't the right timing for me—I wasn't living the Oxford academic life that I had dreamed of at all. I was raising my children, but that was exactly what I wanted to do,” says Anna.
After three years in Oxford, Anna returned to Auckland with her toddler in tow to complete her DPhil from Aotearoa, while working to help support her family. She also became a mother of two when she returned home.
She would still love to go back to Oxford at some point. In the meantime, she enjoys taking community learning courses in a variety of subjects—even if it's on a subject that she's not experienced in.
“I do subjects even if I'm really bad at them, which is, I think, the most useful thing you can do as a teacher,” says Anna.
“I did a course called ‘Dance Yoga’, which I thought would be more yoga than dance, but it turned out to be more dance than yoga, and I was so bad at it.
“It made me so aware of what it feels like to not be able to keep up with a class, and I came out of it not wanting any of my students to feel like the class couldn't slow down for them.
“It’s so important to remember to be a student as well as a teacher, when you can.”
When Anna was completing her Master’s, she had poet and critic, Murray Edmond, as her tutor.
“I took full advantage of having a poet tutoring me, though he wasn’t a creative writing tutor—he was just meant to be marking my essays,” says Anna.
He encouraged Anna to experiment with her writing—challenging her to stop writing in metre and rhyme—which started her fascination with what it means to be a poet and how we decide what is poetry or not.
Over the course of her inaugural lecture, Anna will read poems by six poets, including 'This Living Hand' by John Keats—the inspiration for part of the title of her lecture.
“It's the poem I use as an introduction for students in my course,” says Anna.
“It's the lack of context and the lack of a known addressee that makes you read it as if it’s speaking to you. When you read poetry, it is you who is speaking and you who is reading, all at the same time.”
Anna uses it to illustrate how poetry is a unique form of writing, as it can be separated from its original context and retain—and gain—meaning. This is the primary difference Anna can see between poetry and other forms of communication.
“So much of what we understand to be important to communication is just not what poetry is doing at all. A poet might write in a way that transcends things like audience, context, logic and genre.”
“I like the tonal ambiguity of the poem on the page—the poem is both on the page and as you hear it in your head, and you can hear the tone without it being voiced. There's something kind of wonderfully paradoxical about it that I really love.”
The poems in the first half of Anna’s book, I, Clodia, are a response to the poems of Catullus, a poet of the late Roman Republic.
“I cannot read or translate Latin well, so I read the originals through the translations of other scholars, and every version that I read of a Catullus poem is someone else's interpretation of it—at that point, the poem's not even a poem, it's just a best guess. Between all those versions and the dictionary, you’re writing towards something impossible—a ghostly, time-travelling, disembodied, idea of some essence of the original that transcends any actual poem.”
Anna hopes that at least one of the poems that she reads in her lecture will be remembered and thought about by those who attend.
“Maybe they’ll remember it a week later, and will find themselves dimly remembering a line or a scene and think, ‘where did I hear that?’”
Professor Jackon's inaugural lecture, Poets hand translation over to ghosts, will be held on Thursday 6 August from 5.30–6.30 pm in the Hunter Council Chamber, Level 2, Hunter building, Kelburn campus. Register to attend.