I have been thinking a lot about the place of poetry in global catastrophe and the incomprehensible leadership in Aotearoa. How do we write? Read? Do we need comfort or challenge or both? In an ongoing series, poets respond to five questions. Today Dani Yourukova.

Has the local and global situation affected what or how or when you write Poetry?

I’ve always thought that writing is as much about paying attention to the world as it is about stringing sense together. Like, sometimes you can write all day but then that work doesn’t matter at all if you haven’t walked to the shops, or reached the end of a thought, or had a biscuit.

So, as well as the regular at-the-desk writing practice, there’s a certain percentage of thought-space that needs to be dedicated to writing for it to work for me, and recently, I’ve found a lot of the thought-space normally labelled POEMS has been recategorised as WORRYING ABOUT EVERYTHING and RAGE. Which means protests instead of writing, and struggling to find employment instead of writing, and it means unspeakable grief, and shame, and petitions to ask our government to please refrain from whacking huge massive mining operations onto conservation land or supporting genocidal atrocities. 

Does place matter to you at the moment? An object, an attachment, a loss, an experience? A sense of home?

Oh I’m terrible at locating myself! I’ve always felt more like a brain sloshing around in a jar than a person, which I assume is because my personality is mildly defective. In practice, I think it just means that I have to work a little harder to understand what it means to be in a place, or to be “home”.

I think home is something I experience from being in community. I think it’s both brilliant and bewildering that we can move into and through each other’s lives, and fall into conversation, and take action together and piss each other off. It’s all very moving when you think about it. So I try to make sure I observe people and places sympathetically and honestly, and give parts of myself away sometimes. I listen, and work, and do my best to show up when someone needs me. I am not always good at it, but I do think it might be the most important thing I can do with my time.

Are there books or poems that have struck a chord in the past year? That you turn to for comfort or uplift, challenge or distraction.

I’ve been reading poems by Kapka Kassabova recently and finding a lot of uncertain comfort in them. I have quite an uneasy relationship with my heritage, but I couldn’t really resist reading a New Zealand Bulgarian immigrant poet once I realised we had one of those. Kassabova is about the same age as my mum, from the same end of the country, and they both went to language schools. I think I was curious if there was something, somehow, I’d recognise in her work. And I’m not sure if that happened, but I did find some of her work enormously resonant.

Preparation for the big emptiness

 

Smudges of moon in the morning —
fingerprints of the moon-eaters

A new core gathers for the evening
to be plucked and crumbled by other hands

Sometimes, there is blue in between
Sometimes, there is no one

You must prepare for the big 
emptiness to come

It has come

When it comes
you must spread yourself thinly,
transparently,
to fill what can’t be filled

It has come

Unlike the moon you must do it
without breaking

 

Kapka Kassabova
in Someone else’s life, Auckland University Press, 2003

 

Also, I found it sweet that we have the same publisher.
(Thanks AUP, you have this very specific niche totally covered)

What particularly matters to you in your poetry and in the poetry of others, whether using ear, eye, heart, mind – and/or anything ranging from the abstract and the absent to the physical and the present?

There’s that Audre Lord essay about poetry not being a luxury, and I’m sure everyone already knows the gist and follows the instagram account etc etc. But when I’m feeling a bit hopeless about writing, I come back to the metaphor that opens the essay:

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination.

I sometimes think that, if I must write a poem instead of throwing bricks at politicians, well then that poem had better be beautiful and glorious and profound and timely and serious, and I’m not convinced I’m up to that almost-impossible task. But the other thought, and the thought which is more true I think, is that maybe it’s less about any individual thing we produce, and more about slowly changing the quality of the light. 

I wrote a very silly little poem for an exhibit a few months ago, and it’s really just a love poem to poetry and frivolity and shared jokes:

For Anaktoria
After Sappho, fragment 16

 

I am ordering bread for the table at a mid range chain restaurant
winking over broccoli soup

my heart a pepper grinder
my tongue a mistake

I want to take you to the waterfront market 
and purchase seasonal produce

string bags bursting with blackpurple eggplant
silverbeet spinach
fat sheaves of kale
bruise-coloured beetroots

tomato skins splitting with sweetness

and next thing you know we will be dressed as fatted calves
burning ourselves alive at the registry office

oh Anaktoria 

have you never lied
with violets in your lap?

the fiction too sweet to 
surrender easily

 

Dani Yourukova

Is there a word or idea, like a talisman, that you hold close at the moment. For me, it is the word connection.

“community”

Dani Yourukova is a poet, researcher, and amateur occultist. Their poetry and essays have been published in places like Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff, Bad Apple, and Turbine Kapohau. Their debut poetry collection Transposium was published by Auckland University Press late last year.