Symphony of Queer Errands, Rachel O’Neill
Tender Press, 2025

‘Dress us, Oh Errands, in mellifluence, as we are honey
flowing, effortless, unbroken.‘

from ‘Chant for Queer Errands’

Rachel O’Neill’s new collection, Symphony of Queer Errands, is a book that takes you by surprise. It is mysterious mesmerising memorable. How to lay my engagements on the screen for you without smashing or corroding the reading effect? This book, that traverses the wide stretch between predictability and obscurity, between resistance and embrace, is akin to a transposition of the creative process, of life itself. We are drawn into the interlaced polyphonic collaborative composition of a symphony, with instruments, musicians, rehearsals, trials, suggestions, score sheets. And everything strange, incredibly and wonderfully strange.

I am thinking this morning how these incomprehensible toxic times that we inhabit can infect slant intensify what and how we read. So this astonishing book, in this utterly vulnerable point in time, becomes fablesque, dystopian, surreal, hyperreal. And then, here I am in the heart and thick of the creative process. The heart and intricacy of love and life and how that matters so very much.

This is a book of first lines, of beginnings. It is a book of a guitar’s open tunings, say, where the chords shift and splice. We are listening to arrivals of the intangible, to energy and ether, to suspension and tendency. Or to ‘the ash of silence’. Listening. Listening. I cannot stop listening. And the musical key moves, and the wardrobe arrives with its physical store of clothes and dirt and flies. It’s personal effects and intimate affects.

Ah the lines that ring out as solo instruments: ‘all the voices yet to reach us’. ‘We who lavender time / are more essential than oils’.

Ah the queer instruments: for example, The Cathedral, The Wave, Bass Narcissus, and The Hard Soft Revolt. The latter is a pianoforte made of revolting parts that are neither plucked nor strummed but guillotined.

Old women are best. Generations matter. Pronouns matter. Tremulous holes matter. Sampling. Stolen land matters. Colonisation. Queer matters.

Queer errands are the sonic visual philosophical physical and deeply personal arrivals that score this symphony, this long-form poem. Queer errands that might be musical instruments or vital notes of gathering protest rally disobedience hotness dialogue collaboration . . . and yes, heart.

Symphony of Queer Errands is a sensory prickling, heart-and-idea stirring, body rippling, queer read, and I absolutely adore it. Thank you.

a reading

‘The Hard Soft Revolt’

‘The Wave’

‘Anti-gaslighting Bowls’

four questions

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

While Symphony of Queer Errands is curious about the intersection of poetry and music, I increasingly feel that curiosity for collaboration shapes the experiential energy of the book. 

Contrapuntal poems, and poems inspired by contrapuntal music feature in the book. Contrapuntal poems involve bringing two distinct texts together to create another entire poetic experience out of their conversation. Contrapuntal music involves distinct melodies playing at the same time and interacting harmonically. Throwing in some creative licence here, I feel both point to an elsewhere through and beyond binary relationships.

Sound and language operate vertically and horizontally, as noise and silence, knowably and anonymously, yet in collaboration become multi-dimensional.

It’s a risky business. Collaboration involves trust and uncertainty, a deep understanding of oneself and other people and an openness to not knowing or knowing the least and needing to learn the most, it requires repair from failure, celebration, grieving, laughter and joy.

For me collaboration is a practice. Alongside a suspension of false hierarchies of human worth, we breathe life into alternative realities together, embodying these in the present.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

Over the last year or so I’ve been experimenting with ‘audial’ poems by recording sounds in my immediate environment and making sound design works that become the seed for a new poem or sequence. My friend Andy Hummel invited me to open at his gig last year and I held a listening party, sharing some of the sound design works and reading poems inspired by them. While some poems are irreverent—Alexander the Great getting therapy in the afterlife; a poet planning to propose marriage to a melody; a music journalist conducting interviews as you would an orchestra—others reflect how, for me, writing through sound enables me to unlock potent emotions and memories. I want to continue to deepen and expand this practice.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?

Right now I’m relishing reading local poetry and fiction, including Manuali’i by Rex Letoa Paget, Amma by Saraid de Silva and Slanted by Alison Glenny. Other recent highlights include Chinese Fish by Grace Yee, All That We Know by Shilo Kino, Hine Toa by Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku, A Breed of Women by Fiona Kidman and The Raven’s Eye Runaways by Claire Mabey.

A recent book that continues to be revelatory to me due to its deep articulation of repair is when I open the shop by romesh dissanayake. In my journal I wrote that in addition to the sometimes strange emancipations of grief, the liminal zones of keeping promises and forgiving human mistakes, and the empathy and humour of the writing, I really appreciated the open celebration of friendship/chosen family. I was reminded of the friendships in which I receive unconditional love and how grateful I am to friends who give generously, are accepting and whose manaakitanga comes in many forms, from cooking to laughter, listening and dancing.

On the local music front, some forever favs are Brown Boy Magik’s Trans Pacific Time, Mo Etc.’s Buoys, and albums by Te Kahureremoa and JessB.

We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?

Composers from Aotearoa really fill my cup—Salina Fisher, Victoria Kelly, Gillian Whitehead, Elliot Vaughan, Ruby Solly, Ariana Tikao, Al Fraser, Rob Thorne, Tabea Squire and Jerome Kavanagh. I really enjoy going along to STROMA events and the Pyramid Club to hear contemporary works.

It was a real privilege to collaborate with local composer and musician Lucky Pollock recently. They premiered a new piece at the launch of Symphony of Queer Errands inspired by a poem from the book about a riotous piano called The Hard Soft Revolt. Lucky reprogrammed a keyboard with metallic samples and synths and played Chopin’s Tristesse. It was brilliantly bombastic!

Participating in collective movements is galvanising and nourishing. I’m grateful to human rights activists and connective organisations like ActionStation Aotearoa for keeping us all grounded and empowered across the various stages of reaction, response and repair involved in organising change.

Walking is also my happy place. Composer Torū Takemitsu said ‘my music is like a garden… I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared to walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.’ I enjoy the simple sensory pleasures of letting one’s atoms merge with other atoms, dissolving into a moment, hopefully without tripping on a heap of sand, seagull or silicone mannequin head washed up on the tide (true story).

I think it’s also important to grieve what needs to be grieved. Not everything can be replaced or recovered. Grief points to what you care about, which helps you commit to the fight to protect what you love. Having some rituals to move through the snotty, raw and thorny parts of the process can help a lot.

Rachel O’Neill is a filmmaker, writer and artist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. They are Pākehā, queer and non-binary (they/them/she/her). Their debut book One Human in Height (Hue & Cry Press, 2013) was followed by Requiem for a Fruit (Tender Press, 2021). Rachel was the 2023 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage Writing Fellow. For more, visit their website.

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