a swarm of wasps took your veil & hissed it down the overbridge under which you were once a temporary thing spinning your guileless gossamer & spitting your lies vermillion like an accidental cayenne pepper paprika situation
you were so committed then to prising other anatomies apart savouring their surrender as though they wereactuallygivingthemselves up as if you weren’t just undressing a nostalgic aroma so as to feel a bit new
Amy Marguerite
Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet and creative nonfiction writer based in Pōneke. She is currently doing the MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the IIML.
I have recently had an unfolding email conversation with Chris Tse, prompted by the arrival of his sublime new collection Minority Super Model. It got me musing on why and how we write poetry. On what the point of poetry is in a world so fragile, so out of step, so overwhelming at times. Chris’s poems, and his contribution to our conversation, underline how poetry can matter so very much. Poetry can get to the heart and lungs of being, of existence.
I also read and loved Gregory O’Brien’s endnote in his new collection House & Contents where he says:
And I listened to Anna Jackson ‘s terrific conversation with Kim Hill where she says: ‘Poetry is an urgent medium of conversation that takes place not only on the page and between readers and at readings, but on social media as well.’
Kim said Anna’s book reminded her of reading George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I agree. Plus George raises some crucial questions that resonate (before he considers some Russian short stories): ‘How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing?’
How can we feel at home, I am asking myself, when we are divided by what we want for the good of the world, for our neighbour, our children, our parents, ourselves? How do we keep safe and keep our loved ones safe? How do we cope with the misuse of the concept of ‘freedom’? War, poverty, climate change.
How do we write, read and share poetry?
No matter how dark everything feels, poetry is a light, an energy force, significant connections, a transcendental moment (think uplift), necessary communities.
And so out of a love of reading and writing, I have created this paragraph room for other writers to share what poetry means to them.
Thank you.
The paragraphs
I want poetry to be the missing link in the evolution of my soul. I want poetry to be the lover who decides every day he wants to be with me. I want poetry to be the mega-stacked megaphone the kid down Avondale road ties to his BMX to blare K-pop tunes at 11pm. I want poetry to be the thin patch of cotton on the shoulder of Granny’s cardy, the place I’d lay my head. I want poetry to be my AA meeting with its 12 steps to freedom. I want poetry to be the pōhutukawa tree in my own back yard, the tree that walks its roots in cliff edge, sea rock and deep earth.
Selina Tusitala Marsh
I always want something that gives me that feeling that I’m learning something new or seeing something in language in a new way be it a word being used strangely, or the integration of te reo Māori into poetry. I want something that I can read out loud and in doing so it slows time and everything down into the words before and after each other. I have been reading a lot of older poetry by takatāpui writers including Cathy Dunsford, Marewa Glover, Keri Hulme, and Robert Sullivan (am so excited for his new book Tūnui|Comet!). These are writers that form a crucial part of the whakapapa of takatāpui poetry. So I guess what I want in 2022 are words that slow this world and give us takatāpui a sense of our place in it.
essa may ranapiri
2022 has brought me back to writing poetry again. It’s such a frantic, bleak, weirdly interminable year that the pockets of time I have for processing and expression are perfectly suited to drafting a poem; or, sometimes, they successfully get my head out of 2022. Reading poetry does the same thing: I can’t meditate, but I can focus intensely on reading a poem so everything else dissolves for a few good minutes. Lately, that’s more than enough to ask of poetry or anything.
Jane Arthur
When we were kids, we had a bad habit of leaving the last couple of inches of cereal in the Weetbix package uneaten. No amount of persuasion would convince us that this unwholesome looking mess was as good as the perfectly formed biscuits we’d started off with. That is, until my father came up with the term chocolate weetbix. All of a sudden, we were competing to have a bowl of chocolate weetbix scraps rather than those boringly predictable rectangles. I’m still not sure why those two words made such a great difference to us – the mystique of chocolate transforms all it touches, I suppose. But it was more than that. It was my first experience, not so much of the power of advertising, as of the inherent magic of putting the right words in the right place. My father was a clever and eloquent man, but even he must have felt some slight disquiet at manipulating us with such ease. Since then, as a writer and a teacher, I’ve become increasingly aware of the extent to which one can transform other people’s experience of the world simply by describing it in a particular way. It’s a fearsome responsibility, and not to be taken lightly. This year, as so many of our assumptions about the society we live in crumble around us, I’m more conscious than ever of the power of poetry – ‘language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree’ – and its ability to affect reality. We can, quite literally, change lives with our words: but what is it, exactly, we want to say?
Jack Ross
I wasn’t reading or writing very much at the beginning of the year. I was actually quite frightened by words and their certain power; my head seemed full enough of things (brimming, even) of significant emotional valence, and I was too familiar with the repercussions of emotional burnout to consider overloading the already dizzying load. I was furious with myself for not being able to read or write, especially with my MA approaching, and especially given the ways poetry has previously been there for me in moments of deep grief. But I am grateful now for that break, and for being frightened, as painful as it was. It is necessary to honour your body and your brain that is so much part of your body. It is necessary to honour a present moment and present feeling. Now and going forward into the rest of 2022, I stand by this. Now I am reading and writing poetry again, and having lovely conversations about reading and writing poetry again, and reading (no, inhaling) Anna Jackson’s splendid writing on reading and writing poetry. I am slowly but surely—like condensation trickling down a shower wall—relearning how to welcome all that poetry brings, all that poetry is. I want to read more and more poetry that stirs me, that resonates like a dream dreamed and recalled, that takes me out of myself and delivers me a new, mysterious ground. I want to write more and more poetry that does all of these things for other people, and perhaps most crucially, I want to write poetry that can be there for people when their world isn’t. Poetry should be there for you, even if it isn’t touched, even if it is resisted, it should be there like a shoulder, or a spine.
Amy Marguerite
When I was a student, we were made to paraphrase patches of poetry. When Hamlet said, “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt” etc, you had to reduce his inner thought-process to simple, sensible modern English – to what you believed was its meaning. In this way you learned the limits of paraphrase. It turned out that Hamlet’s soliloquy only made sense as itself! What do I want from poetry in 2022? I still want the poem itself. I want the thing that can’t be paraphrased.
Bill Manhire
In my life the purpose of poetry is varied. I haven’t always had a good relationship with poetry. I have written a lot of it. I have published a fair amount of it. I have written a PhD about it. I have argued with people about it. I have had poetry and poetic language mansplained to me. I have struggled with misogyny in the canon and in contemporary poetry by cis straight men. I’ve realised that my education in poetry has been very white and that poetry in Aotearoa is still on the whole, disproportionately white. For me, as a Pākehā cis woman writer, it feels important that I continue to write, but it feels more important that I help to change the status quo by listening more, buying and reading the work of BIPOC writers, trans and non binary writers, and going to events that involve these writers. It’s also important that I don’t turn this into a performative act about what a good reader and audience member I am. I think it is the responsibility of people with privilege to actively dismantle that privilege and to make space for less privileged people to have a voice. This could include checking our own work for bad attitudes and stereotypes, giving constructive feedback to editors of publications if those publications are not representative, and making sure we are including diverse voices if we are in a position of editing, reviewing, curating or organising events. So I think the question is not just what I want from poetry but how am I able to help? I don’t think the poetry I write, however political, is ever going to change the world. Alongside writing we need to continue to develop our toolkits for enacting change.
Airini Beautrais
As Seneca wrote centuries ago, fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling. Somewhere between the breathless hush and the blinding light, the pulled pin of the Covid-19 hand grenade and the mists of mellow fruitfulness, there will come a time for the prophetic sonnet, with its hopes and deliriums. Poetry in 2022 is the music of the everyday, a waving of poetical palms and a singing of hosannahs, as always. Poetry is incorrigibly plural, wrote Louis MacNeice; the world is too much with us late and soon, said Wordsworth, William; while William C. Williams anticipated another container-load of red wheelbarrows arriving from China, as clapped-out ironies groan in their supply-chains. We poets, those Hart Crane called the visionary company of love, make world-order from word-order, as unacknowledged legislators, legends in our own minds; and so poetry advances one poem at a time, all at once and everywhere, just like that.
But what makes a poem stand out, to engage us, challenge us, delight us, speak to us? Word salads are a matter of taste for non-conformists and formalists alike. Sometimes it’s alright for poems to sound unruly and awkward, as they reach for connection. Will they last forever, as Shakespeare promised a lover in a sonnet, or will they last as long as an April shower, freshening the air for a moment, then be gone? Some poems encourage us to unpack possibilities endlessly; other poems can’t wait to be rid of us and retreat into the catacombs of the forgotten. What is the core business of a poem, was the question the Sphinx asked, and Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ answers it as a prophetic sonnet: ‘Nothing beside remains.’ As we each reach for a poem, for a favourite stanza, for a remembered lyrical line or terse phrase, may we all be stuck fast in the happy and glorious moment of that poem, long to reign over us — that slice of heaven, that heaven in a wild flower.
David Eggleton
I have considered this question in relation to Sir Mason Durie’s health model, Te Whare Tapa Whā, and the legacy of Dr Moana Jackson. The correlation between health and wellbeing has been accentuated by the coronavirus pandemic which still grips the world. The four pillars of the model are 1. Taha tinana (physical health), 2. Taha wāirua (spiritual health), 3. Taha whānau (family health) and 4. Taha hinengaro (mental health). We are into the third year of the pandemic; my mother has turned 90 and my father has been diagnosed with lung cancer. I need these pillars to remain strong as I negotiate yet another year impacted by a virus likened to a crown. Poetry is my Psalm 23. What I lean on, clutch, attach to like a limpet when my world wavers and implodes. Poetry is a portal. The transit lounge, the journey, and the destination. It has become my waka, the vehicle that supports and transports me through life changing events as both a reader and writer of verse. Moana Jackson loved poetry. And he deftly challenged the Crown and its associated institutions. I gifted him a copy of my Tapa Talk collection after I was deeply moved by his presentation at a literacy conference many years ago. It was a way I could say ‘Kia ora’. Give something of myself in return. A bespoke (mainly poetry) anthology was gifted to Moana during a 2020 Koha Aroha ceremony that the bulk of the audience attended via Zoom, due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions. Moana was ill. We gifted him our stories. The essence of who we are. Poetry is our souls revealed and transmitted in stories pared to the quick. If you want to know someone – explore their poetry.
Serie Barford
I feel that poetry is in a way, an essential thing in making sense of the world when we have so much information constantly being blasted at us. While in many ways, it is a good thing that we now have access to so much media, news, and knowledge, it gives us a huge sense of urgency. We feel we need to be doing somethingabout every bad thing we’re hearing about, which is obviously an impossible task and only drains us emotionally. The reason I particularly love poetry as an art form is that it condenses everything down into a tiny micro point, a little anchor to understand a certain emotion, issue, or even moment in time. It’s a way to make very large concepts small enough to fit into a few lines on the page, lines that still pack as much punch as a paragraph. As a reader I’m always after poems that pack some sort of gut-punch, a poem that I just viscerally get even if I can’t articulate it – a poem that condenses complex ideas into a wash of feeling. As a writer of poetry, I never really consciously think about what I’m writing, but I often find that after I’ve written it, the poem seems to make sense of something I didn’t even know I was feeling. Poetry is a sort of divination, a form to render our complexities into bite-sized verses.
Cadence Chung
At fifteen, poetry meant John Keats; at twenty-five, Sylvia Plath and C.P. Cavafy; at thirty-five, Elizabeth Bishop and Hugo Williams; at forty-five, W.H. Auden and Horace. Since then, poetry has meant the work of any poet from any time or culture whose inner world I feel I can enter and which enlarges my own. Starting a poem is usually an involuntary act: a phrase, a rhythm, a lurch in the mind. Then it’s trying to make something that didn’t exist before, also bringing to light something inside that I didn’t know was there. Sex is great, but poetry is better.
Harry Ricketts
Reading (and maybe writing) in uncertain times
About 15 years ago I was invited to be part of a small group of friends who meet to read poems to each other. Not our own poems, poems we have discovered to share. People in the group have come and gone over the years but we have continued meeting for an hour once a fortnight – with a few chosen poems and water only as refreshment. Until this year. 2022 is my 79th year, the virus is evident around me and the poetry group has become another loss. A by-product of the 15 years, however, is a poetry shelf full of little paper strips marking and recording where I have been, where I’ve found the poems that have done ‘poetry’s job’ – as Greg O’ Brien puts it – to ‘flicker’ or ‘glow’. For me the chosen poem might give consolation, insight, laughter, clarity, fellow-feeling, delight. In a group the ‘luminescence’ can create a little lift, a gasp or sigh, or a conversation. Even occasionally a stunned silence. On my poetry shelf I have a small anthology of poems that a student once gave me: Poems to Live by in Uncertain Times and I see it has 5 little tags. The first tag is for a Billy Collins poem called ‘Passengers’ where he manages a fear of flying with his familiar humour. The second is by Bertolt Brecht, who says ‘Truly, I live in dark times!’ …‘The man who laughs/ Has simply not yet had/ The terrible news.’ ‘Northern Pike’ by James Wright is the third tag. It tells us that that we are all going ‘to die in a loneliness/ I can’t imagine and a pain/ I don’t know’ and that to go on living and let the living go on living he will prepare and eat the fish. It is a lovely poem ending with: ‘There must be something very beautiful in my body,/ I am so happy.’ Sharon Olds writes of a mother fare-welling a son on the Summer Camp Bus. ‘What ever he needs, he has or doesn’t/ have by now./ Whatever the world is going to do to him/ it has started to do.’ The last poem is ‘On Prayer’ by Czeslaw Milosz. It reminds me that sometimes in dark times prayer ‘to someone who is not’ is all that we can do.
‘All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge/ And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard….’
Dinah Hawken
As a reader, I think I want poetry to be a place of reflection, illumination, celebration and repair. It can’t be all those things at once, but different poets can offer these things in different ways. I want it to offer music, surprise, and if it can’t offer narrative tension, I want it to offer structural intrigue. Books and reading feel ever more essential to me as we hunker down and avoid crowded indoors or social venues. They’re a chance to experience a form of contact and connection with other people where the only contagion is of ideas and inspiration. As a writer, I want poetry to help me untangle some difficult psychological terrain, to capture an atmosphere of thought the way music might if I could compose. I’ve realised the past few years how much I still need poetry as a way of understanding and recording experience (not only my own), even when I don’t feel a strong impulse to publish individual pieces.
Emma Neale
I think what has really stuck with me over the lockdowns and in the aftermath of Covid-19 is the sense of community within the poetry sphere and the generosity of the people within it. It’s always felt particularly special, but I think it is particularly obvious now that other aspects, like in-person launches and readings, are few and far between and we have had to find new ways to support each other. There is this reciprocal relationship wherein you often read and actively engage (through reviews, book buying, or plain ol’ compliments) with the work of people who also actively engage with your work. I feel real pride being able to share work with poets whose work I admire and great excitement when someone in the community publishes something new. This close-knit feeling is something I am really grateful for. It’s so refreshing that it isn’t an environment that emphasises competition. So, yeah, poetry has really come to signify connection for me, and a particularly crucial one to stave off the lockdown blues. The generous support, mentorship, and encouragement from other poets (given so freely, too) has changed my life. I read something a while ago from Nathan Joe (or maybe I heard him say it somewhere) about the importance of having others believe in your work at the beginning of your practice, particularly from those with more experience. Other poets have certainly done and continue to do that for me and I hope I can one day do that for others.
Lily Holloway
Something I’m realising more and more is how delicious poetry is to me as a kind of construction and/or documentary exercise. The poems I’m most interested in are those that feel they could have only been written by one person—that there is a specific voice, or viewpoint, or a distinct craftsmanship, that might be inspired by the same thing as hundreds of other poems, but could have only been expressed this way once. Part of it, I think, comes down to the fact that no matter what form a poem takes (and sometimes form itself is the thing), writing reveals us. It reveals what we see as important, whether it’s witty, or loving, or pastoral, or political—or all of the above. Poetry reveals what we want to devote space and time to, whether we intend for it to or not. And I think there’s something so lovely in that; you know, “in times like these, what do you love? What are you reaching for? What do you feel is, or isn’t, reaching back for you?”. To feel you’ve been plunged into someone’s perspective, and exposed to their priorities, and to how the world might be viewed through the combined lens of both (regardless of whether the poet and the speaker are one and the same), is an absolute gift. It’s an exchange I’ve always valued but one I especially cherish now, when it’s so easy to feel removed from everything. Predictably, I suppose my approach as a writer is similar; it’s very much a “here is a text I have built; here is how I see it (whatever ‘it’ is); here is what matters to me.” And I’ll certainly never capture every single thing I care about in poetry—nor do I have the desire to, frankly!—but with circumstances as they are, while I have the choice, I don’t know why I would write about anything else.
Tate Fountain
In 2022 I am trialing some of the ways that I can make poetry my bread and butter. One of my goals for the year is to read more of the collections of poetry that I already own, and to prioritise the reading of poetry over the other forms of writing which I find more accessible. In other words, to challenge myself to read poems even when I may not be in the mood. It’s a bit like physical exercise, isn’t it? You know it’s good for you, yet sometimes it slips out of your routine, and getting back on the horse feels like a huge ask and then you realise- actually, I like this and it makes me feel good. As a writer, I’m about to stop editing my first manuscript. I hope to send it away soon and clear the decks. But also, this year I’m having a go at teaching people about poetry! I tutored some school students in the summer and now I’m tutoring tertiary students. It’s a complex position at times, I frequently feel the need to remind my students that I’m not the poetry police and their readings are just as valid and true as mine. My goal is to guide them to an attitude of curiosity about what words can do. What I want from poetry is a means to grow our community of appreciative readers and writers.
Claudia Jardine
Gah!!! Poetry. At the moment poetry means to me lots of boring hard admin, which is obviously wrong and bad. All I want is to be swallowed by it (as both a reader and a writer) and feel something, but at the moment I have to skate across the top of it while I make my attempts to put it in front of people, and I hate skating across the top of anything, emotionally speaking. But I’m doing it cos what I really want from poetry is for it to move big audiences. I know that poetry can have this exceptional power on a stage, and having seen it, felt it, that’s what I want more and more of. Unfortunately it’s also harder and harder to make it happen, and the longer I go without having people in a room together getting moved, the less… substantial I feel. What I want from poetry is to be in a crowd, watching artists make language transcend itself, feeling the room – and myself – totally alive with it.
Freya Daly Sadgrove
2021 on the internet felt like the Hundred Years’ war of those who proclaimed poetry is a vital life force and those who pronounced it deeply pointless. As the self-appointed arbiter of taste I have decided poetry is both and that’s ok. In 2022 we have declared the year of discourse dead and rung in the new flesh, 2022 is the year of New Zealand poetry, don’t forget that. I just read ‘Poetry to make boys cry’ in Super Model Minority and fulfilled the Chris Tse prophecy, I devoured Meat Lovers with the salt of my enemies, I pre-order collections, I sit at the window and wait for the new word from Michael Steven/essa may ranapiri/Erik Kennedy/50 other NZ poets like a war widow. I briefly forget I have my own book coming out, for a minute I shamefully wish everyone else just chilled and put out their career-defining works next year instead. I swallow humble pills until the feeling passes, the feeling passes, I pre-order more collections. 2022 is a fence post year in the vast paddocks of NZ poetry history, it will not be forgotten. As for writing poetry, in the early hours of Thursday morning, high on sleep deprivation, I wrote my first poem of 2022, it is deeply weird, a slick, writhing thing you wouldn’t want to hold for long, but I like it, maybe there’s some blood left in the engine.
Jordan Hamel
Poetry has always been a lifeline to me. As a teen, the reading and writing of it felt like it saved me over and over again. I could figure out how I felt by piecing together words and phrases. I had access to people and experiences that did not exist around me. As an adult, in this time, poetry is a pause in my afternoon, it’s something I read with breakfast and coffee, it’s what I read before I sleep. It reminds me that I am alive, that there are so many things I don’t understand, but that I don’t have to understand. I just have to live and keep on living.
‘Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.’ Kim Addonizio
Emma Barnes
The last couple of years have caught me at my most vulnerable: favouring Netflix, staying in my dressing gown, and with little demarcation between days. My mind’s been elsewhere, preoccupied with Covid instead of what’s happening in contemporary poetry. I needed to read things that were recognisable, so I found myself turning to old classics of the canon: Milton, Barrett Browning, Yeats, and Eliot among others. These are the same poets I naively dismissed as an undergraduate for being irrelevant. But reading them now, on my own terms, their verse feels structured and orderly. Their voices feel assured, helping me make sense of how we ended up here in the first place. It’s comforting to think of people having adored and laboured over them for centuries, and how their words still felt immediate after all this time.
Anna Jackson’s new book Action & Travels, has been a welcome introduction back to contemporary voices, and a reminder that the past and present can be read together. I’m thrilled to see Becca Hawkes and Hera Lindsay Bird, for example, in conversation with Keats and Coleridge. On Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning, Jackson explains poetry’s magnetic ability to capture that “intensity of feeling” we often can’t make sense of. Poetry is last night’s dream we don’t understand, an unearthly Bill Hammond painting, or the mental rehearsal of a conversation we never have. I write poetry to try and make sense of that resonance, of that something that seems important, that something that’s too big to carry my head.
Tim Grgec
I just had a pepi so writing has been a challenge so far this year. I have been trying to find moments to read and have been re-reading Strands and Lost Possessions by Keri Humle. I don’t think there will ever be another Keri Hulme. Hulme was special because she could be many people, many places and many things. She also stylistically never wrote in a very linear way, for instance some of her poetry could be seen like short stories or dialogue or pūrākau. I want to read more poetry that transgresses form.
Hana Pera Aoake
Being someone who writes toikupu in 2022 has, to date, been unsettling. I’m seriously wondering if I’ve lost my mojo. Let’s face it, who actually wants to read about suicide bereavement during a pandemic? It’s not light and fluffy, which is possibly what people are after as a means of escape. I don’t blame them, but I’m exhausted from trying to figure it out. The serious lack of funding, in an equitable spread, within our literary sector is concerning, and probably contributes to creatives feeling isolated and hōhā. I’ve noticed my skin has become thinner, in that I’m less able to slough off multiple rejections in the ways I did before. There’s some fantastic new mahi coming out which I’m excited to read, and I’d love to see NZ libraries buying LOADS MORE copies of NZ pukapuka, and making them accessible to readers who can’t afford to buy them.
Iona Winter
The biggest thing poetry means for me is a community. The people it’s brought into my life and the time I spend with them is something I’m so grateful for. Getting together with other poets to write, or sing karaoke, or just talk shit, is a balm. I used to think people who write just for their friends were too exclusive, but if you do it well, anyone who reads your poems can feel like they’re your friend—like it’s for them. I read poems by people I don’t know and I get that feeling. Poetry is so fluid that it can do something different every second, but that human connection is always there. These past couple years, that’s mattered so much.
Ash Davida Jane
Poetry means making to me. The making new in the face of tearing down, and cutting down, and Faustian pacts and costs. Since the start of this year I’ve been poeting with poetry students and every day they make new rooms for us to walk into and look out from. They assemble kit for kōrero, connecting ropes, magic tricks, leaps of faith, wild dances, wild gardens in the badlands. Our workshops see poetry splashed against the walls and bounced against the windows. But it’s resilient stuff and carbon footprint friendly. I read that the carbon impact of an average Marvel movie is the equivalent to 11 trips to the moon – poetry can get us to multiple other moons whenever, however, and – this is miraculous – without the terrible toll.
There’s one week left to submit for the winter issue of Starling! New Zealand writers under 25, send us your new work by 20 April 2022 to be considered – full submission guidelines can be found here.
The arrival of a new Chris Tse poetry collection is always a moment to celebrate.
Paula: In 2022 I am running a few email conversations with poets whose work has affected me over time. I have loved your poetry since your appearance in AUP New Poets 4 (2004). Your new book, Super Model Minority, strengthens my enduring relationship with your writing. The collection is an explosion inside me, but first I want to touch upon the spiky times we live in. What helps you? I am finding books keep repairing me, sending me on extraordinary package holidays, depositing me in the sky to drift and dream, to think. All genres. What are books doing for you at the moment?
Chris: Books have been such a comfort for me these past few years. Emma Barnes and I were still up to our necks in reading for Out Here when we went into lockdown in March 2020, so there was plenty to keep me busy and distracted. Things did get a bit more difficult when we couldn’t access some older and out-of-print books, but we made it work. I’m not a very fast reader so I do tend to take my time with several books on the go at any given time. Books have always made me happy – I was always happiest hunched over a book while my family watched rugby or played mahjong in the background. These days a big part of that happiness is the thrill I get seeing friends getting published and receiving well-earned praise for their amazing work. It’s such an exciting time to be a reader and a writer – to be able to experience the world through the poetry of essa may ranapiri and Rebecca Hawkes, or to have your brain recharged by the essays of Megan Dunn and Lana Lopesi. Aside from a few small projects I have no plans to start writing a new book, so I’m just hungry for stories and ideas right now to see where that might take me next. I want to read as much as I can for pleasure while I can.
Paula:Out Here gripped me on every human level imaginable, yet I never considered how Covid might prevent access to the archives. That was such a joy for me researching for Wild Honey. With Emma, you have gathered something special. Wide ranging and vital. It is how I feel about the younger generation of poets. I fall upon brittle, vulnerable, edgy, risky, exposed heart, potent – and I am grateful to Starling and The Spinoff’s Friday Poems for representing these wide-ranging voices. I am decades older than you, but how is the new generation affecting you?
Chris: For me, it’s such an exciting time to be a poetry reader right now with so many young poets producing ground-breaking and challenging work. Also, they’re voices and perspectives that we’ve been sorely lacking for such a long time – poets like Cadence Chung, Khadro Mohamed, Lily Holloway and Ruby Solly are all redefining what ‘New Zealand poetry’ means in their own ways. If I look back at what it was like to be a poet at their age, the playing field has shifted a lot because of journals like Starling and Stasis, and publishers like We Are Babies Press. I find their energy so infectious and inspiring – it certainly makes me want to keep pushing myself as a writer.
Paula: Exactly how I feel! But I also have poets I have carried across the decades since my debut collection in the 1990s. Bill Manhire, Michele Leggot, Bernadette Hall, Dinah Hawken, JC Sturm, Hone Tuwhare. Poets that helped me become a writer in so many ways. Particularly as I didn’t do any creative writing courses. Were there poets from the past or the present that were writing aides for you? In person or on paper?
Chris: My exposure to New Zealand poetry was sorely lacking as a high school student, so I’m really grateful that the papers and creative writing workshops I did at university introduced me to the canon and more contemporary writers. Jenny Bornholdt, Stephanie de Montalk, Bill Manhire and Alison Wong are poets whose work played a huge role in shaping my fumblings as a young poet. My poetry world was further expanded when I started to stumble across contemporary US poets like D.A. Powell, Frank Bidart, Cole Swensen and Richard Siken, whose first collection Crush I have written and spoken a lot about. It really is one of those life-changing books that set me on my current path. For Super Model Minority specifically, I turned to Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Tusiata Avia, Nina Mingya Powles and Sam Duckor-Jones for comfort and inspiration. Their work feels so vital during these times of change and uncertainty.
Super Model Minority, Chris Tse, Auckland University Press, 2022
Paula: Inspired and comforted seem crucial for both readers and writers. Your new collection is body shattering and heart repairing. And yes, both inspiring and of comfort. The book includes the best endorsements ever (Nina Mingya Powles, Helen Rickerby, Rose Lu). They catch how the reading experience affected me perfectly. Would you couch the writing experience in similar terms?
Chris: Writing this book caught me off-guard, in a number of ways. First, I didn’t think I’d have a manuscript ready so soon after HE’S SO MASC – I was happy to take my time with the next book. Then a few things happened that set off something in me – an urgency to write and respond: the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attacks, and the rise of anti-Asian sentiment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. These events all triggered powerful emotions, but the overriding frustration I felt was that things seem to stay the same no matter how much we push for societal change and equality. I was overcome by anger, sadness, and helplessness, so I decided to write myself out of that state and turn it into energy. The poems kept coming and I found myself confronting a lot that I’ve left unspoken for so long – some of it out of guilt, some of it out of fear. Overall, the writing process taught me a lot about myself because of these responses and the realisation that it’s important to hold on to hope throughout the dark times – I’m not as nihilistic as I thought I once was, even if that’s how it may come across in the book!
Paula: I am coming across a number of poets who are re-examining a drive to write poetry in a world that is overwhelming, disheartening. Gregory O’Brien muses on poetry expectations: ‘If the times are dark, oppressive, tunnel-like – as they seem presently – maybe poetry can be a lantern?’ For me it’s Covid and impinging greedy powers. Shattered everyday lives in Hong Kong, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine. And it’s like you say – despite waves of resistance, critique, standing up and speaking out – a world free of sexism, racism, poverty, classism, homophobia can feel impossible. And yet … poetry can be essential at an individual level. It seems so, for you and I, as both readers and writers.
I will use my tongue for good. I say I will because this book needs to start with the future even though the future has always scared me with its metallic fingernails poking through the metaphysical portal come-hithering. Aspiration—and the threat of what we have awakened from the salty ashes of a world gone mad— aspiration will bolster my stretch goals. I will use my tongue to taste utopia, and share its delights with my minority brothers and sisters before the unmarked vans arrive to usher me back in time.
from ‘Utopia? BIG MOOD!’
The first poem ‘Utopia? BIG MOOD!’ is an inspired entry to the book. The opening line gives me goose bumps. I want it tattooed on my skin. Heck just reading it make me want to cry, stand up and getting going. It implicates the writing of poetry in the world and the world in the writing of poetry. It gives me hope reading this. You say it all in the poem but do you carry utopia in your heart? Despite your sadness and anger and helplessness?
Chris: That’s such a lovely quote from Greg – it sums up exactly how I feel as a poet and when I’m reading submissions for the Friday Poem. I’ve definitely noticed that recently poets are using poetry to light the way, even if we’re not sure where a particular path is leading us. Better to walk in light than stumble in darkness I suppose. I’m so glad that the first line resonates for you in that way. Here’s the thing – the first lines of all three of my books are a thread that ties them together. (I won’t presume that anyone is reading my work that closely to spot it!) All three books open with a reference to speech or being heard. In Snakes, it’s “No one asked me to speak…”; in HE’S SO MASC I wanted the flipside so the first line is “Shut the fuck up”. I knew I wanted the first line in Super Model Minority to echo the first two books – “I will use my tongue for good” felt like the best way to open this book about confrontation and working towards a brighter future. So, to answer your question, I do carry some form of utopia in my heart because without it I’d be resigning myself to a future that is ruled by sadness and anger. If there’s a conclusion that I come to in the book, it’s that utopia will always be out of reach because we’ll never agree on a singular utopia – the version we carry in each of us is built upon our own desires and subjective perspectives of the world around us.
Paula: Ah it gives me hope to imagine our world no longer governed by despair and anger. I loved your review of Janet Charman’s new collection with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ National ((The Pistils, OUP). I haven’t read the book yet but I got the sense it was personal, intricate, political. The same words apply to your collection. Each poem opens up in the process of reading, and then lingers long after you put the book down. It feels so deeply personal. The way you reassess vital things: the past, the importance of names (your name), speaking more than one language, your parents, relationships, being gay. And in this personal exposure and self-navigation, there are the politics that feed and shape who you are. Inseparable. It feels like a landmark book to me. Is that placing too much on its shoulders?
Chris: It feels like a landmark book for me personally in terms how far I’ve come as a writer over the last decade. I look at my three books side by side and even though there are things I would change in the first two (and I’m sure I may have similar feelings about some of the poems in Super Model Minority in a few years!) I’m really proud of this body of work I’ve created. HE’S SO MASC has those early flourishes of the personal and the political, and I remember being so worried about how it would be received because it was so different in tone and outlook than Snakes. All of my books to date have required a lot of self-reflection and self-critique to get to a place where I’m not only comfortable writing about these topics, but also to be able to share them. Even though the work is personal I hope people can see themselves in it too, or can see why some of the things I write about are a big deal for me and the queer and POC communities.
Paula: Would you see yourself then as a hermit poet, a social poet where you share what you are writing along the way, or something in between?
Chris: I’ve got a small group of trusted writers who I send works in progress to if I’m stuck on something, but this time around I did hold a lot back until it was ready in manuscript form because I wanted to work on trusting my own instincts. However, when it comes to sending work out into the world for publication, I’d say I’m more on the social side, although there were a few poems from Super Model Minority that I chose not to submit anywhere because I felt like they needed to be read in the context of the collection as a whole.
Paula: Is there a poem (or two) that really hits the mark. Whatever that mark might be! That surprised you even.
when asked to explain the lines that lead to now, you describe /
the shape of your body as it hits water / the shape of cold water
shocking muscle / the shape of fleshy chambers forced to loosen
and acquiesce / the shape of your grandparents in their coffins /
the shape of coffins that are too small to contain entire lifetimes /
the soft and hard moments we can’t forget no matter how often we
turn our backs to the light / [you write this poem out of love / but
even love can be a blindfold] / the shape of you and your parents
standing in your grandparents’ driveway / after being kicked out
for talking to your aunty’s white boyfriend / your hand reaching
out to someone you don’t recognise in a dream /
from ‘Identikit’
Chris: I’m really proud of ‘Identikit’ in this collection – finishing that one felt like a fist-in-the-air moment. I think it’s because it covers a lot of historical and emotional terrain that I’ve wanted to write about but had struggled to find a way to balance the pain with moments of joy. Same with ‘Love theme for the end of the world’, which is the slightly more optimistic and hopeful sibling to ‘Identikit’. In fact, the way the “…for the end of the world” poems revealed themselves as I wrote them was surprising to me, because they felt like a valve had ruptured and all this pent up pressure was being spilled out onto the page.
Paula: I wrote down ‘a bath bomb effect’ in my notebook as I was reading. The whole book really. A slow release of effervescence. The kind of poetry that you think and feel. That inspires and comforts! This comes through when you perform or record your poetry. The poems you recorded from the book for Poetry Shelf. Your performances with the Show Ponies. Your readings have got a whole lot of love on the blog. Mesmerising! Does it affect the writing? The future performances in the air?
Chris: Sometimes I’ll have a feeling as I’m writing as to whether or not a poem will be one suited for performances. ‘The Magician’, ‘What’s fun until it gets weird?’ and ‘Poetry to make boys cry’ were written to be performed at particular events so I was conscious about how they flow and build during a performance. Having that embedded into the poem really helps me when it comes to performing it, and hopefully that effect comes across on the page when others are reading it. Reading my work out loud, either at home or to a crowd, has become a much more integral part of my writing and revision process in recent years, even if it isn’t necessarily a poem that I think will make it into high rotation as a ‘live’ poem. This wasn’t really a major consideration when I was writing Snakes because the thought of sharing my work in that way wasn’t really front of mind, although I do love the opportunities that book presents when I’m asked to do a long set and have the chance to read a substantial selection from it.
Paula: I agree that what you write must be a big deal for the queer and POC communities. I am heartened by an increased visibility of Asian writers not just as poets but as editors. But at times I am also disheartened. How do you feel?
Chris: It really is heartening to see so many POC and queer writers getting published and stepping into editing and leadership roles, but there’s still a long way to go to undo decades of erasure and disengagement with the industry, and to not feel like we exist only to be a tick in the diversity box. When it feels like we’re not getting anywhere, I hold on to as many moments of joy as I can and celebrate our achievements. I’ll never forget being on the bus home after the last event at Verb 2019 and being overwhelmed with emotion after spending the weekend attending events featuring so many Asian authors. It felt like such a turning point to have so many writers I could consider contemporaries, and to be graced by the presence of US poet Chen Chen, who has been a major inspiration. The other time I’ve had the same feeling was while rehearsing for a staged reading of Nathan Joe’s play Scenes from a Yellow Peril – the entire cast and crew were Asian. It’s the dual power of being seen and finding your people! When I started writing, the concept of ‘a Chinese New Zealand writer’ felt so murky and out of reach, and I also wasn’t even sure if it was a role I particularly wanted to inhabit. The word ‘whakama’ comes to mind when I think about who I was at that time, and it’s taken me literally decades to push back against that shame and unpack the effect of racism on my life to understand why I need to be loud and proud about who I am.
Paula: Your epigraphs signpost both past and future. This is important. Both in view of poetry and life. Like I have already said, many poets are examining the place and practice of poetry in our overwhelming and uncertain world. Are you writing poems? What do you hope for poetry, as either reader or writer, as editor of The Friday Poem?
Chris: It’s been wonderful seeing more people read and engage with poetry over the last few years both on the page or in person. I think a lot of this is a result of people not relying on old structures and established means of production, and just getting on with getting their work out there through new channels, or putting on innovative events and festivals and mixing poetry with other artforms. It’s proof that we can continue to challenge people’s perceptions of poetry and to find ways to introduce it into people’s everyday lives. But it’s more than just poetry being ‘cool’ again – a lot of work still needs to be done to address diversity, equity and accessibility. From my perspective as a writer, reader and editor, the future looks bright – and isn’t that what we want poetry to do? To show us the power of possibility and give us reasons to be hopeful.
I guess there’s always the pull of more to do—flags to fly and words to scratch into the world’s longest stretch of concrete.
I guess what I’m saying is—I am not done with snakes and wolves; I am not done with feathers or glitter on the roof of my mouth.
This is me begging for a fountain to taker all my wishes. This is me speaking a storm into my every day.
from ‘Wish list—Permadeath’
Chris Tse was born and raised in Lower Hutt. He studied English literature and film at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Tse was one of three poets featured in AUP New Poets 4 (2011), and his work has appeared in publications in New Zealand and overseas. His first collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014) won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and his second book HE’S SO MASC was published to critical acclaim in 2018. He is co-editor of AUP’s Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa, published in 2021.
Poetry Shelf: Chris Tse reads from Super Model Minority
$100 less tax for mince 1 pkt cheese 1 litre of milk 1 loaf of bread 2 rolls of loo paper paid for my poem
fall
gnarled burnt weathered twisted toppled rotting arms raised skyward falling earthbound this tree is dying
Apirana Taylor
Apirana Taylor is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer and novelist. He’s been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He tours globally presenting his poetry. He’s written and published poetry, plays, short stories, and novels and is included in many anthologies nationally and internationally.
Acclaimed New Zealand author Tracey Slaughter presents The Longest Drink in Town, debuting at The Meteor Theatre from April 27th – 30th. A dark, lyrical and brooding snapshot of the fallout of a parental affair; The Longest Drink in Town marks the first of Slaughter’s works to be adapted for the stage.
On the inspiration behind The Longest Drink, Slaughter says, “The situation took place on the roadside of my own childhood: I’d been a passenger in my mother’s car to be delivered for ‘visitation,’ and my new stepmother met us at the drop-off point. The detonation was instant. The two women scrapping it out at the T-bone where a servo met a pub met a fleet of display homes – as a child all I could do was freeze in the gravel intersection and witness. That set-up became the nexus for a storm of childhood reactions to the everyday spectacle of a ‘broken home,’ taking me into stories that touched the dark core of what divorce is for the small players who don’t get to choose it. The ‘chick fight’ was more than just late Friday arvo entertainment. The scene transfixed me, and never left. It was inevitable that writing would one day drive me back there.”
Tracey Slaughter is the author of deleted scenes for lovers (2016), Conventional Weapons (2019), and most recently Devil’s Trumpet (2021). She’s received numerous awards, including the international Fish Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize, the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, the Landfall Essay Competition and was the recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.
This exciting project is brought to you by One Question Theatre and Mayhem Literary Journal, who have lifted Slaughter’s prose from the page, without losing an atom of the yearning and the ache of her novella.
Co-directors’ Dave Taylor and Liam Hinton say of the project, “It’s a tremendous privilege to be gifted such a generous text and to have our shared hand in bringing it to life.”
On seeing the story alive on stage, Slaughter says, “Many of their stories were fragments of mine. But they weren’t just vehicles for my catharsis – they had bloodstreams and hair-ties, longings and school-shoes, ugly old dollies and busted hearts. They felt alive to me in the writing, and I loved them. To meet them now, walking round The Meteor, is an experience near indescribable. They’re not just suffering – they’re leaping with wildness, wriggling with mischief, and rocking with anger and lust. They are a joy to behold. I’ll always be intensely grateful to the group of actors who took this journey to bring my characters to life.”
Tracey Slaughter’s The Longest Drink in Town
Where: The Meteor Theatre (1 Victoria Street, Hamilton)
NZ Poetry Shelf 