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From NZ Festival: Landfall editor, Emma Neale, talks to ARTicle magazine about her reading life
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The first book to capture my imagination was
My mother read aloud a lot of AA Milne, Beatrix Potter to me and my sister when we were small; I loved the Narnia books; and one novel that still stands out for me was a copy of The Last of the Great Whangdoodles, by Julie Andrews Edwards – it was a book bought for the plane flight to America when I was 8. There was something momentous about it being a hardback, being written by the person I thought of as Mary Poppins, and its imaginative fantasy world, with moments of ludicrous word play (the sweet tooth – a tooth with a tiny flower tattooed on it) totally transported me.
Full article here
NZ poetry to set to music in Featherston
This year, the programme will offer a selection of Bill Manhire’s poems set as songs that speak to ice and the frozen north/south.
The themes and inspirations will be drawn from the albums Antarctica (‘These Rough Notes’) and a new album in progress that centres on themes from Nordic mythology and the frozen north (to be released as Bifrost (after the rainbow bridge that link the earth and the homeland of the gods, and that is celebrated in the Ragnarok)).
Composer and pianist, Norman Meehan, and vocalist, Hannah Griffin, have been collaborating for more than ten years, performing poetry as song. That collaboration has seen them work extensively with New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate, Bill Manhire. This year they will be joined by violinist, Martin Riseley.
Entry: Koha
This is an event involved in the Featherston Booktown Festival on Friday 11th, Saturday 12th & Sunday 13th May celebrating everything to do with books, writers and reading.
The three-day programme includes writing workshops; poetry readings; talks by leading authors and illustrators; and a book fair including stalls with rare and second hand books. There are also events specifically for children while this year’s festival has a special emphasis on poetry and young adult fiction.
details here
A poetry reading in Lyttelton: Avia, Brown and Hoey
Culture trip offers ten great NZ poets
‘While New Zealand is most famous for its astounding natural beauty, friendly people and now legendary cinematic prowess, it has also been called home by some truly exceptional poets. Here’s a top 10 of New Zealanders who’ve graced the world with their poetry.’
Go here for the ten poets.
This on Janet Frame whose poetry keeps pulling me back, year after year:
Janet Frame
Janet Frame was probably one of – if not the – greatest writers that New Zealand has ever produced. More than that, she was one of the most thought provoking and powerful writers of recent times. So much so that she was frequently spoken of as a Nobel Prize candidate for literature. She was more prolifically a writer of fiction – and that was what she will be chiefly remembered for – but she also published a single book of poetry.
If you’ve never read Frame’s work then you really should. She spent about a decade in mental hospitals after being incorrectly diagnosed with schizophrenia. Of this time she wrote: “I inhabited a territory of loneliness which … resembles the place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return, living, to the world bring, inevitably, a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure, and a lifelong possession …” Her poetry collection is called The Pocket Mirror.
This is a tip-of-the-iceberg kind of list! Iceberg is not exactly the best trope though.
Poetry Shelf Audio Spot: Chris Tse reads ‘I want things that won’t make me happy’
Chris Tse, ‘I want things that won’t make me happy’, He’s so MASC, Auckland University Press, 2018
Auckland University Press page
after the dawn service
Paula Green from The Baker’s Thumbprint, Seraph Press, 2013
Some poems from the Ockham NZ poetry finalists: Briar Wood’s ‘Kuramārōtini’
Kuramārōtini
So the story goes
that trickster Kupe
cheated his friend
into diving overboard
to free the lines
then paddled rapidly away.
Some hoa.
Best to know that
legendary navigators take huge risks
and do not make the safest companions.
Ākuanei—
she asked herself—
what do I want—
home in Hawaiki
or the travelling years?
What does he want—
the waka my father gifted—
Matahourua and me?
Or maybe unhappiness
with the man she’d married
drove her to the coast.
It’s possible—
she was curious and Hoturapa wasn’t
the kind of man who liked a journey
so she chose Kupe.
Yet even an inveterate traveller
might become weary in a waka
on the open sea,
looking out for landfall.
Travelling direct to her destination—
as the future loomed towards her
she named that radiant land
on the horizon
Aotearoa.
©Briar Wood from Rāwāhi
Briar Wood grew up in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Until 2012, she lived and worked as a lecturer in Britain. Welcome Beltane (Palores Press, 2012) made poetic links between family histories and contemporary places. The most recent collection Rāwāhi (Anahera Press, 2017) is focused through a return to Northland places where her Te Hikutū ki Hokianga, Ngāpuhi Nui whakapapa resonates with ecological concerns.
Monday Poem: by Gregory Kan
I wanted what happened to be something
I could know
and I wanted what I knew to be something
I could describe
something to which others could say
I know this
this happened to me also.
At the back of the room is a mirror
dreaming it’s become itself at last.
I keep walking
as if I know all the parts
and could play them.
©Gregory Kan
Gregory Kan is a writer and coder based in Wellington. His poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in literary journals such as the Atlanta Review, Landfall, The Listener, SPORT and Best New Zealand Poems. His poetry and philosophical works have also featured in exhibitions and publications for contemporary art institutions such as the Auckland Art Gallery, Artspace, the Adam Art Gallery, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Physics Room. Auckland University Press published his first book, This Paper Boat, in 2016. An earlier incarnation of This Paper Boat was shortlisted for the Kathleen Grattan Poetry Prize in 2013. The book was also a finalist in the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Best Poetry in 2017. He was a Grimshaw-Sargeson Fellow for 2017. His second poetry collection, Under Glass, is forthcoming.
Emma Neale is reading at Dog with Two Tails
NZ Poetry Shelf 