Category Archives: NZ poetry

In the hamock: reading Ila Selwyn’s dancing with dragons

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Ila Selwyn, dancing with dragons, Westridge Publishing, 2018

 

Ila Selwyn has published a previous poetry collection, two sisters, two chapbooks and a number of handmade books. She was an MC at Auckand’s Poetry Live, ran Rhythm & Verse at Titirangi’s Lopdell House and has run National Poetry Day events.

Ila’s new collection is as much a performance piece as it is an aural and visual symphony for the page. The book tips you as reader. It is in landscape format turning on a vertical rather than horizontal axis. The poems hug the right-hand margin. Quirky black and white drawings are scattered throughout. Lines in italics are mashed from songs or dead poets, so as you read, familiar melodies cut into the poems.

The word at the start of a line has a big role to play. It is the bridge between two thoughts (‘you be piggy in the/ Middlemarch‘).  This is the joy of reading a collection that keeps you on your toes; that startles with its jumpcuts, its playful wit and willingness to rove and risk in myriad directions. The poems move through the personal, politics, popular culture, books, people, cities, geography, history, the weather.

dancing with dragons is an exuberant explosion of words on the page, beautifully crafted and a joy to read. It is like catching the radio static of the world.

 

 

walking, poems pop into my mind, but when i get home they vanish from my

HeadworX is a select publishing house in

Wellington won The Battle of Waterloo and gave his name to a pair of gum

Boots was my darling dog that i carried over a mile from primary school to escape the dog

Catcher in the Rye is an American classic i adore, so taught it at sixth

form the clay into balls, pressing out the air, before you

throw me the ball Doug, and Ann, you be piggy in the

Middlemarch is not a novel about a March Hare, nor is it set in the middle of

March in NZ is the beginning of our

autumn leaves float by my window / and how i wish that you were

here, hear and hair are pronounced the same way by many

kiwis are a protected species of

 

from ‘pickled impressions’

 

 

 

Going West Podcasts 2017: Words and Melody – Bill Manhire and Norman Meehan with Paula Green

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Listen to the podcast here

 

 

 

National Poetry Day 2018: We are the persistance

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Christchurch Feminist Poets presents an evening of spoken word poetry that will move you, inspire you and make you think about society today and the ongoing struggle for equality. Bringing together a stellar group of Christchurch’s most powerful and thought provoking poets, this event is a unique opportunity to hear a cross section of voices, all driven to make the world a better place. Featuring Tusiata Avia, Ray Shipley, Alice Anderson, Rebecca Nash and Isla Martin, this event will immerse the audience in poetry that is as diverse as it is uplifting.

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Tracey Slaughter’s ‘it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’

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it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out

 

*

(cream)

me & Karen Carpenter

blu-tacked heartthrobs

to the hangout

wall & laid down

under our own gatefold

smiles. The ridges of our mouths

tasted like corduroy & the hangout

door was a polygon of un-hinged

ultra-violet. We stole lines from stones

& rolled them like acid

checkers on each

other’s tongues, testing

the discs of our tucked spines as we

swallowed. We rippled all through

the magazines: there were morsels of cosmetic

Top Tip to live on. We loaded our skin

& rubbed in the limits like cream, microscoped

for layouts of handbag & muscle. We could

not switch off the mirrors: it turned out

since me & Karen C

were kids we’d sucked on dolls cross

legged & shaved their limbs

to size with the

zip of our teeth. Somewhere

our mothers had bleach

dreams. We lay & grinned

on the oblong of leftover

shagpile. The seventies tasted

like orangeade, like groovy wars & honeybrown

explosions in the wallpaper. Karen

Carpenter held my hand & walked me

through the detonating spirals.

She showed me where

we could feast

on tangerine horizons

 

©Tracey Slaughter

 

Tracey Slaughter is the author of deleted scenes for lovers an acclaimed collection of short stories (VUP, 2016). Her poetry and prose have received many awards including the international Bridport Prize (2014), two BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards, and the Landfall Essay Prize 2015. Her poetry cycle ‘it was the seventies when me & Karen Carpenter hung out’ was shortlisted in the Manchester Poetry Prize 2014, and her poem ‘breather’ won Second Place in the ABR Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2018. She teaches at Waikato University where she edits the journal Mayhem.

 

 

 

Poetry Day audio invite: An excellent celebration of poetry on Lately with Karyn Hay

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From RNZ:

We’re getting listeners to download our Voxpop app onto their smartphones and read a two minute poem so we can play it on air during the show all week.
If you write poems and would like to read one to be heard on Lately with Karyn Hay next week on RNZ National, we’d love to hear it. Download the RNZ Voxpop App from the Appstore or wherever you get your apps, and read a short poem of up to two minutes onto it. Simple as that. Make sure you say who you are, and what it’s called and – if you like, other deets such as where it’s been published. Karyn will play it on air next week on her show. We already have lots of poems to play, some from published authors, others from complete novices. Have a go! And please, share away!!

Instructions for the app:

1. To download the VoxPop app search for “RNZ VoxPop” in the app store on your iPhone or android phone.

You can find also find the app here:

VoxPop Apple
VoxPop Android

2. Give yourself a username and give the app permission to use the microphone.

3. Select the question you wish to answer and it will bring up the microphone to begin recording.

4. Touch the microphone in the red circle to begin recording and then touch it again to end recording. You can “replay” to listen back and if you are happy hit the “publish” button to send the reading to us.

If you have any issues or questions email me: ceinwen.curtis@radionz.co.nz

 

National Poetry Day

 

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Poetry Shelf audio Spot: Jeffrey Paparoa Holman reads ‘Toroa Feeding – Taiaroa Heads’

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Jeffrey Paparoa Holman reads ‘Toroa Feeding – Taiaroa Heads’, from Fly Boy (Steele Roberts: 2010).

 

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Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is a Christchurch poet and a writer of non-fiction, and senior adjunct fellow in the School of Humanities and Creative Arts at the University of Canterbury. Born in London, Jeffrey immigrated to New Zealand in 1950, growing up in the Devonport naval base in Auckland, then the coal mining town of Blackball on the West Coast of the South Island. He has worked as a sheep-shearer, postman, psychiatric social worker and bookseller.

Jeffrey’s poetry collection As Big as a Father was longlisted for the Montana New Zealand Book Awards (2003). In 2007, Jeffrey and Martin Edmond won the Copyright Licensing Limited Award giving them $35,000 each towards a non-fiction project. Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau, was published by Penguin in 2010. Jeffrey was the 2011 Waikato University Writer-in-Residence and in the same year shortlisted for the Ernest-Scott History prize, Australia. In 2012, he was awarded the Creative New Zealand University of Iowa Residency. The resulting book, The Lost Pilot: A Memoir was published by Penguin NZ (2013). In 2014, Jeffrey travelled to Berlin on a Goethe-Institute scholarship, pursuing research for his current project, a family history based on links with his German relations.

Jeffrey’s SHAKEN DOWN 6.3: Poems from the Second Christchurch Earthquake was published by Canterbury University Press in 2012. His most recent collection, Blood Ties: New and Selected Poems was published by Canterbury University Press in 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Gregory O’Brien’s ‘On drinking water’

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On drinking water

 

What besides

pure water a glass

of water contains:

 

of the sky nothing

necessarily, but always

something

 

of the cavernous

substratum

calcium, potassium

 

the wooden ladder we climb

down into the chasm

to swim.

 

©Gregory O’Brien

 

This poem was included in a painting of mine in the Water Project exhibition, curated by Shirin Khosraviani  at the Ashburton Art Gallery. The exhibition has just come down–but will be touring the nation over the next year or two. Pic of the painting, ‘Ode to a South Island water molecule’:

 

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Gregory O’Brien is currently living in Alexandra, Central Otago, where he is working on a new collection of poems and finishing Always song in the water, a book of travels in Northland and aquatic regions north of there.

 

 

 

 

nzepc presents poet Lola Ridge’s author page

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credit: New Zealand Illustrated Magazine

7.6 (Mar 1903): 424

 

visit page

 

nzepc presents Lola Ridge’s New Zealand and Australia, an author page that includes Ridge’s antipodean poetry and video of biographer Terese Svoboda reading and talking about Lola Ridge in Hokitika, where the poet lived 1880-1903.

This long overdue collection of writings, images and recordings in the one place will open up avenues into a poet who got lost in the shadows. Thanks again to the dedicated excavation work of Michele Leggott and Brian Flaherty.