Category Archives: Uncategorized

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Sarah Jane Barnett’s ‘Playing Dead’

Leave a reply

 

 

 

Sarah Jane Barnett is a poet and freelance editor. Her poetry has been published in Aotearoa, Australia, and the US. Sarah’s debut collection A Man Runs into a Woman was a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her second collection WORK was released in October 2015. She is currently working on a third collection, a poetic memoir about how raising her son makes her confront her own childhood trauma. She lives in Wellington, Aotearoa, with her family.

 

‘Playing Dead’ was published in Turbine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Poem: Nicola Easthope’s ‘Blue Night’

Leave a reply

 

 

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

Leave a reply

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

Leave a reply

 

 

Te Henga, 2017.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jacket 2: Vaughan Rapatahana in conversation with Bob Orr

Leave a reply

 

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.

 

Visible Ink seeks submissions

Leave a reply

full details here

Visible Ink wants your words, your art, and your hot take on Trace — the theme of our thirtieth edition. An annual literary anthology, we are accepting submissions of fiction and non-fiction, poetry and visual art. All published contributors will be paid — see below for rates.

The trace edition:

As both verb and noun, the word ‘trace’ invokes the dialectical nature of human connection. We trace the call, or we hang up. A trace is a mark of existence or passing. It is a harness-strap. It is a shadowed past tense that we cast unwillingly or pursue in search of the present. It is the memory of a thing, not the thing itself. A trace is scarcely discernible. It is latent, yet often imperative. We trace things to the fount, or wish the trail cold. A trace is a bullet whose course is made visible by a spoor of flames or smoke, used to assist in aiming. It is a warm gun: did you shoot or were you shot?