Selina Tusitala Marsh has edited Best NZ poems 2017 – the Pasifika way

1 Reply

Screen Shot 2018-05-02 at 10.03.51 AM.png

 

Yes!  What a breath of outstandingly fresh air. I love Selina’s approach to picking the poems – you need to read the whole piece here

And it is a crackingly good selection. I can’t wait to read and listen.  Some of my favourite reads from 2017 included. Content’s page here

 

From the intro:

‘I dedicate this last 12 months of choosing the ‘best’, to my friend and mentor, the late Associate Professor Teresia Teaiwa, whose Memorial Scholarship Fund continues to help give Pasifika peoples a choice.

Everybody loves free books (excluding my sons). I accepted this invitation to judge 2017’s batch of newly published poems because frankly, I wanted the books. I wanted to be able to map the latest constellation of Aotearoa’s poetry stars and navigate the various poetic journeys being offered from a particular time and place. I wanted to be inspired. After reading what seemed like, say, 3000 plus poems, I got what I wanted.

But I soon discovered that this was not an easy task. It wasn’t just a matter of reading a few poems and picking the ones I liked ‘best’. The sheer variety of form, tone, subject matter and lyricism soon problematised what I had thought was the ‘best’. Many a judge before me has acknowledged the impossibility of the task ahead. Most point to the bright sticky pink bubble gum of subjectivity that clicks and pops in the mouth whilst reading: ‘click, I like this one; pop, don’t like this one. Blow, I’m in my own bubble anyway.’ Presumably, this lets one off the hook. But I soon discovered that what I liked was too small a cage in which to read these free-range poems—just to further mix my metaphors in the post-euphoria of having climbed the Mt Everest of 2017’s poetic metaphors. Note to self: stop with the tongue in cheek stuff and get on with the serious business of writing this Introduction! (Aah, but whose tongue and in whose cheek?)

As a Pasifika Poet-Scholar, I wanted a more egalitarian way to ‘judge’ the ‘best’. I wanted to do something different, more collaborative, more epistemologically Pasifika—recalling Sia Figiel’s famously poetic passage nestled in the middle of her novel, Where We Once Belonged:

there is no ‘I’
only ‘we’

So, I decided to seek out the opinions, responses, reactions of the ‘we’ for a select numbers of poems that I hadn’t liked enough to include in my measly top 25. I gave out books and I gave out poems (with the payment that they could keep what they liked). My readers? Fellow Waiheke Trail Tribe runners, real estate agents, book club members, students, teachers, family members, people at the bus stop I saw often enough to bug. I asked them to give me 1-3 poems they liked and why.’

 

Selina with fue - 2 FLS.JPG

 

Selina at the Tokotoko Laureate event.  Photo credit:  Fiona Lam Sheung

 

 

 

 

 

At Cordite Review: Anahera Gildea’s Bone Shame: Grief, Te Ao Māori, and the Liminal Space where Translation Fails

Leave a reply

‘Wherever there is a need for translation there is discomfort – a chasm that must be scaffolded, or connected by branch, bond or bridge. There is almost a desperation in the need to both enlighten and to be understood. In te reo Māori (the Māori language) the concept of te wheiao represents this liminal or transitional space. It is a term that has appeared in our incantations of mythology from the beginning of memory. It is a phrase that acknowledges a place between places, a third space, a chamber of waiting and uncertainty and one that has no set time, nor prescribed gestation period. It is also a place that is unavoidable and through which we must travel in order to gain full understanding. It is after darkness, but before light. It is the birth of all ideas. It can be the site of great discovery, or rampant anxiety, but regardless, it is a necessary place. There is no other way to reach te ao marama (the world of light). And it is in no way associated with shame.’

This is essential reading and you can read it here

 

 

 

 

Phantom Billstickers pay tribute to the nation’s poets as they announce National Poetry Day 2018

Leave a reply

 Screen Shot 2018-04-16 at 2.19.38 PM.png

 

New Zealand is a nation of poets and poetry lovers. Last year Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day broke all records, with 120 events taking place in cities and towns all over the country.

This year, Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day (#NZPoetryDay) will be held on Friday 24 August 2018 and is set to be even bigger. Expect chances to read poetry on public transport, street posters and footpaths; to hear it in special events in cafes, bars, bookshops, libraries, schools, universities, theatres, clubs and community centres; and to enter your own work in to poetry competitions for all ages.

 Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2018 will feature a range of events and activities, from readings headlined by Poet Laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh to Slam Poetry contests to events that celebrate local writers and places. David Merritt’s ‘Poetry in a Box’ will see poetry bricks in 25 different locations around the country – in schools, cafés, libraries, galleries – culminating in a co-ordinated “simultaneous reading” on the day.

 

The cut-off date for organisers to register events and apply for seed funding is Wednesday 23 May 2018 at 5:00pm. Events can be registered online via this link. For enquiries about registering an event or applying for seed funding, please contact National Administrator Harley Hern on email poetryday@nzbookawards.org.nz.  For full information go here. 

Held on the fourth Friday in August, National Poetry Day is a popular fixture on the nation’s cultural calendar. For the third year Phantom Billstickers are supporting this through a naming rights sponsorship, and plan to proudly ‘splash poetry across New Zealand’ in the weeks leading up to National Poetry Day with a massive street poster campaign.

Phantom Billstickers NPD 2018 Poster.jpeg

 

Paula Morris, National Poetry Day spokesperson for the New Zealand Book Awards Trust said, “Last year’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations brought out more great poets, charismatic performers and avid readers than ever before. Poetry has the power to speak to and for us, from the personal to the political – to mark our big occasions, comment on our society, and challenge the way we see the world. National Poetry Day is a chance to encounter poetry in unexpected places, and to engage with the many things it’s able to do and say.”

The poetry winner of the prestigious Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, announced on Tuesday 15 May 2018, will be available to take part in selected events on Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, as will the other poetry finalists. The shortlisted writers for the Poetry prize are: Tony Beyer (New Plymouth), Elizabeth Smither (Taranaki), Briar Wood (Northland), and Sue Wootton (Dunedin).

 

Nicola Legat, New Zealand Book Awards Trust Chair, said: “In the year that we celebrate 50 years since New Zealand’s prestigious book awards were first established, it’s rewarding and affirming to reflect on how many great books of poetry have been celebrated in the awards’ winner lists. These books of poetry were noticed, brought richness to readers’ lives and are eminently worth rereading. They have held their ground and their authors constitute a poetry hall of fame: Allen Curnow, Bill Manhire, Fleur Adcock, Elizabeth Smither, Brian Turner, Vincent O’Sullivan, Michelle Leggott, Hone Tuwhare, Kate Camp, Ian Wedde, Jenny Bornholdt, Glenn Colquhoun and so many more. Here’s to New Zealand poetry!”

Some poems from the Ockham NZ poetry finalists: Sue Wootton’s ‘Wild’

1 Reply

 

Wild

 

Measure my wild. Down to my last leaf,

my furled, my desiccated. This deciduousness,

this bloom. Calculate my xylem levels.

My spore count, fungal, scarlet

in a bluebell glade. Whoosh,

where the foliage closes on a great cat.

Test me: how many tigers in my jungle,

how many lions at roam? Map my rivers,

deltas, estuaries. Mollusc, whelk, worm.

Monitor my silt. Do I have spoonbills, 

high-stepping and watchful over the darting fish?

Rainfall on pines. Dappled sunlight

in my dells. Under moss, the fallen log, under

the log the hibernating hedgehog. Late my dates,

or soon? Return of the albatross, godwits

gathering. What clouds me, shifts,

but: indigo thunder-stack, pink wisp. Count the mice.

What will survive me, O my cockroaches, O my lice?

Scaffold me with metal, cage me in glass, tube me,

needle me, fill me, flush me. Saline solution:

the ocean. Oxygen therapy: the sky.

Mineral deficiency: socks off. Soil. Dark

rot, eye-less wriggle, while the roots seek, seek.

Un-diagnosable, that ticklish insect.

Mountain peak speak only snow, and thus

I am diminished; thus I rest in my pulse. Sweet

heart. Monitor my yearn, and treat it with trees.

Un-pane me. Wilden my outlook.

Membrane animal, skin mammal under the osmosis moon.

Allow my tides. All this to say, in love we nest, and on Earth.

 

©Sue Wootton from The Yield

 

Sue Wootton lives in Dunedin where she writes fiction and poetry and, as a PhD candidate at the University of Otago, is researching the importance of literature to health and wellbeing. Her debut novel, Strip (Mākaro Press), was longlisted for the fiction prize in the 2017 Ockham NZ Book Awards, and her most recent publication, The Yield (Otago University Press) is shortlisted in the 2018 poetry category of the awards. She is the selecting editor for the Otago Daily Times Weekend Poem column and edits the weekly Health Humanities blog Corpus: Conversations about Medicine and Life, found at corpus.nz

The poem “Wild” was awarded 2nd place in the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine in 2013. Sue’s website is suewootton.com

Congratulations! Sarah Broom Poetry Prize finalists 2018

Leave a reply

 

Screen Shot 2018-04-30 at 2.34.13 PM.png

 

Sarah Broom Poetry Prize Finalists 2018

We are delighted to announce four finalists for the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize in 2018.

 

Stuart Airey is a poet with a day job as an optometrist, which involves using the logical, scientific part of his mind. He describes poetry as “letting me explore all the other bits”.  Stuart began writing poetry a few years ago; these poems are as yet unpublished, but they have been performed in his local church. Though he has been living in Hamilton for many years now, Stuart feels an increasingly strong call from his Christchurch roots and his resonance with loss. Poems allow a part of him to look up at the Port Hills, walk along leafy Saint Albans, and gaze longlingly out at the Sumner surf.

 

Jane Arthur was born in New Plymouth and lives in Wellington with her partner, baby and dogs. She has worked in the book industry for over 15 years as a bookseller and editor, and is a founder of the New Zealand children’s literature website The Sapling. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from the IIML at Victoria University, where her supervisor was Cliff Fell, a 2017 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize finalist. She also has a Diploma in Publishing from Whitireia Polytech and a Master’s in English Literature from Auckland University. Her poems have appeared in journals including Sport, Turbine, Ika, and Sweet Mammalian.

 

Wes Lee is the author of Body, Remember (Eyewear Publishing, 2017), Shooting Gallery (Steele Roberts, 2016), and Cowboy Genes (Grist Books, University of Huddersfield Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2018, New Writing Scotland, The London Magazine, Landfall, Poetry London, Irises: The University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Poetry Prize Anthology 2017, and many other journals and anthologies. She has won a number of awards for her writing including the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Literary Award; the Short Fiction Writing Prize (University of Plymouth Press) and the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award in Galway. Wes is currently working on her third poetry collection, By the Lapels.

 

Robyn Maree Pickens is an art writer, poet, and curator. Her critical and creative work is centred on the relationship between aesthetic practices and ecological reparation. Robyn’s poetry has appeared in the Australian eco-poetic journal Plumwood Mountain (2018), and US journals Matador Review (2017), water soup (2017), and Jacket 2 (2017). Her most recent work was exhibited at ARTSPACE, Auckland in March 2018. Robyn’s poetry criticism has appeared in Rain Taxi (2018) and Jacket 2 (2018). Currently Robyn is a PhD candidate in ecological aesthetics in the English Department at the University of Otago, and an art reviewer for the Otago Daily Times, The Pantograph Punch, and Art News.

The four finalists will read from their work at the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize event at the Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday 20 May, 3.15-4.15pm.  Guest judge Eileen Myles will introduce the finalists and announce the winner.

 

The judge:

Eileen Myles is an American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction and other works. Their poetry collections includes I Must Be Living Twice (selected poems) and Not Me, and they are the author of Inferno, a novel detailing the hell of the life of the female poet. Myles has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction, four Lambda Book Awards, and numerous other awards and fellowships. Fellow novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as “one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature”.

Monday Poem by Bernadette Hall

1 Reply

 

 

from a sonnet sequence called  Fancy Dancing

 

vii.

Drowning is painless, or so they say, when we die

we’ll look as though we’re sleeping. How many thousands

and thousands are sleeping now in the swollen waters

of the Mediterranean? It’s enough to break your heart.

Maggie dropped in for a drink after work

the other day. Tears in the street. I’ve given her

our mother’s lovely little blue Limoges plate.

We talked about the grandfather we’d never met,

Alexander, thrown out of the family for some reason

we are left to imagine. I found him earlier this year,

lying all on his own in an unmarked grave  in Ashburton.

You can drown in loneliness, it seems, just like in water.

We’ll put up a stone with his name on it, such a small gesture.

 

 

©Bernadette Hall

 

Bernadette Hall lives in a renovated bach at Amberley Beach in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She has published ten collections of poetry, the most recent being Life & Customs (VUP 2013) and Maukatere, floating mountain (Seraph Press 2016). In 2015 shereceived the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. In 2016 she was invested as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature.  In 2017 she joined with three other Christchurch writers to inaugurate He Kōrero Pukapuka, a book club which meets weekly at the Christchurch Men’s Prison.

 

 

From ANZL: Vision Test – David Taylor assesses the 20/20 Poetry Collection

Leave a reply

Screen Shot 2018-04-29 at 11.23.42 AM.png

David Taylor assesses the 20/20 Poetry Collection, and what we’re exploring – and avoiding – in our literature of unease.

 

The 20/20 poetry project was devised in 2017 to celebrate 20 years of National Poetry Day in New Zealand. Twenty ‘acclaimed Kiwi poets’ were asked ‘to choose one of their own poems – a work that spoke to New Zealand now’.  Those poets included Bill Manhire, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Kevin Ireland, Elizabeth Smither, Paula Green, Apirana Taylor and Cilla McQueen.

That group of poets were ‘also asked to select a poem by another poet they saw as essential reading’.  Many of the selected ‘second twenty’ were young, new, or underrated voices who’d published a collection or had poems included in an anthology or journal – including Chris Tse, Lynley Edmeades, Gregory Kan, Johanna Emeney, Michael Steven, John Dennison and Simone Kaho.

The resulting forty poems offer an interesting cross-section sample of the current ideas, voices and concerns in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand poetry. Many of the poets had their selected poems pasted around the country by Phantom Billstickers, current sponsors of National Poetry Day.

To comment on what these poems suggest about the subjects current in our poetry right now, and on why these poems may have been chosen, it’s necessary to make some generalisations – drawing observations from ‘repeated sightings of’ rather than from an exhaustive scientific survey. With so much diversity in our poetic voices the commonalities are not necessarily topics, themes and styles, as they once would have been. But there are definitely patterns here which are hard to ignore.

One is to do with the timeframe of these poems – in particular that many of them have very long temporal settings. The second is to do with a sense that many of these poems have an underlying sense of uncertainty – culminating in a collective sense of existential searching.

Three themes which I expected to be more prominent were very modestly represented and so some consideration is given to their absence – landscapes, cultural identity and relationships.

As a sample on which to run some quick tests, these poems suggest that we might be moving away from some more traditional areas of exploration but are not yet sure where to look or what we might be looking for, or what we are trying to avoid.

 

Full article here

 

 

 

 

 

 

An invitation from Landing Press for poetry by migrants and those with refugee backgrounds

Leave a reply

If you know someone that might be interested – please share. I know there are some creative writing groups that might take this up but don’t know how to contact them – Paula

 

Hi there,

I am writing to you on behalf of Landing Press based in Wellington.

We are working on a collection of poems by migrants and refugee-background individuals living in New Zealand and want to invite you/your organisation to send us poems. And please help us spread the word about this great opportunity.

The only requirement is that the poems must be written by migrants or refugees, whether they have lived in New Zealand for a month or fifty years.

 

·         You can send up to 3 poems.

·         Email them to landingpresspoems@gmail.com. Include your name and phone number.

·         Or you can post them to 97 Tireti Road, Porirua 5022. Include your name and postal address. (Keep a copy of your poem).

·         Send us your poems by Monday, 16th July.

 

A selection of poems will be published later in the year as a companion to a book of poetry on the themes of migrants and refugees, written by Adrienne Jansen and Carina Gallegos. Both books will be published by Landing Press. All writers whose work is included in the selection will receive a copy of the book.

Landing Press is a very small press, but we have a big vision. We believe that poetry is a powerful way in which our many voices can be heard. 

Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.

 

Kind regards

Devinda Senanayake

 

For Landing Press

From NZ Festival: Landfall editor, Emma Neale, talks to ARTicle magazine about her reading life

Leave a reply

 

Screen Shot 2018-04-27 at 3.56.07 PM.png

 

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