If you missed reading and listening to the wonderful Poetry Day feature .posted here on Friday . . here you go

A crowd in Ōtepoti Dunedin’s Athenaeum library, the country’s oldest continuously operating library, still filling its original purpose to stimulate, inform and entertain. A cool evening, around 60 people crammed among old shelves laden with books. Thirteen poets, each reading a single poem around a theme that had been set with great sensitivity by the convenor, Wendy Parkin, chair of the Ōtepoti Dunedin branch of NZSA, in a week of ecological catastrophe, war and more Trumpian posturing. In Te Anau, another branch of Otago NZSA, was also celebrating the day in an event organised by Sara Litchfield. 

Tūmanako: Words of Hope

Wendy’s introduction widened its scope to encompass global politics, climate destruction, and also current attacks on literature, the humanities and original thought, drawing her references from Emily Dickinson (‘Hope is the thing with feathers’), Dinah Hawkins (‘Hope… is to do with trees”), Rebecca Solnit (Hope ‘is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky.’), Mary Oliver  (‘what we must do, I suppose, is to hope the world keeps its balance’),  and concluding with Shelley’s beautiful breath of air from the west wind (“…can spring be far behind?”). 

The poets and musicians who followed Wendy’s introduction rose to her challenge, and in all their various voices, sought to articulate this pressing need. Many in the audience commented afterward that the result had been one of the best poetry readings they’d ever attended in the city – and that’s a high bar! 

As Wendy expressed it, in summing up the evening, ‘Tonight, our invited poets have offered us consolation and challenge, addressing the most profound themes of life and death, love and loss, in different places and times, by turning their attention to the most ordinary of objects, like white shirts and yellow quinces, and activities from play and parties to cooking, sewing, re-building, performing, healing, and of course making poetry.… We are here tonight as part of that commitment to a live-able present and a sustainable future….It is my hope that we can – at least for a time, here together – imagine that the spring Shelley doesn’t want us to forget while in the depths of winter, is possible and is fast approaching, that the time of destruction might end and we might yet save and renew all that is life-affirming, beautiful and good. 

We can only hope. And fight. And vote. And write’.

It was a fine evening, and everyone walked out into that cool Otepoti Dunedin night, feeling yes, indeed! Spring could not be far behind!

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