Short list 4th April
Winner 12th June
The locals:
2019 International Dublin Literary Award long list announced (a few New Zealanders)
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Monday Poem: Steven Toussaint’s ‘The Neoplatonist Theatre’
THE NEOPLATONIST THEATRE
In the neoplatonist theatre
audience exists, a couple
of victims of the new
conscription, waiving
all their outrage,
waiting in the cockpit.
One’s a former gallery
serf, feeding frozen
grapes to animals
not born to work
their mandibles that way.
One expresses gently
the gland whence prayers
discharge, a man
who sits and glares
at his companion, lost
in the foreignness
and novelty of names
his gland would praise
but can’t forgive.
Some overeager, out-
of-tune apologist
announces tea
and biscuits in the vestibule.
Neither budge, rooted
in middlebrow certainty
that a single righteous
and timely volume
of samizdat applause, lodged
like a socket wrench
in the uptake, would stay
the launch of a still
more secretive
and stylized soliloquy.
©Steven Toussaint
Steven Toussaint was born in Chicago in 1986. His books include Fiddlehead (Compound Press, 2014) and The Bellfounder (The Cultural Society, 2015). He lives with his wife, the writer Eleanor Catton, in Auckland.
5 readings from VUP’s Short Poems of New Zealand
Short Poems of New Zealand, edited by Jenny Bornholdt, Victoria University Press, 2018
Angela Andrews reads ‘Grandparents’
Tusiata Avia reads ‘Waiting for my brother’
Lynley Edmeades reads ‘The Order of Things’
Brian Turner reads ‘Sky’
Albert Wendt reads ‘Night’
VUP page
For Michelle
Poet Alice Miller is the winner of the Landfall Essay Competition 2018
Alice Miller, a New Zealand writer based in Germany, is the winner of the Landfall Essay Competition 2018.
Her winning entry ‘The Great Ending’ impressed with “its teeming yet elegantly controlled catalogue of international and national, Pākehā and Māori historical events”, says competition judge and Landfall editor Emma Neale.
Alice Miller says her essay began to write itself about five years ago, when she was working on another project about the home front.
“It is indebted to the National Library’s amazing Papers Past archive, which I quietly believe is one of the best things on the internet.”
The judge’s report noted her essay stood out for the lyricism of the prose, which “glided from moments of understated comedy to those of stark horror”.
“The essay uses the catalogue and a lyrical style to evoke complexity and simultaneity — it achieves both lament and a kind of guarded eulogy. It lifts its focus to the retreating horizon of history, pulling it closer in the way it colours the telling with plangent grace,” says Emma Neale.
Second prize winner was Susan Wardell’s ‘Shining Through the Skull’ and third place was awarded to Sam Keenan’s ‘Bad Girls’.
There were two highly commended essays: ‘Aquae Populus’ by Toby Buck and ‘That’s Not a Māori Name: Penelope Fitzgerald’s Aotearoan adventure’, by Derek Schulz.
A further five essayists were commended: Bryan Walpert (‘One Eye Open’), Justine Whitfield (‘The Klimt Bubbles’), Kirsteen Ure (‘Puriri Moth’), Jocelyn Prasad (‘Uncut Cloth’) and Nadine Hura (‘A Thing of the Heart’).
Alice Miller wins $3000 and a year’s subscription to Landfall.
The winning entries will be published in Landfall 236, available later this month. Landfall is published by Otago University Press.
Around 90 anonymous entries were received in this year’s competition, an increase of around a third on the 2017 competition.
For more information about the Landfall Essay Prize and past winners, go here
Alice Miller’s new poetry collection, Nowhere Nearer, is published by Auckland University Press and Liverpool University Press.
See my interview with Alice here
2 opportunities at Massey University, Palmerston North
Creative Writing 2019 at Manukau Institute of Technology
A poem from Pat White’s Watching for the Wingbeat: new and selected poems
There’s much more going on here
for Hone Tuwhare
From where we sat talking the hills take on a painter’s
tone, light and dark, valley and ridge, bush at night
with the small owl sounding far enough away. Both of us
a bit deaf, we shout observations across the back porch
two old gramophones not quite used to listening. Today
stumbling across that ridge, half-lit seen at dusk last night
it’s different, each step testing mud-slide sheep track
fallen trees, such subtle geomorphology, rough slopes facing
north, telling how little distant perspective gets to know
of that hare bursting from beside your foot, fooling
with your sharp-eyed observations about literature
of landscape borrowed from an unpaid library book.
Old Bess the bitch would have given chase once, but today
she thinks better of activities meant for puppied bounce
the silliness of charging off up hill when there’s perfectly
good bones back home rotting under the macrocarpa
it’s enough to be out there, reading the breeze. I watch
you stop, lay a flat hand against grass bruised and bent
by the hare’s body warmth, her form hid beside dead thistle
stalks, dry and buff coloured in winter, it is still warm.
This hare has learned to be elusive, still, till instinctive
urge to flight has her bursting away, past the skylark’s nest
through the rusting fence, pushing the heart’s capacity
to run. We romance the hills from our chairs, our beer
out of the sun’s heat, the rain’s beat, knowing
next to nothing. The risk of leaving our bones out there.
©Pat White Watching for the Wing Beat: new and selected poems Cold Hub Press, 2018)
Pat White is a writer and artist living near Fairlie. He has an MFA from Massey University, and an MA in Creative Writing from IIML Victoria University. In August 2018 Roger Hickin’s Cold Hub Press published Watching for the Wingbeat; new & selected poems. In 2017 his biography/memoir of the teacher, author, environmentalist, Notes from the margins, the West Coast’s Peter Hooper, was published. An exhibition Gallipoli; in search of family story has been shown in museums and art galleries a number of times in recent years.
Cold Hub Press page
Sport 46 launch
We don’t usually hold a launch for Sport but issue 46 is too crazy good not to. Please come celebrate!
With readings from Bill Manhire, Rose Lu, Jane Arthur, Oscar Upperton, Anthony Lapwood, Freya Daly Sadgrove and Nikki-Lee Birdsey.
Thursday 22 November (that’s next week!)
6pm-7.30pm
at Vic Books, Kelburn Parade, Victoria University of Wellington.
2 poems and a conversation – All of Us by Adrienne Jansen and carina gallegos
homework
she waits
for her children
to fall asleep
before she opens
their schoolbags
and studies their homework.
they learn
so much faster
and she’s falling behind.
they speak her language
with an accent now
and she can’t
understand what they say
when they speak
among themselves
in their new
mother tongue.
carina gallegos
Lost in translation
Lev has learnt
the word in English.
Rabbit.
He points at the book
and says in his thick accent
‘Rabbit.’
It’s freezing cold,
frost on the window.
‘Rabbit’ comes out
in a rush of smoke.
‘No’ I say,
‘that’s not a rabbit.’
I point at the book.
‘It’s a pig.’
He breathes heavily,
clouds of white steam
rising around him.
He goes to the window.
A dog is running
on the white grass.
‘Rabbit!’ he shouts
‘Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!’
and bursts into tears.
Adrienne Jansen
©Adrienne Jansen and carina gallegos All of Us, Landing Press, 2018
Watch a clip from the book launch
Adrienne and carina gave me kind permission to post their conversation which forms the introduction to the collection.
Where did these poems come from?
Adrienne: I wanted to write a series of poems from two perspectives: what does someone from Syria, for example, experience when they go to a railway station, compared to what I experience going to a railway station? What would happen if we each wrote about our experience of the railway station?
So I started to write a series of poems that were about ‘there’ and ‘here’. One of the reasons it appealed to me was because I didn’t want to take on the voice of the migrant or refugee. I might be recording the stories and experiences they’ve told me, but I’m not taking on their voice.
Now you can talk about where your poems came from.
carina: my poems aren’t imagined either, they’re just sharing the experiences that people have shared with me. they’re the observations of ‘here’ and ‘there’, when you work with people or communities from refugee backgrounds, you hear these stories over and over again. the stories go on for days and people experience them in their heads every day, and to tell them in a poetic context brings them alive in a more succinct way. but we don’t get to experience the ‘there’, we only experience the ‘here’.
coming from a migrant background it was easy for me to relate to some of their stories too.
Adrienne: Both of us are retelling the stories that we’ve heard and heard and which we think are very important to pass on, and in this case, we’re recording them in poetry.
carina: exactly. it’s storytelling poetry.
that was the other part of the vision – that we were going to write poetry that was accessible to a wide range of people. it wasn’t conceptual poetry, it wasn’t difficult, it was poetry that a lot of people could read and understand, even if there were other layers of meaning, even if there were stories between the lines. there was something there, regardless of whether you could read between the lines or not.
Adrienne: Tell me why you don’t use capital letters.
carina: because i don’t like capital letters.
Adrienne: Because … ?
carina: ever since i was a little girl i’ve had an issue with authority (that’s a longer conversation). i don’t mean for the lack of capital letters to be an obstacle for people. it’s quite common for poets to play with capital letters and punctuation and with the aesthetics of letters and words. i love full stops and commas and use them in a very traditional way. i just don’t like capital letters. i don’t even use them to spell my name.
Adrienne: So that was a challenge for us, how to combine two quite different styles. I use capitals and punctuation because I see them as a kind of small signpost to the reader and a kind of fine-tuning for the writer. That would be my approach.
But there are other differences in style too. Like yours – would you describe your style as Latin American style? It’s more discursive.
carina: we talk a lot. latin americans, i mean.
Adrienne: You talk a lot. Right. And of course, New Zealanders don’t talk so much. This could be very interesting!
carina: we’re long-winded people.
Adrienne: That’s why you’ve got longer poems than mine. We’re both being true to type.
carina: and there’s also the weather factor. we’ve been told that in the poems it rains a lot. the weather here is not tropical. if we lived in central america or south america, we’d be writing about mugginess or bad hair days. but in new zealand the challenge is the weather, even for people who were born here. it’s the cold weather that challenges people.
Adrienne: So that’s why it rains a lot.
carina: that’s why it rains a lot.
Adrienne: In the poems.
carina: because in new zealand it rains a lot.
From All of Us, published by Landing Press November 2018
Carina Gallegos has a background in journalism and development studies. She grew up in Costa Rica, moved to New Zealand thirteen years ago, and has worked with refugee-background communities since 2011. She lives in Wellington with her family.
Adrienne Jansen has published numerous books (poetry, novels, nonfiction). She teaches on the Creative Writing Programme at Whitireia Polytechnic. For ten years she was part of the writing team at Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum. She lives in Wellington.
NZ Poetry Shelf 