Poets hand translation over to ghosts

“Today i am going to talk as truthfully as I can about what I really believe poetry is doing, how truly strange a form of communication I think poetry is, as the maybe somewhat cryptic title of this talk suggests. And the kind of community I am going to be talking about, if community is the word for it, is not really the kind of community we see here in this room. It is a community of ghosts, of invisible solitary writers in communion with invisible solitary readers. This is what poetry has been and is and is for me.” Anna Jackson

I was so disappointed not to have attended Anna Jackson’s inaugural lecture as Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka (6 August 2026). But I have now watched the lecture online and it is perhaps one of the most extraordinary lectures I have attended/viewed.

Each word in the title is a portal into one of the lecture’s six sections, each focusing on a particular poem. We are carried into an uplifting and inspired discussion on poetics, poetry, personal quivers, with ‘I’ floating free, analytical and probing, being afraid, misremembering, hiding, imagining, recalling, eavesdropping, being dazzled. On being reader. On being writer. On being self. Or not. Or maybe.

Getting to hear Anna read her electrifying ‘On Invisibility’, and with it’s poignant last line, I am jelly. As does hearing ‘Uniform’, in the Jackson McCarthy clip from Poetry Shelf. Oh and yes, hearing Anna read Mary Ruefle’s incredible heartsmash of a poem, ‘The Hand’.

I will be watching the lecture again. Breathing in the utter joy of the lecture, and how joy can be and might be the bloodline of reading and writing poetry for many of us, of being both invisible and being seen.

Please note this event: Tonight (Tuesday 25th, 6 – 7pm) Anna Jackson, Helen Rickerby and Jackson McCarthy read and discuss poetry with Chris Tse at 2/fiftyseven, Level 2, 57 Willis Street
an early Poetry Day event