Art Nahill and Stu Bagby launch poetry books at Time Out Bookstore
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Author Archives: Paula Green
National Poetry Day: 2018 Geometry / Open Book poetry competition
At Corpus: Mary McCallum on her moving poem, ‘C’
If like me you loved reading Harriet Rowland’s The Book of Hat, you will love this.
Mary McCallum talks about the genesis of her poem ‘C’, at Corpus: conversations about medicine and life. The poem is in her new collection XYZ of Happiness and navigates her time with Harriet and cancer. Wonderful!
We were a very new press, barely begun. The daughter of an old school friend had been diagnosed with cancer and was writing a blog. A bunch of us who’d been at school together began to read it. One of our group, illustrator Fifi Colston, sent me an email: ‘You could do worse than make a book about this.’ I agreed. This young woman knew how to write. Her blog posts had strong read-me titles and energetic don’t-argue-with-me first lines. They were focused on one event or idea and they told that story with economy and humour and knew where to end. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She celebrated life. She often said how lucky she was.
Full piece plus poem here
Monday Poem: Nicola Easthope’s ‘Blue Night’
Blue night
Out of the frame is the baby.
Beyond the door is the sea.
Its white noise is not working.
The black out is not working.
The mother is not in the frame.
She brings him to her breast.
She rests her head on the sill.
Her head part goes to sleep.
The mother’s body, like a whale’s
mind, half insentient, half on
depth watch. The milk draws
blue and baby sleep.s.
Here in the painting is a man.
At four he sends her back.
Her neck clicks in the pillow.
The baby whistles awake.
Though it is full and fully burped.
The mother jolts and palpitates.
She begins to rise. But the father.
The father is in the picture.
On a chair, hardly, dressed, barely, under
damp green light, he shifts from buttock
to buttock, pumping and pressing
the red piano accordion.
Tendrils sling off the lampshade,
sea grass hums. A harmonic
vamp of frond and must and
tears become his cheek.
Her fingers free the water –
His fingers free the wind –
breath is the chord is the base tone
small pod of falling whales.
©Nicola Easthope
Nicola Easthope is a poet, reader, teacher, partner and Mum, living on the Kāpiti Coast. She is a champion of children, teenagers, and activism for a more just, green and peaceful world. Her forthcoming collection, Working the tang (The Cuba Press), includes explorations of her ancestral roots (Orkney Islands, Scotland, Wales and England), the life of oceans in between there and here, and what it means to be Pākehā supporting Te Tiriti o Waitangi, in Aotearoa. Nicola was a guest poet at the Queensland Poetry Festival in 2012, following her debut collection, leaving my arms free to fly around you (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2011). She will appear at the Tasmanian Poetry Festival in October. You can follow her at Nicola Easthope – poet, on Facebook.
The poem originally appeared in an online anthology for National Poetry Day 2015 – ‘Catch and Release‘ (KUPU poetry anthology).
‘Blue night’ was inspired by Kelly Joseph’s pencil and pen artwork, dirge. Check out her beautiful creations here.
Announcing New Volumes: Pantograph Punch’s 2018-19 Critics in Residence Programme
What a fabulous initiative!
Full details here
The Pantograph Punch and Basement Theatre are pleased to invite submissions from individual writers to be part of New Volumes for 2018-19. Nau mai, haere mai!
TE KAUPAPA
We all know the deal: it’s tough out there for writers, and even more impossible to survive as a critic, let alone start out as one. But without critical writing – writing that responds, interrogates, and examines our experiences with artists and their work – how do we debate and grow as a community? How do we have public conversations about how work can be better, and how can we share the multiplicity of responses that any single experience might have?
New Volumes will involve up to four writers being mentored as a group across a 12-month period (beginning August 2018), covering three to four Basement shows each throughout the year (primarily through critical writing, but with the opportunity to explore other forms like profiles or features). These pieces will go through a peer-editing process, and be accompanied by a series of workshops looking at a range of ideas, including form, structure, genre and the commercial reality of working as a writer.
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Vaughan Rapatahana’s Te Henga
Vaughan Rapatahana continues to write and to live across three countries. Several new books in different genre are due out soon in Hong Kong SAR, Aotearoa New Zealand, France, United Kingdom. Thank you also for this opportunity.
Poetry Shelf review of Ternion
Wai Word presens Anahera Gildea
Big Weather is back for National Poetry Day
Poetry at the Fringe – Rachel McAlpine and Beantown
Jacket 2: Vaughan Rapatahana in conversation with Bob Orr
Full piece and a few poems here
Bob Orr has been a well-regarded New Zealand poet for several decades, having eight collections of poetry produced to date, with a new collection due out soon. He is also rather different to so many ‘modern’ poets, in that he has always paddled his own poetic waka (or canoe) in and through his own currents. Oaring across his own ocean, if you will.
Bob never completed any tertiary education. He never attended any university ‘creative writing’ classes in an endeavour to craft his poetry ‘better.’ Up until very recently, when he was the 2017 University of Waikato Writer in Residence, he eschewed any applications for literary grants. He rarely, if ever, uses a computer to write with or on — he doesn’t even have an email address. Indeed, he continues to write with an old style ribbon-fed typewriter. Bob Orr is a bit of a Luddite — all of which ensures that his stream of poetry flows deep from his heart and mind and is never obfuscated by the trends, tropes, and trivialities of the latest poetic fad. Like another key New Zealand poet, Sam Hunt, Bob Orr has always remained a people’s poet, by which I mean, a writer who keeps it simple, who never overreaches into pretentiousness and amorphous cleverdickism.
