Category Archives: Uncategorized

The IIML revives the National Schools Poetry Award for 2015

Leave a reply

Not sure of the details yet of fundraising but will keep you posted.
The IIML revives the National Schools Poetry Award for 2015

How you can help

Kia ora,

In 2003 Bill Manhire set up the only national poetry competition for high school students in Aotearoa. Last year we had to cancel the Award through a lack of funds. We have just launched a fundraising campaign to help revive an important literary event for young writers which each year has attracted more than 300 poets from across the country.

We’re not starting from scratch. We already have some support from Creative New Zealand. But we still have a large shortfall. With your help we can deliver a full Award, securing the workshop which is such a vital part of the experience, and promoting poetry throughout our high schools.

The Award is about much more than a winning poem. English teachers use the award to generate excitement and activity around Creative Writing. Ten shortlisted poets are flown to Wellington for a weekend of workshops with great poets hosted by the International Institute of Modern Letters. These young writers become ambassadors for creativity when they return to their schools.

The Award has made a difference. Students who have been shortlisted in previous Poetry Awards have gone on to study Creative Writing at tertiary level, won other national writing prizes for emerging writers and have been published in national magazines and literary journals.

Ruby Solly, from Western Heights High School, Rotorua, was the 2013 runner-up: ‘After I came back from the poetry workshop I became very committed to school and writing as I had been given a taste of what it was like to be with other writers and to see what kind of course or occupation I could end up in as a poet. The workshop showed me various ways of both ‘sparking creativity’ and refining my work to make it the best that it could be. These skills helped me to achieve publication in both Minarets (literary journal) and Redraft. It was definitely a highlight of the year for me.’

Margie McLaren, who teaches at Baradene College, writes: ‘The main benefit is the new confidence instilled in the students about the value of poetry in a utilitarian world which does not always attach the significance to poetry that it deserves . . . The Award is an affirmation of the many benefits of working with and celebrating language, and the special ways in which poetry can reflect human experience. The opportunity of entering for the Award has been a very positive and rewarding experience.’

We hope you can support us!

Ngā mihi nui,

Damien Wilkins
Director
International Institute of Modern Letters

It is a great list — Best NZ Poems is now live

1 Reply

Our current NZ Poet Laureate, Vincent O’Sullivan, has edited Best NZ Poems 2014. It is an eclectic taste of why New Zealand poetry is so very very good at the moment. Congratulations!

Here is a taste of Vincent’s introduction:

“Last year I joked, more accurately than I realised, that there are now more publishing poets in New Zealand than there are commissioned officers in our armed forces. And that was before I considered the three thousand poems that turned out for inspection in 2014. There’s at least a clarity if we’re just noting numbers. But talk of poetry may quickly fall into generalisation and defence of a corner, when it comes to poems that interest us deeply. We are always reading towards the elitism of our own taste, whether or not we quite put it like that. Geoff Page, the editor of the excellent Best Australian Poems 2014, wryly picks up on this when he writes, ‘Our time on earth is finite, and we are invariably hierarchical.’ It’s not a big step from there, of course, to the necessary corrective that we are always teetering on the verge of possible error.

Inevitably then, the discomfort other editors too have felt with that title, ‘Best Poems’. I wish it weren’t called that, because I have never heard a compelling argument to take it seriously. As a philosopher might say, it is a ‘category error’. Instead, what you have are twenty-five poems that I admired when I first came on them, continue to admire as I read them again, and am fairly certain that next time round they will still attract me with the particular kind of attention they give to how something is said, or for their technical elegance, or for the finally indefinable lift that good poetry provides. But let’s not make out that anything more definitive than personal choice is going on. One reader’s shortlist may be another reader’s rejects. Yet what a privilege, and a celebratory one, to be handed the chance to invite readers, ‘Look at these, look at their variety, their elan, their vigour—isn’t that something?’”

Full introduction here

Contents here

The National School Poetry Award will be running a Boosted fund-raising campaign to make up shortfall

Leave a reply

I had the pleasure to be a judge for The National Schools Poetry Award a few years ago and think it is a terrific feature of our writing landscape. Aside from the competition, the Wellington workshops are a great opportunity for young writers passionate about poetry and song writing to come together. I endorse this proposed campaign strongly. In my experience, writers came from all over New Zealand, under the umbrella of poetry, to share, to develop and to take off in myriad writing direction directions.

 

This just out from IIML:

The National Schools Poetry Award was set up by Bill Manhire in 2003. Last year we had to cancel the Award due to a lack of funds. This year Creative New Zealand has given us half what we need to run a full Award. To make up the shortfall we’re launching a Boosted fund-raising campaign. For most of the decade the Award has been running, we’ve been in the wonderful position of having private sponsors (Bell Gully at the start, then NZ Post). Times are tough and now we’re looking for wider support. We’ll be sending out links soon.

In the meantime here’s a great testimonial from Vanessa Scott, Head of English at Pakuranga College: ‘I believe this Award has lifted the profile of poetry within the school and shown the school community how young people can excel in literature and the arts, and that these achievements are just as valid as those won on a rugby field.’

Launch of two new books on and by Poet Laureate Vincent O’Sullivan

Leave a reply

Come and celebrate Vincent O’Sullivan’s writing:

Being Here: Selected Poems by Vincent O’Sullivan will be launched on

When: Wednesday 15 April 5.30pm–7.30pm at

Where: National Library of New Zealand (Ground Floor),
70 Molesworth Street, Thorndon, Wellington.

This is a double launch with Steele Roberts for Let the Writer Stand: the work of Vincent O’Sullivan, edited by Judith Dell Panny

Dame Fiona Kidman will launch both books at this event.

APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR 2015 FLASH FICTION COMPETITION

Leave a reply

APPLICATIONS OPEN FOR 2015 FLASH FICTION COMPETITION

Celebrating the shortest form of fiction writing
Closing date 30 April

For rules see the competition link
http://nationalflash.wordpress.com/

Read winning entries from previous years via the archives link
For any other info E: nationalflash@gmail.com

or this page

Screen shot 2015-03-13 at 9.25.31 AM

History Write Now: Free workshop

Leave a reply

HISTORY WRITE NOW: FREE WORKSHOP #1

Before workshop, select an artifact from Papakura Museum and start writing about it.
Can be fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, non-fiction…

Where: Sir Edmund Hillary Library function Room 209 Grt South Rd, Papakura

When: Saturday 21st March 9 15am – 12 00noon, spaces limited, book early
check website for details and to book a place

Titirangi Poets on Saturday March14th

Leave a reply

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’s Real Fake White Dirt — The poems overlap and interlace with a vibrant cutting bite

Leave a reply

Jess Bates book cover   Jess_author_photo_lo-res

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

Eleanor Catton’s Horoeka/ Lancewood Reading Grant kicks off with a fabulous essay by Amy Brown

Leave a reply

‘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.

‘Cultivating the Barren Planet’ by Amy Brown

  • ‘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.