TITIRANGI POETS
guests: BERNARD BROWN & PAUL DOESBURG
Where: Titirangi Library, 500 Sth Titirangi Rd
When: Saturday March 14th 2 00pm – 3 45pm
MC Amanda: amandajeason@gmail.com or ph 849 8114
MC Piers: wwandd.co.nz or ph 524 6927
http://www.aucklandlibraries.govt.nz/EN/Events/Events/pages/titirangipoetsgroup.aspx
monthly on the second Saturday
Jess Holly Bates is a Pākehā poet, particularly a spoken-word poet, and has studied English and Chemistry at The University of Auckland. Her Masters Thesis (she gained First Class Honours) is entitled ‘Revolting Others; Disgusted Bodies as a Function of Colonial Continuity in Aotearoa NZ and the Pacific.’ She did a Rising-Voices workshop which spurred her desire to write spoken word poetry. Her first piece, ‘P.I.P: Pakeha Identity Poetry’ was performed at the Rising Voices Slam in 2011. Since then she has performed in various places; most notably, REAL FAKE WHITE DIRT, which was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (with a four-star review).
Anahera Press (publisher is Kiri Piahana Wong) published REAL FAKE WHITE DIRT in 2014 and it is a terrific debut. It is the first Pākehā poet that this press has published and I can see why Jessie was chosen. The poems overlap and interlace with a vibrant cutting bite. This is wide open, loud politics that navigates identity issues face on. Tough. Uncompromising. Edgy. I loved the urgent challenging punch of ideas but I also love the way the words on the page split and weave into poetry. There is glorious word play at work. On the page, phrases flit and float. You have to keep your eyes roving as this is not conventional poetic forms/form (although not exactly unconventional as you can trace back examples of this for decades). I see it as poetry misbehaviour. There is enviable rhyme (taxes/ masses, bleached/ keen, schtict/ poetic). There is leapfrogging assonance and the aural allure of repetition. Repeated things gain flesh in shifting contexts. Sound enacts political punctual marks. Everything comes back to the white-hot core that this is poetry from the heart and that vital ideas percolate above the surface. Wonderful!
PS: It is a gorgeous production with a striking black cover and a fake patch of grass that in the manner of poetry could equally be something else.
Anahera press page here
‘The conditions, in the wake of this reading, are ideal for beginning to cultivate my own barren planet, to write my new poem, and for that I am very grateful.’ Amy Brown 2015
Eleanor Catton on the grant she has established and to date funded (contributions are welcome!):
‘I established the Horoeka / Lancewood Reading Grant to give New Zealand writers the means and opportunity not to write, but to read, and to share what they have read with their colleagues in the arts.
I hope that this endeavour will challenge our tendency to measure the value of art in the proof of artistic production and productivity, and that it will restore value to the crucial but in many ways unquantifiable activity of reading. Most of all, however, I hope that the grant will encourage free and curious discussion about books.
Each grant is worth NZD$2000, with half awarded at the beginning of the reading period, and half at the end, whereupon the recipient submits a short essay that discusses what they have read and what they thought about it. These essays are then published on this site along with a bibliography.’
For the rest of her statement see here.
The inaugural recipient of this timely project is Amy Brown whose debut poetry collection, The Odour of Sanctity, was published in 2013. She teaches at the University of Melbourne where she was awarded a PhD in Creative Writing.
‘For the last year or so, I have been drawn to news items such as:
The Country Fire Authority implores residents in rural areas to make Fire Plans so that when it becomes imperative to leave their homes the temptation to stay may be over-ruled by a rational list of instructions.
Asylum seekers intercepted in Australian waters are being stripped of their personal effects — hearing aids, spectacles, prosthetic limbs and medication — on arrival at detention centres.
Hundreds of Mars One applicants are hoping to participate in a small Dutch not-for-profit organisation’s plan to send four civilians on a one-way mission to Mars in 2026.
These stories have struck me, I believe, because I’ve been interpreting them as extreme extensions of my own expatriate situation. In 2014, I applied for permanent residency in Australia, married an Australian, and so began legally relinquishing New Zealand as my home. My country of birth was not being consumed by fire tornadoes or bombed to pieces; I was not fleeing anything. Nor was I choosing to fly for seven months to a planet whose atmosphere could not support my life. However, these news stories gave me a new, oblique angle from which to question when and why I felt ‘at home’ in Australia, how that affected my connection to New Zealand, and, generally, what it means to belong to a place.’
You can read the rest of her essay here.
Current recipients include Craig Cliff, Alex Lodge, Rosabel Tan and Alex Mitcalf Wilson.
The second issue of Ika is out. This is a journal devoted to Literature and the Arts, is published by the Faculty of Creative Arts at Manukau Institute of Technology and is currently edited by Anne Kennedy.
This not your run-of-the-mill journal as it included a big book pasted inside a small book, a poster, a handful of postcards and a sticker. The postcards are terrific; they have a graffiti image sourced by Caryline Borerham and poems by Semira Davis, Courtney Sina Meredith, Alice Miller and Richard von Sturmer.
The look of the complete package is fresh. The line up of contributors on the literary front diverse and includes students at MIT and from Hawaii along with familiar poets. I am not sure what the submissions policy is but the guest poets include Emma Neale, Steven Toussaint, Helen Rickerby, Grace Taylor, Lee Posna, Daren Kamali, Jeffrey Paparoa Holma, David Eggleton, Michelle Elvy, Geoff Cochrane, Sue Fitchett, Johanna Emeney, Kirsti Whalen. That gives you an idea of the range of voices and styles.
A couple of personal favourites: I loved the curl and slide of Lee Posna’s ‘Island bay Blues,’ but two other poems really stood out for me. Steven Toussaint’s suite of ‘cradle’ poems are joy to read because the musical pitch is utterly rewarding. You follow the clash and link of vowels and consonants and fall upon tonal bridges, arcs and diversions. Wonderful. Emma Neale’s poem, ‘Pokpo,’ underlines how assured her writing has become. This poem reads in the ear so sweetly, yet it shocks and startles. It is risk taking not in terms of language that bends but in the degree of confession. And that confession is slipped in the cracks of the poem, subtly, surprisingly. It is a knock-out poem.
Long may this journal continue.
Subscription enquiries to: The Editor ikajournal@gmail.com
First prize of $500 in the fifth annual Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize for 2015 has been won by Dunedin poet Sue Wootton, for her poem ‘Luthier’. Second prize ($250) was awarded to Jessica le Bas, of Nelson, for ‘Four Photographs from a Window’.
Alexandra poet Michael Harlow, who judged the competition, said in his report that ‘Luthier’ was ‘a poem alive in its language’ and ‘a fine pleasure to read aloud’; and he described the second-prize-winning poem as ‘a poem of celebration, accurate to its truth-telling’.
Michael Harlow listed six further entries as highly-commended. The poets are Carolyn McCurdie (Dunedin), Jillian Sullivan (Omakau), Michael Morrissey (Auckland), Karen Zelas (Christchurch), and Pat White (Fairlie).
Around two hundred entries are received each year for the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition, from writers working in a number of different countries. Entries are judged ‘blind’, with the judge being completely unaware of the poets’ identities until after the final decisions have been made.
The prize-winning poems and the judge’s report will be published in the May issue of Landfall, and along with the highly commended poems, will be posted on the Caselberg Trust web-site after publication of the journal. Awards will be presented at a function at the University Bookshop Dunedin on Thursday 9 April.
Photo by Nicholas Walton-Healey
Poetry for Cordite 51: TRANSTASMAN is guest-edited by Bonny Cassidy
I’ll be looking for poems that can swim, fly, float, sail and possibly even skim across the very short and very deep difference between Australia and New Zealand.
Have at the current.
Poems for this issue will be partially by invite and selected anonymously (but we’ll be taking about double the usual number of poetry we do in our issues). Robert Sullivan will also curate an e-chapbook of contemporary Māori poetry. Please submit only once, with a maximum of three (3) poems in one (1) document … but first, please read the submission guidelines
for web page see here
Tim Jones’s review of Cinema by Helen Rickerby, Bird Murder by Stefanie Lash and Feathers Unfettered by Karen Zelas is now up at Landfall Review Online here.
Helen Rickerby has just made a new web page for the Journal of NZ Literature. Link here.
‘The Journal of New Zealand Literature (JNZL) is the only international, fully peer-reviewed journal devoted to New Zealand literary studies. It is edited within the English Programme of Victoria University of Wellington. Read more about JNZL…
We welcome submissions on any aspect of New Zealand literature in English. Read more about submissions…
JNZL is calling for expressions of interest in a fully funded special issue for 2016. Read more about the special issue… ‘
A letter from Hinemoana Baker on current support for her funding campaign via Boosted:
‘Three quarters.
I still can’t find the proper words to say thank you for this.
I am over 3/4 of the way towards my fundraising goal to allow me to keep writing my family memoir ‘Dear Mother Basillise’.
I am still blown away by the number of people who say ‘sorry it couldn’t be more’ when they write their messages alongside their donations.
I am beyond stoked that there are 133 of you who feel strongly enough about me and this project to give so much towards it already.
There are 15 days to go to reach our target of $15,000.
As you may or may not know, unless I reach the full total, all the donations are bounced back to the generous folks who gave them.
So – please give something if you can, and/or feel free to share this link with anyone who might be interested in supporting ‘Dear Mother Basillise’:
NZ Poetry Shelf 