Love the sound of this workshop ‘to bring us closer to the heart of what we are trying to say’

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heraHera Lindsay Bird

Having Our Imagist Cake and Eating It, Too

“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.”
~Richard Hugo, Triggering Town

For me, the central question/task of poetry is how to make something that feels alive on the page. How do we get to the heart of what we are trying to say, without being overly didactic or too shy? How do we to approach what we are unable to approach, when we are stuck and overwhelmed, staring at a blank page? Good poetry should guide itself, not be dragged kicking and screaming towards a predestined conclusion. Good poetry allows the poem permission to steer itself. But how, practically, can we achieve this? And how can we take linguistic and formal risks while staying emotionally honest. In other words, how can we have our imagist cake and eat it too?

This workshop is a practical guide to generating new ideas & experimenting with text, but it’s also about how we integrate emotional honesty into our writing practice, and how we can adapt formal exercises, (which are so often sterile and cerebral) to bring us closer to the heart of what we are trying to say.

Hera Lindsay Bird is a poet from Wellington. Her debut collection Hera Lindsay Bird was published by Victoria University Press in 2016, and has gone on to be reprinted several times since. She has published work in the Toast, The Hairpin, The Listener and The Spinoff, and her book has been featured in The Guardian, Vice, and The Sunday Star Times. She believes in emotional honesty, excessive similes, and the occasional dick joke.

 

The 2017 Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat

 

 

The 2017 Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat with Helen Lehndorf, Hera Lindsay Bird, Jordan Hartt, Nalini Singh, Queenie Rikihana-Hyland, and Vivienne Plumb

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For the programme see here

Immerse yourself in writing and conversation this summer. There’s something for everyone–whether you’re new to writing, an established writer, or somewhere in-between.

Dates: 3-5 March 2017
Location: El Rancho, Kāpiti Coast, New Zealand
Registration:  Register securely online or contact kirsten@kahini.org with any and all questions or for additional information.
Join us for the Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat and renew and recharge your writing and your life. The Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat is an immersive, two-day gathering for writers, happening on the Kāpiti Coast. The retreat includes intensive morning workshops, lively afternoon panels, discussions and space and time to write, relax and engage with topics critical to your work. Read about last year’s event here.
Kahini is delighted to host six established New Zealand and international writers–Helen Lehndorf, Hera Lindsay Bird, Jordan Hartt, Nalini Singh, Queenie Rikihana-Hyland, and Vivienne Plumb–who will teach the Retreat. Each writer will teach morning workshops: three in fiction, two in poetry, one in memoir writing, and one cross-genre. (Read descriptions of the workshops and teachers below.)
Evening get together
In the afternoons the same teachers will lead panels and discussions on topics pertinent to craft and literature in Aotearoa. All writers are welcome, at whatever stage you are in your writing life. You’ll find community, encouragement, and a safe place in which to take artistic risks. Please contact Kirsten at kirsten@kahini.org for more information. Register for the Kāpiti Writers’ Retreat!
 

2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellows announced – two poets – Congratulations!

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New Zealand poets Steven Toussaint and Gregory Kan have been awarded the prestigious 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellowship. This is the first time two poets have been the recipients of the fellowship.

The poets will have the opportunity to focus on their craft full-time, with each having a six-month tenure at the Sargeson Centre in Auckland, and sharing an annual stipend of $20,000.

Originally from the United States, Steven Toussaint is looking forward to seeing where the fellowship takes him, as his writing is often troubled by our increasingly digital environment.

“The digital age has opened up wonderful opportunities for new kinds of communication. However, it has also scattered our attention in many different directions. At times I feel concerned that my attention is strained by all the media and digital attractions that exist around me,” he says.

Steven will use the fellowship to work on a new book of poetry, which will consist of individual poems with unifying themes about religious imagination.

Steven’s published works include a chapbook, Fiddlehead, which was published in New Zealand in 2014, with his first full length book, The Bellfounder, published the following year in the United States.

Gregory Kan says the fellowship provides a wonderful platform to help writers gain traction in an unrestrained world of literature.

“The digital age has meant that we have more writing than ever before – it’s a form that was previously only accessible to a privileged group, but is now more pervasive than ever which is fantastic,” he says.

Gregory will be using the fellowship to work on another book of poems. He will be consolidating pieces of already completed work as well as writing new pieces which interrogate the writing of biography and autobiography in this era of overwhelming and spectacular information.

Gregory published his first book this year, This Paper Boat with Auckland University Press, which is on the Okham NZ Book Awards long list for poetry. His work has been published in numerous literary journals, as well as contemporary art exhibitions and catalogues.

Frank Sargeson Trust Chair Elizabeth Aitken-Rose says she is delighted with the calibre of this year’s fellows and is excited to see them take their work to the next level.

“The current technological revolution is shining a light on some wonderful talent we may never have known about before – and this was quite evident in the quality of applicants we received this year,” she says.

“Being a writer in the digital age gives writers unprecedented opportunity, yet this can make it more challenging for writers to cut through and have their voice heard. This is particularly the case for poets, we are very excited to have two poets win the Fellowship this year.

“The fellowship will assist Steven and Gregory in gaining traction in this highly competitive environment, giving them a platform from which they can continue to build their careers and time to dedicate to their projects.”

The fellowship will run from 1 April 2017 to 30 November 2017. Steven will have the first stint at the residence with Gregory finishing out the tenure.

In 2016 the fellowship was awarded to Diana Wichtel and Breton Dukes. Other previous winners include Alan Duff, Michael King and Janet Frame.

The fellowship has been recognising and supporting some of our greatest talents for more than 30 years, says Grimshaw & Co Partner Paul Grimshaw.

“It offers vital support to New Zealand writers to focus, uninterrupted, on their work,” Grimshaw says. “They are contributing to New Zealand’s literary landscape and we are very proud to support them.”

Further information on the Fellowship is available here. Any queries can be directed to Elizabeth Bennie at elizabeth.bennie@grimshaw.co.nz or on +64 9 375 2393.

Catherine Vidler’s Chaingrass poems – skeletal like a leaf-haul in autumn

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Catherine Vidler has used Bill Manhire’s poem ‘Falseweed’ as the starting point for a series of poems. I am hesitant to name this endeavour concrete poetry. I am not sure why. Perhaps because although the poems plant a visual imprint on the page, a tangible icon to lock eyes upon, the effect is more like a kinetic web, an ethereal tissue that evokes memory, anecdote, fleeting sensations. I have seen these poems referred to as visual poetry.

 

 

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The cover of the paperback (SoD)

 

Bill’s lines haunt – a kind of causeway to daydreams. Catherine has set up camp on the causeway and in an almost stream-of-conscious way lets Bill’s words float and tumble and take shape. Sometimes I see the visual imprint but I can no longer read the words with my myopia. That doesn’t matter to me. I know the words are there. Sometimes they are lost in smudged grey blocks of once-were-words. I get the nostalgic kick of cross stitch – me at school in the sixties making thread patterns on linen like generations of women before me. I was never very good and found my mind wandering to patterns in the sky.

Then again it is like trying to catch a dandelion kiss and blow it to your grandmother. The tissue poems are like a map of a mind wandering from the poetic line. At times a molecular snapshot, at times the pattern of a choreographer, at times the movement of the wind. Accepting the book on these terms, my terms really, no page is static.

I am reminded of the utter of joy of abstract art. In Paris I sat in front of Gerhard Richter’s mound of yellow pollen for an hour, sitting and looking at the yellow. It began to move and hum – just as yellow on a canvas can move and hum – and lift you beyond colour, can sink and submerge you in colour. It’s not like I entered a Zen-like space – I instead entered a fullness, a richness of experience that braided physical images with deep feeling.

 

If you are going to read this book the verb ‘to read’ acquires new dimensions.

 

Catherine’s chaingrass poems also appear in a smaller chapbook. There is a sense (sensation) of leafing through the long grass because it is the long-grass poems that have made it here. Shuffle too and fro, your eye catches glints of wordchains and you are caught  in the long grass. The white space renders the word stamp elegant, skeletal like a leaf-haul in autumn; altogether beautiful and mesmerising. Yet there is change, transformation, a magnetic pull of letters to displace and connect the word fragments. The grass is memory. By this point the visual dance, almost molecular, shifts to a new key, and yes, it becomes music.

 

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The cover of the chapbook (zimZalla)

 

For the big, Stale Objects dePress book:

chaingrass, SOd press 2016

The book can be purchased online through Lulu here.

 

 

For the zimZalla book:

Chaingrass, zimZalla obect 039, 2016, zimzalla.co.uk

The book can be purchased online at zimZalla’s object page

 

Catherine Vidler‘s collection Furious Triangle was published by Puncher & Wattmann in 2011. She is the editor of trans-Tasman literary magazine Snorkel.

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from chaingrass the chapbook

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Seraph Press Translation Series launches in Auckland: with Manasiadis, Colquhoun, Harvey, Poole, Ross, Green, Kelly & Thompson

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Please join us for a multilingual poetry reading to celebrate the launch of the first the first two chapbooks in the Seraph Press Translation Series:

Shipwrecks/Shelters: Six Contemporary Greek Poets, edited and translated by Vana Manasiadis
and
Observations: Poems by Claudio Pasi, translated by Tim Smith with Marco Sonzogni

6.00pm Wednesday 14 December
ST PAUL St Gallery
40 St Paul Street, Auckland
All welcome

For more information about the books, or to buy them online visit.

and for more about the Seraph Press Translation Series, visit.

From The Guardian: Verse goes viral: how young feminist writers are reclaiming poetry for the digital age

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from The Guardian. Full article by Rebecca Slate  here. Includes video clips.

 

If you’re not an Instagrammer you may never have heard of Rupi Kaur. In fact, if you’re not a young female Instagrammer, then your chances are probably even slimmer.

And yet, with almost 750,000 Instagram followers and more than half a million copies of her debut poetry collection, Milk and Honey, sold worldwide, Kaur is one of the biggest names on the literary scene right now.

Dubbed the queen of an emerging trend of “Instapoets”, this 24-year-old Indian-Canadian writer is leading the charge in an exciting new movement of young writers reclaiming poetry for the digital age.

[… and …]

And in New Zealand, poetry’s latest “it girl”, Hera Lindsay Bird, is amassing a semi-cult online following for her smart, sassy and explicit takes on everything from female sexuality to Friends.

On Pantograph Punch: ‘In the Meantime: Shipwrecks of the Self’ by Ingrid Horrocks

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28.11.2016

In the Meantime: Shipwrecks of the Self

By Ingrid Horrocks

Ingrid Horrocks considers her time at Princeton during 9/11, how the public and private selves combine, how the last decade and a half of world events make the future seem uncertain, but how we can begin again.

In the summer of 2001 I looked after a large sunny house on the edge of the Princeton campus. The house had a small neat garden with pink and yellow roses in beds between gravelled pathways. The summer began quietly but by its end everything felt different. I was a year into a doctorate, and for reasons I still find hard to explain, I keep returning to this period when the world seems at its most intense and precarious: when I have moved between cities and when my daughters were born; but also, when world news seems too terrible to hear, when I heard of the Paris terrorist attacks, and over the week when Donald Trump was elected U.S. president.

On the evening before the house owners, Bridget and Jonathan, went away for the summer they invited me around for dinner. Bridget was editing her new book at the kitchen table when I arrived, while outside the early summer evening gradually honeyed into a deep scented yellow around the trimmed roses. Roxy, their cat, moved from one bench to the next to lap up the last warmth, and upstairs their new baby slept. I remember sitting in the dining room in a quiet, wine-softened state, for once released from the crippling sense of homesickness that had suffused the past year.

After Bridget and Jonathan left, the house became the centre of my new social group. One night we all arrived back from a party and I found I’d locked myself out. Two of the physics boys, Joel and Jeff, all of us a little in love with each other, helped break a window so we could get in, the shattering glass somehow thrilling in the warm night.

 

Full article here. It is so good!