Please join Te Herenga University Press and and Unity Books Wellington for the launch of ASH, a much anticipated first novel by Louise Wallace.
Te Herenga University Press page
It’s time to register for Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2024!
Mark your calendars! The date for this year’s nationwide celebration of poetry is scheduled for Friday 23 August. Registrations and seed funding applications are now open, and event organisers across the motu are encouraged to get involved and celebrate Aotearoa’s growing and vibrant poetry scene.
In its 27th year, Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day has established itself as a prominent and popular event in the literary calendar that promises an explosion of poetry countrywide in late August.
Poetry has made its mark everywhere during previous events, from bricks to buses, sidewalks to sand, resonating through national parks, churches, hospitals, museums and city streets. “The possibilities are endless,” emphasizes NPD’s new national coordinator, Gill Hughes. “We invite organisers to don their creative hats and come up with unique and wonderful ways to celebrate poetry in all its forms”.
Phantom Billstickers CEO Robin McDonnell says, “Poetry is the beating heart of unity, inspiration, and endless imagination. From poem posters on the streets of Aotearoa to a verse that hits you right in the heart, it crosses every boundary. At Phantom Billstickers, sponsoring National Poetry Day for nine years, we’re still in awe of how it brings us all together.”
Gill urges interested organisers to register early for seed funding and to take advantage of the heavily promoted official schedule of Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2024 events.
Registration forms, templates, planning and marketing resources are all available on the NPD website. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to showcase your love for poetry and engage with your community in a meaningful way. Join us in making Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2024 a memorable and successful celebration of creativity and expression.
Applications for seed funding close at 5pm on 4 June 2024. The official Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2024 calendar will be announced on 1 August.
For further information contact NPD national coordinator Gill Hughes at poetryday@nzbookawards.org.nz and to keep up with plans for NPD 2024, follow NZPoetryDay on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023 captures the spirit of the times
The latest edition of the online anthology Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems is now live, featuring 25 poems chosen by Poet Laureate Chris Tse from nearly 4000 published in 2023.
“These are the poems that surprised and delighted me the most, that made me pause to sit in my own discomfort or revel in another poet’s joy. Above all, they’re the poems I thought other people need to read.”
His chosen selections, he says, are the “poems that stood out to me for the way in which they navigated inner and outer worlds, or gave life to the poets’ hopes for themselves and their communities.”
The fiery public debate around Tusiata Avia’s poem ‘The 250th Anniversary of James Cook’s Arrival in New Zealand’ that was unfolding when Chris Tse was editing the anthology speaks to the continuing power of poetry to provoke and challenge.
“Here and around the world, we are seeing creatives caught in campaigns of misinformation and bigotry, sometimes driven by those in power,” says Tse in his introduction. “The effects of this are concerning: for example, cultural institutions have cancelled events featuring writers who are outspoken against genocide, and tired anti-queer and racist rhetoric is being used to threaten writers and performers, and fuel the surge in book bans.”
The 2023 edition showcases established figures such as Michele Leggott, Sam Duckor-Jones, John Allison, and Tracey Slaughter alongside 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Award Poetry finalist Isla Huia, and introduces newer poets such as Ruben Mita, Jessica Hinerangi, Geena Slow, and Loretta Riach, who are making their first appearance in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems.
The voices in this anthology engage with times past as well as looking to the future. They contain multitudes of experience and perspective, delight in moments of love and desire, confront the ongoing impacts of colonisation, show us the many ways in which the political is deeply personal, and in the process offer a mirror on the world as it is, along with tantalising glimpses of where we might be heading.
These are poets writing from the range and depth of human experience. Hannah Mettner offers a youthful experience of that infamous measure of fitness, the ‘Beep Test’, as a lens through which to view the adult world. Emma Shi considers the distances of immigration, what remains and what is lost, while Rushi Vyas uses a memory of a father’s Rolex to explore the work of facing our cultural inheritances, of choosing what we want to keep alive, and what we are prepared to relinquish. Hana Pera Aoake gives us a meditation on the anxieties she holds for her newborn daughter’s future, while harold coutts offers an exploration of passion, intimacy and lust. Dan Goodwin’s boy in Wyoming meets his dream man in a bar, while Stacey Teague unpacks the way pop culture, specifically Kylie Minogue’s gold hot pants, alters the chemistry of your brain.
Series editor and International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) senior lecturer Chris Price says, “The poet laureate has given us a gathering of poems that are very much of this moment, recording the crises we are facing, reflecting the diversity of our culture, and celebrating the way human dreams and desires persist in the face of all obstacles.”
The International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington has published the anthology annually since 2001, with support from Creative New Zealand. Every issue has a different editor, selected from Aotearoa’s literary world.
Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023 can be viewed online
Today there is the real wolf
and the imagined wolf
mixing up with
an Airini Beautrais short story
and missiles are dropping
and children are starving
and I can only do one day at a time,
and The National is singing
and there’s a midnight moon
in the dead of the night
with the window wide open
Paula Green from The Venetian Blind Poems (2023-2024)
After a fourth month hiatus to restock my small energy jar, I am keen to refurnish Poetry Shelf. In such planet-and-self-depleting times, it feels even more important to foster a connecting hub for readers and writers, booksellers and librarians, festival organisers and book reviewers. My aim is to host a shelter, a haven, a meeting space for poetry. It is a place for music, stories, ideas, relationships, beauty, conversation, heart and aroha. It is a place for celebration but it is also a place for the growing concern and protest we feel at global and local inequity, prejudice, conflict.
I aim to post something each day:
Monday new poems
Tuesday audio and videos
Wednesday my reviews
Thursday poets on other poems
Friday various features and musings by and on other poets, interviews, thematic poem clusters
PLUS an ongoing noticeboard.
I spotlight poetry but I may review fiction and nonfiction that catches my attention.
In April I am posting features on each of the shortlisted poets for the Ockham NZ Book Awards.
I cannot promise to post every day as I am still on my recovery road and have daily patches when it is hard to function. Ironically the past week is the most challenging I have had for a long time. But I strongly believe in the power of doing things that build joy and wonder, focus on what we can do, make nourishing connections. In order to protect my small energy jar, I do not accept unsolicited poems and I cannot promise to review every book I get sent.
I am so grateful for the support you have given me over the past 18 months. Your kind emails. Your magnificent writing. And for the heart-boosting response to my recent invitations.
On Monday I am launching Monday Poems with a poem by John Allison (1950 – 2024), selected by James Norcliffe. This series usually hosts new work, but it felt fitting to pay tribute to a much loved poet. Poetry Shelf will also post a tribute feature.
Welcome back!
NZ Poetry Shelf 