Poetry Film Night, Girls on Key ten year anniversary
Cityside Baptist, 8 Mt Eden Road, Auckland
4th May, 4.30pm
A showcase of freshly produced international poetry short films and animations to celebrate the ten year anniversary of Girls on Key.
On Thursdays, Poetry Shelf will post a series entitled ‘Poets on Poems‘. The poets and invited guests will muse on a favourite poem, especially New Zealand examples, and the poem will be included with permission. I love the idea of drawing poems out of the shadows, of underlining how we can be readers as much as writers, how poetry can evoke such diverse responses, epiphanies, pleasures. How it might comfort but also might challenge. How it underlines the sublime and satisfying reach of words.
Bill Manhire has a regular column in North & South where he writes about poems and poetry. His latest piece (April issue), considers witty lines: swerves, teasings, humour, the sizzle of the ordinary, ‘a deflation effect which is sometimes called monostich’. He includes a terrific poem by Jessie Mackay and a musing on the brilliance of James Brown (James has a new book out in June or July).
To launch the Poetry Shelf series, Airini Beautrais has contributed an excerpt from The Beautiful Afternoon, her new book of essays, a book that engages with life and difficulty, resolve and multiple fascinations, including poetry and reading, on so many levels.
From ‘Silent Worship’
In a 1966 ‘fragment’ poem, Rachael Blau DuPlessis writes:
I, Lady, you are my true love’s lady.
You stand in the middle of the room,
Sunlight streaming around you.
Sunlight takes hold of the seeds in you
And wets them.
I want to hold myself to you,
But you are myself. Can I?
In considering the coexistence of ‘I’ and ‘Lady’, DuPlessis asks questions about who is allowed to speak. In her essay ‘Manifests’, in which this fragment is quoted, she asks: ‘Am “I” forbidden to poetry by one – but one key – law of poetry, the cult of the idealized female?’ DuPlessis goes a step further into botanical imagery by incorporating ‘the seeds’, implying both ova and semen. Wetting one’s own seeds, holding oneself to oneself, could allude to masturbation, but more is going on here. If we can’t speak in poetry, the oldest literary language of the world, in what medium can we speak? If we can’t speak for ourselves, all we can be is spoken to, or spoken of.
Where do women go when we are no longer deemed physically attractive by dominant beauty standards? When our boobs droop and our waists thicken, our spines curve? Where do women go who have never been perceived as attractive? Who no longer want to be attractive, or have never wanted to be? Where do people beyond the gender binary, beyond heterosexuality go? The centring of heterosexual romance leaves out a lot of people and a lot of possibilities, pushed to the edges, the wilderness beyond the garden. In the literary canon, there are ghosts, whispers, occasional glimpses. In the gardens made by men, uncertain shapes glimmer underneath the trees, or flash briefly across the sun. Who was also, always there? Whose seeds were always planted?
One day, recently, I was talking to my science students about sand, how sand is a mixture of broken bits of shell, rocks, organic matter. Sand looks like it’s uniform if you hold it in your hand, but if you look at it under a microscope, you can see all the different parts. I thought about the William Blake poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
I thought about how we are able to see beauty when we turn our attention away from performing or spectating it. How difficult it is to see a world in a grain of sand when you’re socially conditioned to be meditating upon the flaws of your figure and face. What does it mean to let go completely, to go into the organic world, to get your hands covered in soil, to sow your own herbs, to mutter your own spells? As I moved out of the state of being a woman in a long-term committed relationship and into the state of being a single woman, a single mother, a difficult woman, a woman who spoke openly about her experiences, I also made spiritual shifts. I moved from an afterglow of Christianity, my liberal Quaker upbringing, further into a desire to seek out connections with nature and the occult. My maternal grandmother was raised as a Scottish Presbyterian, but mostly believed in nature spirits and fairies. In every garden, she told us, there should be a wild place where the fairies can live. Threads of Celtic paganism ran down through the maternal generations of our family, in spite of the overlay of devout, churchgoing, Protestantism. Multiple people in the family have been visited by the dead after their passing. I don’t have words or understandings to describe all of this, but I do have a word for what is implied: power. In the garden, in the forest, in the wild spaces, both externally and within ourselves, is where it lives.
After my separation, it took me some time and legal wranglings to get back into the house I had left. Once I returned, I had a sense that things that had happened there needed to be exorcised. There was a bad smell and a bad energy in the house. It was mostly empty of furnishings, and it hadn’t been cleaned in several months. The garden had not been tended. Anything motorised or stereotypically masculine had also gone, including the lawnmower and the weed-eater. I was on a tight budget and had a number of appliances to replace. I decided not to replace the mower or weed-eater. I would turn the entire lawn into garden. While a family court psychologist interviewed my children inside the house, I worked outside, moving rocks. Big lumps of shellrock had been piled into a large mound in the corner of the section by previous owners of the house. Now I was clearing this mound. The rocks were sharp to the touch, filled with the fragments of million-year-old shells. I wore gloves. One by one, I carried the rocks, placing them in the shape of a heart, in the centre of the front lawn. Later, I filled in the heart with cardboard and mulch, made other shapes around it. I lifted heavy chunks of broken concrete, set them in a circle, built a fire pit, surrounded it with river pebbles. I planted fruit trees. I made a pond, which sat green and murky in the corner. I hung wind-chimes in the trees. Gradually, the suburban lawn gave way to what felt like a magical space. For my thirty-fifth birthday, my seven-year-old enlisted the help of his grandmother to buy me six rose bushes. I planted them within the rocky heart.
European and colonial American Christians burned, drowned and hung people they deemed witches because witches represented the things they were most afraid of. One of these things was female power, which across cultures has resided primarily with older women. People of all ages and genders have been put to death accused of witchcraft, but the ageing woman was a favourite target. The problem of contemporary ageism is that it encourages us to silence ourselves, to worry about our physical attractiveness when we are spiritually ready to inherit the fullness of our capabilities. Biologically speaking, there is no consensus on the reasons for menopause. Only humans and a few species of whales go through it. It may be an evolutionary irrelevance. Spiritually speaking, the older woman is vital to the workings of the community. In pre-Christian Europe and in cultures around the world, we find her in central roles: as midwife, wise woman, herbalist, soothsayer, witch and queen. If we are distracted from our power, we can be prevented from exercising it. If we are encouraged to resent younger women, we will refuse to help them. We will see them as enemies. Our intergenerational wisdom will be fractured and diluted. Pitting women against each other in a competition where men are the prize is one of the crudest but most successful tactics of patriarchy.
In 2022, a couple of days past the winter solstice, I walk around the lake. The first magnolia buds are opening on the same trees, revealing white petals. Looking at the trees, I remember the spring six years ago, when the sight of the flowers seemed synonymous with the emotional pain that physically ached inside my chest, and churned my guts, when I projected body dysmorphia and internalised misogyny and ageism onto an annual botanical event. Now, feeling no pain or heartbreak, I feel an immense sense of freedom. I am walking with no concerns other than walking. On the top path I pass two women in their sixties, with dyed hair and bright pink lipstick. We are strangers but we greet each other warmly. A trail of scent remains behind them. Pink camellias are bursting with flowers. Bees are working the stamens. The sun is out and I turn my face towards it, feel its warmth enter my skin. The spring belongs to no one, signifies nothing human. A tree is not a person: it comes into leaf, fruits and sets seed annually, following its own cyclical rhythms.
I have not lost my fear of ageing. That goes too deep to deal with in a matter of a few years. It is part of a normal human fear of mortality; it is also heavily socialised into me. I still have difficulty looking in a mirror and seeing the deepening lines on my face, the changing texture of my skin, the thinning of my hair, the loosening of everything. What I have lost is the conceptualisation of my life as something with romantic love as its central aim. This is a difficult thing to lose. I don’t know many people who feel the same way. Most of the single women I know are trawling dating apps, or their limited pool of acquaintances, for someone who might be a reasonable long-term partner. Most of the divorced women I know still believe in marriage.
Turned away from the lecture on sexual economics
she goes down into the sexual garden, under its dark spread
and into its detail: ecstatically branching magnolia, tuberous
roots thrusting up huge leaves. Fuck the tulips in their damned
obedient rows. Stop. They’re finally opening their throats!
They have dark purple stars! They have stigma! They have style!
Hawken’s description of the tulips in their ‘damned obedient rows’ suggests feminine submissiveness. But then, she abruptly changes tack. Stop. The tulips, so evocative of genitalia, are opening, and are finally able to speak. The puns on floral parts put a humorous twist on what is a call to power. The garden has been filled with female sexuality, with all sexualities, with female power, with humanity, all along. Nothing is silent, the garden worships itself. We are all able to go down through it.
Airini Beautrais
from The Beautiful Afternoon, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui. Her collection of short stories, Bug Week, won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Foundation Prize at the 2021 NZ Book Awards. She is also the author of four collections of poetry and the essay collection The Beautiful Afternoon (THWUP 2024).
Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Anahera Press and the Women’s Bookshop invite you to:
Submissions for the next issue of Starling close in one week! New Zealand writers under 25, send us your new work by 10 April 2024 – full submission guidelines can be found here.
“In Plastic, Stacey Teague reaches beyond the frame of her known world to find a way back to te ao Māori. Hers is a complicated, joyful route, full of conversations with ancestors, old places and herself. In form these poems range from plain-speaking prose and concrete poetry to odes and spells; in mood they are just as restless, taking in those times when life feels as big as a movie screen and times when it is more like ‘a loose stone to kick down the path’.” Publisher blurb
‘Spell for Hilma af Klint’ from Plastic (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2024)
Stacey Teague (Ngāti Maniapoto/Ngāpuhi) is a poet and teacher living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She is a publisher and editor at Tender Press. Her poetry collection Plastic came out in March 2024 with Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Stacey Teague website
Ff Fast Fibres Poetry 11: call for submissions
Fast Fibres Poetry this year has an open theme.
We invite poets with a strong Northland connection to submit 2 or 3 of your best poems. Please include a two line biographical statement.
Deadline: June 7, 2024. Email submissions to: fastfibres@live.com
Each poem should be single spaced and typed in 12 pt. Times New Roman. Poems must be submitted together in a single Word document, with your name in the filename. PDFs and handwritten submissions will not be considered.
Poets@OneOneSix, April 18, 5.30 – 7.30pm, 116 Bank Street, Whāngarei Share your poems with a supportive group.
Poets@OneOneSix, May 16 will be held at Creative Northland, Railway Road, Whāngarei from 5.30pm and will feature Peter Bakowski, a well known touring Australian poet together with local Whāngarei poets.
To celebrate the inclusion of Talia by Isla Huia (Dead Bird Books, 2023) on the Ockham NZ Book Award Poetry short list, Isla has read three poems from the collection and I have written a short review. Isla’s debut collection is a book to be celebrated. The awards will be announced at an Auckland Writers Festival Event on May 15th. In the meantime here is a taste of this sublime book, and if you get a chance to hear Isla read live, do!
The reading
‘Hiruhārama’
‘Pegasus’
‘Motuoapa’
Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a te reo Māori teacher and writer. Her work has been published in journals such as Catalyst, Takahē and Awa Wāhine, and her debut collection of poetry, Talia, was released in May 2023 by Dead Bird Books. She has performed at the national finals of Rising Voices Youth Poetry Slam and the National Poetry Slam, as well as at writers festivals and events throughout Aotearoa. Isla can most often be found writing in Ōtautahi with FIKA Collective, and Ōtautahi Kaituhi Māori.
Dead Bird Books page
The review
when you carried me to the bath / and to the chest where i
sat / and pronounced myself very much alive again
to night ‘n day / where we married /
over steaming hot potato / and it felt so native,
so hāngi / so ancestor / to say
the passenger seat is your mould now / love /
there is nothing i wouldn’t do for you / and
i think we should keep this up forever /
a fact so irredeemable / and hot to the touch / that it
slots better / into a cloud formation or penne pasta /
than into language
from ‘eleven eleven’
Poetry books can be like favourite albums that demand repeated listening for all kinds of reasons. Reading Talia is so. The poetry soothes and tugs, unsettles and mesmerises. The poems are personal, intimate, revealing. They pull you into the sweet musicality of words and the magnetic power of storytelling. There are the resonant and connecting threads of place. There is the absolute need to connect with people: whanau, friends, loved ones, mother, whaea, wife, tīpuna, whakapapa.
Voice is paramount, within audible distance, necessary, singing in both te reo Māori and English, with epiphany, reflection, memory, challenge. Acknowledgement. Ah, there is a pulse of yearning, of writing one’s self close, of speaking health and the planet, cancer and virus and isolation. Of signposting division and injustice and rejuvenation.
There is a sense of urgency, a building momentum, like a whispered chant, or compelling list poem, with the surprise arrival of certain words (‘this wholegrain miracle of feast’), or the lyrical agility of a phrase (‘there’s a swamp beneath us all, a cathedral / in the abdomen, and rūaumoko’), or the physical tang and sweetness of detail (‘before the becoming, it was all body / bags of meatloaf, the lingerie, the storm.’)
You will fall upon Nina Simone, Keri Hulme, Audre Lorde, the isolation hotel, headlights, islands, suburbia, hospitals, love. Yes, this is a collection so movingly steeped in aroha, in the power and reach and traffic of love. It is a poetry collection to put on repeat, to lose and find your way in. I love it.
Paula Green
The poem
god-ly
“In some future day, when this generation is dead and gone, to those who look up inquiringly at this statue it will be told how the fathers of the colony left their homes and tamed the wilderness under the leadership of a man of heroic type; how, when he died, the representatives of the people, appreciating his character, determined to erect a monument worthy of his memory, and how a great sculptor in executing the work impressed it with the stamp of his genius. So shall some old man speak in the after time To all the people, winning reverence. And now I may congratulate the city that this statue is about to be handed over to its care, worthy as it is of admiration, like King Arthur’s sword of old, not only for the memory of a great man, but on account of its own intrinsic beauty not like that sword, to disappear from the eyes of men, but to be preserved by us and our successors as a possession for ever.” – C.C. Bowen, 7 Aug 1867
godley, you’re standing awful casual up there
warmer layers slung in your crook
lookin like your foot wants to accelerate something
or stand or somethings neck
you’re balding now
but have done well to love what’s left
a blueprint of my own swelling curls
framing eyes that are hungry, unyielding
for the next swampland you may conquer
another someplace hot and brown
to be the founder of, frame this
as experimental, or really good work,
or home
godley, how’s it looking from up there
since your recent resurrection
you can see the birds, shitting in the rafters
they want to fix that too, apparently we
are all walking around gutted without a cathedral,
headless, big bellies bleeding
hey, i’m still upright
same as you, the first face of this land
to be petrified in bronze, cast in forever
the creation story of pākehā public art
auē old koro, i see your oxygen
and your ships, and associations
i don’t even want to patu you up
or send you shaking at the whites
of my eyes, i just want them to
stop spending our money on
your very dead face, freckled
i imagine, and maybe cracked
i want to whakaiti you, wanna
munch on your mana, wanna
bark at you, wanna rip up the
stone and the bins and the benches
and plant a pā harakeke and
whistle to my bird brothers and
my tattooed sisters and my mobsters
and my students and my knees
and we can just all here sit on you
like the weight of our great mother
and hold your hand while the dust
of your settler manhood does settle
e tau, e tau
e tau, e tau
when the first four ships came
to see what you had made and then
live on it, your wife said you did not
know whether to cry, or laugh, and
so you did both
godley, did you know my ancestors?
what were they like? what did they say?
were you kind to them? did they dance for you?
in me they are immortalized
like you in this square chest of the city
i hold them up to the sun and say
thank you, one by one to the bones
interred in us just as the words of this
plaque make memory of you
godley, why don’t you lay down
just for a little while
just sleep
let me see the sky
your stomach takes up.
Isla Huia
Whitianga Testament
Je suis l’espace où je suis
(Noël Arnaud)
Shells, pools, holes in the mudflat,
edges, ledges, shelves and hollow places;
homes: so utterly these
are homes for each particular inhabitant.
Each creature is its habitat,
its space the locus of its movement.
I walk the waterline at dusk, the mud
at low tide sucking at my feet,
these little brown and olive crabs
scuttling from me. Look.
They scud across a broken image of the
moon
scattered over saturated land.
I’ve been away from here too long, so long
required to live another life,
so long an actor in a play who somehow
got the stage-directions wrong.
Now I just want to head for home,
a home just where I just aim.
John Allison from Dividing the Light, Hazard Press, 1997
John Allison (1950 -2024), a poet and musician, lived in Heathcote Valley near Christchurch. His debut collection, Dividing the Light was part of the Hazard Poets series, edited by Rob Jackaman and Philip Mead. A Long Road Trip Home was his seventh and final poetry collection (Cold Hub Press, 2023). His previous book, Near Distance, was also published by Cold Hub Press in mid-2019. He was Poetry New Zealand 14’s featured poet, and his poem, Father’s axe, grandfather’s machete, was selected for the Best New Zealand Poems, 2020.
Poetry Shelf will be posting a tribute feature.
NZ Poetry Shelf 