see here for details
(can we have this in Auckland please?)
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: The Old Shebang Book School Workshops
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Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Starling calls for submissions
Full details here
STARLING CONSIDERS WORK FROM NEW ZEALAND WRITERS UNDER 25 YEARS OLD AT TIME OF SUBMISSION.
Material must not have been published elsewhere in any form previously, and please do not send us simultaneous submissions (material you have submitted or intend to submit to more than one journal/competition at the same time).
Starling is published twice yearly. Submissions may be made at any time to be considered for the next issue, so the best time to send your work is when you feel it is ready. The editors will read and respond to all submissions as soon as possible, and in any event no later than 8 weeks following the cut-off date for the issue. The editors are unable to enter into correspondence regarding individual submissions or selections.
Cut-off dates for work to be considered for each issue are 20 April for the July issue and 20 October for the January issue.
Poetry: send up to six poems.
Prose: Send up to two pieces, each up to a 5,000 word maximum. Prose may include short stories, creative non-fiction, personal essays or anything else you can surprise us with.
Friday Poetry Talk: Paula Green on International Women’s Day
It is International Women’s Day – the sun is barely up, I am slumbering and musing on life as a woman, on the the past century’s impact on women, on what there is to celebrate and what there is to mourn, thinking of the women poets before me who wrote against the mainstream tide, who spoke out in myriad poetic ways, on my glorious discoveries in writing a big book on women’s poetry, and thinking sideways with breaking heart to the fact women still endure family violence, sexual abuse, workplace bullying, hardship, multiple daily demands, denigration on the grounds of gender, devaluing of a mothering role, and then again I am slumbering and musing and thinking of the women who are reshaping how to lead a nation (Jacinda Ardern and her kindness model), to work in prisons (from poet Blanche Baughan decades ago to novelist Pip Adam), to work with women’s refuges (novelist Sue Orr and poet Angela Andrews) and the women who are fiercely telling, and have told, their stories in the form of poetry in ways that shake our hearts and minds because they write and wrote from their own truths (Selina Tusitala Marsh, Tusiata Avia, Michele Leggott, Dinah Hawken, Emma Neale, Sarah Broom, Airini Beautrais, Nina Powles, Mary Stanley, Robin Hyde for a start), the women who write and wrote against the model poem and blast my head off (Alison Glenny, Elizabeth Welsh, Tayi Tibble, Joan Fleming, Amy Brown, Janet Frame, Courtney Sina Meredith, Anne Kennedy for a start), and then women who call me sister and are at the end of a phone and have my back and get me though one of the most challenging years of my life – I am slumbering and musing and thinking of you
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Lounge 66
Poetry Shelf audio spot: Elizabeth Welsh reads from ‘The mountain-daughter’s last years’
from ‘The mountain-daughter’s last years’ in Over There a Mountain, Hoopla Series, Mākaro Press, 2018
Elizabeth Welsh is an academic editor, poet and short fiction writer. Over There a Mountain, her debut poetry collection, was published by Mākaro Press in 2018 as part of the Hoopla series. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in journals and anthologies in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In 2012, she won the Auckland University Press – Divine Muses emerging poet prize. She lives in Titirangi with her husband and daughter.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Minarets call for submissions
Poetry Shelf Classic Poem: Elizabeth Smither picks Kendrick Smithyman
Cutty Sark
In company with Cutty Sark at sea
only once, on Himalaya off Brazil.
They sailed into the doldrums.
Day after day another sail came into sight,
would lose the wind, then idle.
Forty-two ships counted from the masthead.
Sent up with a glass at daybreak
to mark if anything stirred, reported
a clipper coming from the south carrying
canvas, the mate observing from the poop
later was first to say ’That’s Cutty Sark.’
They watched her through the day.
At last she was hull down, northing,
had sailed right through the might as well
have been derelict fleet, forty-plus of them,
some getting on for four weeks there.
That’s what poetry may be about, the impossible
part of it which achieves insubstantial
fact, as little material as Sybil Sanderson’s
G in alt or Fonteyn’s unpredicted change
(‘if you didn’t see why I did it when I did
it then it didn’t work’) not to be described;
when seen, if seen, in a kind of dumbshow
to strike dumbstruck any who looked out
hearing something beyond likely hearing,
seeing something not likely seen, gone
without leaving words for.
©Kendrick Smithyman from Imperial Vistas Family Fictions (AUP, 2002)
On the poem
If you’ve ever been aboard Cutty Sark at Greenwich your head will be full of
legends. The figurehead of Nannie, the witch, clutching the tail of a horse in
her fist; The fabulous races with its rival tea clipper, Thermopylae; the romance
of sail before the advent of steam. Kendrick Smithyman has captured all this
and more in his wonderful poem. It begins with the facts: location, doldrums,
number of ships becalmed. Then the manifestation, like an opera star, a
ballerina assoluta. Cutty Sark appears and those lovely nautical terms: ‘carrying
canvas’, ‘hull down, northing’; the other ships might as well be derelict; Cutty
Sark cuts right through them. The last stanza, the longest, turns to the mystery
of poetry, the sighting which not everyone sees, the thing ‘not to be described’
that strikes dumb anyone who is looking or hearing, something that is moving
away as fast as Cutty Sark.
Elizabeth Smither
Elizabeth Smither, an award-wi9nning poet and fiction writer, has published eighteen collections of poetry, six novels and five short-story collections, as well as journals, essays, criticism. She was the Te Mata Poet Laureate (2001–03), was awarded an Hon D Litt from the University of Auckland and made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2004, and was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2008. She was also awarded the 2014 Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature and the 2016 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poems, Night Horse (Auckland University Press, 2017), won the Ockham New Zealand Book Award for Poetry in 2018.
Celebrating the Ockham NZ Book Award poetry finalists
The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Are Friends Electric? by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press)
There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime by Erik Kennedy (Victoria University Press)
The Facts by Therese Lloyd (Victoria University Press)
Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Victoria University Press)
Great to see we have new sponsors, Mary and Peter Biggs, for the Poetry Category at the Book Awards.
I have featured all four finalists on my blog because I have found much to love about these books – this therefore is a moment of celebration. Of course there are books not here that I loved immensely. Poetry Shelf is whole-heatedly devoted to celebrating local books and the fact that I don’t have time to feature all my poetry loves is testimony to the excellent poetry we publish – through both big and small presses. Victoria University Press is becoming a flagship for NZ poetry – publishing at least 9 books a year of high quality and diverse scope. I applaud them for that. And all the other publishers issuing standout poetry (there are many) and the booksellers who put local poetry books on their shelves.
Thank you!
Congratulations to the four finalists! And to VUP.
Listen to Helen read two poems here
Helen’s book is a complex, satisfying read with enticing layers and provocative subject matter. It is a book of seeing, strolling, collecting; as though this poet is a bricoleur and the book is a cabinet of curious things. What I love in the poems is the shifting voice, the conversational tones. The poems that link grief with the effect of technology upon our bodies get under my skin. Most importantly there is a carousel of voices that may or may not be invented or borrowed but that make you feel something.
I ask if you would like a body.
You say, ‘No I’m beyond bodies now,
I’m ready to be fluid, spilling out all over.
I’m ready to spread myself so thin that I’m
a membrane over the world.’ I’m not ready.
I take off my socks and shoes and walk
over a patch of grass very slowly.
from ‘Spilling out all over’
Erik’s first-full length collection sparks with multiple fascinations, experience, thought, wit, politics, optical delights and aural treats. It is a book of harmonics and elastic thinking, and is a pleasure to read. The collection navigates eclectic subject matter but I was initially drawn to the interplay between a virtual world and a classical world. I began to muse on how poetry fits into movement between the arrival of the internet and a legacy of classical knowledge. I also love the idea of poetry reacting to collisions, intersections, juxtapositions. Interestingly when I was jotting down notes I wrote the words ‘detail’, ‘things’ and ‘juxtaposition’ but not just for the embedded ideas. Yes, the detail in the poems is striking in itself, but I was drawn to the ‘static’ or the ‘conversation’ or ‘kinetic energy’ between things as I read.
Two feet of snow at my parents’ place, in another season.
Here, the cicadas sing like Christian women’s choirs
in a disused cotton mill. Belief is a kind of weather.
I haven’t seen proper snow for three years.
from ‘Letter from the Estuary’
Therese’s new collection resides in a captivating interplay of chords. You could say that any poetry book delivers chords whether aural, visual or thematic, and in the light of ideas and feelings. This book does it to a stunning degree. Once you start hunting for them – whether in harmony or not, between poems or within a single example – the rewards are myriad. At the core of the book the title poem, the standout-lift-you-off-your-feet poem, achieves a blinding intensity: raw, surprising, probing, accumulative, fearless. I particularly love the surprising turns of ‘Mr Anne Carson’. Therese’s collection takes you deep into personal experience that gets hooked up in the poetry of another (Anne Carson), in matted ideas and the need to write as a form of survival. It makes you feel as much as it makes you think. It is a riveting read.
For three months I tried
to make sense of something.
I applied various methods:
logic, illogic, meditation, physical exertion,
starvation, gluttony. Other things too
that are not necessarily the opposite of one another,
writing and reading for example.
from ‘The Facts’
Tayi’s debut collection, Poūkahangatus, has already and understandably attracted widespread media attention. The poetry is utterly agile on the beam of its making; and take ‘beam’ as you will. There is brightness, daring and sure-footedness. The poems move in distinctive directions: drawing whanau close, respecting a matrilineal bloodline (I adore this!), delving into the dark and reaping the light, cultural time-travelling, with baroque detail and sinewy gaps. The collection charts the engagement of a young, strong woman with her worlds and words – and the poetic interplay, the sheer joy and magnetism of the writing, is addictive. I treasure this book for its kaleidoscopic female relations and views of women; and the way women are the vital overcurrents and undercurrents of the collection. Above all I loved the kaleidoscopic effect of the book; the way it is edgy and dark and full of light. The way it catches living within popular culture and within family relations, the way it carries sharp ideas and equally sharp feelings.
Poūkahangatus
in 1995 I was born and Walt Disney’s Animated Classic Pocahontas was
released. Have you ever heard a wolf cry to the blue corn moon? Mum has.
I howled when my mother told me Pocahontas was real but went with John
Smith to England and got a disease and died. Representation is important.
from ‘Poūkahangatus’
I am not a journalist punting on a winner – I am a poetry fan and have read all these books several times – any one of these books deserves to win. A toast from me x.
Poetry Noticeboard: Book School is where you learn about making books
Find out more about book school and hang with some amazing bibliophiles: Hannah Mettner, Charlotte Darling and Helen Rickerby!
Book School is an 8 week programme hosted by The Old Shebang and taught by local talent. It takes you through design, writing, editing and production to the book launch. The workshops are a series – come to all to create your own book. Or you can treat them as one-offs, we’re commitment-phobes too.
The launch is a chance to find out more, ask questions and take part in an informal discussion on all things book with Hannah, Charlotte and Helen.
Hannah Mettner is an award winning poet.
Charlotte Darling is a co-founder of The Old Shebang and has her Master’s in NZ print history
Helen Rickerby is a stalwart in the Wellington lit scene. She is a poet and publisher at Seraph Press.
Drinks and nibbles provided. All welcome.
The launch:
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: secondary school writing competition
The competition — what’s involved
Secondary students are required to respond to or interpret an image from the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library and produce either:
- a piece of creative writing
- an illustrated graphic story, or
- a written song/waiata.
Entries can be in English or te reo Māori.
This year’s theme is Tuia Encounters 250, which acknowledges 250 years since the beginning of sustained onshore meetings between Māori and Europeans in Aotearoa New Zealand. The commemoration is also about telling the stories and histories of the Māori communities who had been established in Aotearoa for hundreds of years and had voyaging traditions of their own.
details here
NZ Poetry Shelf 