Victoria University Press warmly invites you to this double launch for
There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime
by Erik Kennedy
&
Louder
by Kerrin P. Sharpe
5.30pm-7.00pm on Wednesday 29 August
at Scorpio Books, 120 Hereford St, Christchurch central.
All welcome.
Refreshments will be served.
All-day Wayside
He walks in, takes a seat,
eats his pie.
He smiles but doesn’t speak
until his farewell thanks.
He looks like someone off TV,
but they can’t agree on who.
Did you see how quick he ate it?
She shakes her head, disbelieving.
Nothing to drink, just pie
and free tomato sauce.
*
Not yet half-way,
a family squares off.
Soggy chips, nachos
missing a couple of ingredients.
Forbidden phones, the kids
play with their food.
An unhappier couple sits
at the next table.
The father sighs; the mother
brightens, and tunes in.
*
They closed the café
half an hour early.
The traffic had been quiet a while,
and the sausage rolls had gone.
Finding the door locked, he turns
and pans the street.
It’s the service station, then, packet of chips
and a chocolate bar.
He parks himself at the picnic table,
but the view doesn’t satisfy him.
©Kerry Hines
Kerry Hines is a Wellington-based poet, writer and researcher. Her collection Young Country (poems with photographs by William Williams) was published by AUP in 2014.
Poetry Shelf highly recommends this!
An event with Therese Lloyd Tayi Tibble Chris Tse Sam Duckor-Jones
Therese Lloyd, Tayi Tibble, Chris Tse and Sam Duckor-Jones
These poets write works of boldness with an acute eye on relationships in the modern world. Therese Lloyd’s The Facts, Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou), He’s So MASC by Chris Tse and People from the Pit Stand Up by Sam Duckor-Jones are diverse and exciting books of poetry. Each writer engages with language in innovative ways to explore and reimagine love, trust, intimacy and the politics of being. Come and hear the new wave of New Zealand poets in a reading and discussion chaired by poet and essayist Chris Price.
Writers on Mondays is presented by the International Institute of Modern Letters and The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.
Free event.
‘Beak/Nest’ was published in girl teeth.
Manon is a poet from Auckland, NZ. Her chapbook of poems and essays girl teeth was published by Hard Press in 2017. She has had poetry published in Minarets, Sweet Mammalian, Deluge, Brief, and Turbine.
My interview with Manon
‘The Spanish Connection’ for National Poetry Day
What would you write if I gave you five words? The Given Words poetry competition returns for the third year running with a new challenge for New Zealand’s Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2018.
This year the New Zealand poet Charles Olsen, who was recently awarded the III Poetry Award SxS Antonio Machado in Spain, has chosen five words from his translation of one of Spanish poet Antonio Machado’s poems, The Hospice. To participate you have to write a poem including all five words and send it in before midnight on 24 August, National Poetry Day.
The Given Words competition is free to enter and is open to all New Zealand citizens. Prizes will be awarded for the Best Poem and Best Poem by Under-16s. The winner of Best Poem will receive a copy of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook 2018, courtesy of Massey University Press and the winner of the Under-16 category will receive a copy of Slice of Heaven by Des O’Leary (due out in September) courtesy of Mākaro Press. The winning poems will also be translated into Spanish.
You will find the five words and full details of how to participate here where you can also read entries from previous editions. For teachers there is a creative lesson plan available to inspire pupils.
Charles Olsen, who will also judge the entries, says: ‘It is fun to see how the same five words can inspire such a diverse range of poems. Take the words for a walk, mull them over and see what they say to you. I look forward to reading all the entries!’
Further Info:
NZ Given Words blog
Facebook events
NZ Poetry Day
Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day #NZPoetryDay announces its largest ever celebration of poetry today, with more than 135 events programmed to take place around New Zealand.
Held annually on the fourth Friday in August, National Poetry Day sees award-winning poets join poetry enthusiasts from all over the country in a marathon programme of poetry readings, performances, workshops and competitions.
On August 24, poetry will be making news – and noise – in dozens of cities, towns and rural areas across New Zealand. Expect to encounter poetry in expected and unusual places – on public transport, street posters and footpaths; in cafés, bars, bookshops, and libraries; and at schools, university campuses, retirement villages, marae, theatres and community centres.
The day will include readings with 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards poetry category finalists Briar Wood and Sue Wootton in Auckland and a workshop with winner Elizabeth Smither in Christchurch. All four 2018 Ockham poets, including Tony Beyer, feature in Phantom Billstickers’ countrywide super-size Poetry on Posters campaign and will also be filmed for a social media campaign celebrating poetry.
New Zealand Books Awards past poetry winners Jenny Bornholdt, Kevin Ireland, Anne Kennedy, Bill Manhire, Greg O’Brien and Brian Turner will also take part in events around New Zealand. Alongside established poets, emerging voices and student poets will take part in open mic sessions and spoken-word performances. There will be a host of poetry contests for writers of all ages and many of the programmed events will be open to the public and free admission.
Among the scores of events taking place from the far north to the deep south of Aotearoa are: Rodney District’s live human art/poetry installations and poems written on the sand, to be captured by drone and made into a movie; Auckland’s ‘love letters to Auckland’ event – a multimedia performance by local poets, rappers, storytellers and dancers; Taranaki’s ‘Pop Up Poetry’ exhibition of poems on sticky notes; Wellington’s ‘Where the Wild Words Are’, in the company of local poets who will bewitch, berate, busk and bewilder; Nelson’s ‘Poetry Fridge Door and Poetry Generator’; Christchurch’s ‘Speed Date an Editor’; Dunedin’s gala poetry evening; and Central Otago’s evening of poetry on the theme of rivers with Brian Turner, Michael Harlow, Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien and Liz Breslin. There will even be an international poetry event at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
If you can’t get along to an event, why not enter The 24-Hour Poem Competition? Your challenge is to write a poem of no more than 30 lines, containing ten supplied words. The catch is: you only have the 24 hours of Poetry Day itself to write and submit your poem.
For full details about all the events taking place on Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, including places, venues, times, tickets and more, go here.
Established in 1997, National Poetry Day is a popular fixture on the nation’s cultural calendar and one that celebrates discovery, diversity and community. For the third year in a row, Phantom Billstickers support National Poetry Day through their naming rights sponsorship. In the lead up to August 24, they will bring poetry to New Zealand communities with a mighty street poster campaign.
Rx
I am ill because of wounds to the soul. D. H. Lawrence
Iceberg, Peace, American Beauty: the blooms
smack the window in the summer storm, hammered,
blotted, falling early in this discontent. Now
is become the only season. Patients all, we ail.
Our wounds are deep, our fractures dirty, complex,
irreducible. Compound upon compound. O rose,
we are sick! Thinner and thinner our skins
in these plague years. The lesions fester and we scratch.
Small words buzz and swarm, stripping the tongue
of buds. Our mouths are full of boils. An excess of bile
mocks the liver. This contagion of crimson rage,
these wails building. Eros, thou art sore.
Our memories fail, fatally. Too much for
get. Thus, prescribe ourselves a salve
for give. Mix in the blue bowl all our howls
and mutters. Add the lullabies, waiata, sagas,
ballads, odes. Copy and collate
the scrolls; trace the stories written slow
by candlelight and goose quill on illuminated manuscripts.
Resurrect the many, many ways
of saying sister, brother. Compose
our selves. Patience, all. Make open refuge
for the human heart and place the books within.
Read, and repeat. Read, and repeat. Let settle.
©Sue Wootton
Note: The medical shorthand for ‘treatment’ is Rx, which derives from the Latin imperative recipe (‘take’). ‘Rx’ was commended in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (judged by Mark Doty).
Sue is a a PhD candidate in creative practice at the University of Otago, researching how literature articulates what it means to be able or disabled, ill or well. Her most recent publications are her debut novel, Strip (Mākaro Press), longlisted in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and the poetry collection, The Yield (Otago University Press), a finalist in the 2018 Ockham NZ Book Awards. Her poem ‘The Swim’ has recently been longlisted in the 2018 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize.
NZ Poetry Shelf 