An invitation from Cats & Spaghetti Press:
where: 19 Tory Street, Wellington when: 7pm Friday 16th May
We’re going to be having a bit of a shindig to say welcome to the world to Pen Pal. There’ll be readings by Sugar Magnolia Wilson and special guests Hannah Mettner, Jackson Nieuwland, Carolyn DeCarlo and Morgan Bach.
Come along to get your copy and have a drink and maybe even a bit of a dance in celebration.
I heard Siobhan read a bit from this at the Pah Readings and witnessed the degree to which the audience was moved. Was rather special.
New Zealand seems to be a fertile ground for independent poetry presses and bookshops. Wonderful!
Time Out Bookstore
Saturday April 26th 4.30 pm until 8pm
Join Compound Press to launch poetry chapbooks by Steven Toussaint & Lee Posna.
Fiddlehead by Steven Toussaint : Re-imagines Rangitoto as Dante’s mountain island of purgatory.
Arboretum by Lee Posna : A posthumous reflection on the bounds of the empire of artistic vision.
The poets will be present to read a little – perhaps from these books, perhaps something else entirely.
A few drinks will be provided.
Handmade books available for purchase for $10.
Check out this terrific post from Ashleigh Young:
I’ve been a big fan of James Brown’s poems for a long time. The first poem of his I read was ‘Loneliness’, in 2001. It’s probably still his most well known poem, all these years later. I wonder if James is a bit tired of it now, has made a real effort to leave it behind, the way Radiohead have left behind ‘Creep’ but a stubborn faction of people still want them to play it and wish they’d go back to their roots. Anyway, after I read it and Lemon, his second book, I became preoccupied with tracking down a copy of his first book, Go Round Power Please. It was out of print, but that eerie crowd of little pottery faces on the cover haunted me, and eventually I stumbled across a copy in a secondhand bookstore, and when I read that book, I knew that James’s poems would end up being permanent fixtures in my head.
The full post is here
This message from Hue & Cry
‘Thank you so much for supporting our campaign for Zarah’s book, Autobiography of a Marguerite. You’ll be happy to know that the manuscript is now with our designers. This means we’re on the home run and on the countdown to launch night.
And for those of you based in or near Wellington, we have a confirmed venue and date for the official launch event. This will take place at the City Gallery Wellington on Thursday 5 June, 5.30PM. So put it in your diary now, as you’re all invited. And you can collect your rewards at the event as well. We’ll also be holding an Auckland reading a little later in June, so stay tuned for information about this.’
Chloe
Libby Hart
Email :: libbyhartfile@gmail.com
Website :: http://libbyhartfile.blogspot.com
Postal mail :: PO Box 1289, Brighton Road LPO, Elwood 3184, Australia
I was invited to contribute a piece on Love to Awkword Paper Cut blog run by Michelle Elvy (it draws in writers from NZ and USA to write on writing). Even though I edited an anthology of love poems (Dear Heart) and I feel I write primarily out of love, I don’t write many love poems. It was a fascinating thing to do– to write the piece.
You can read the three pieces here.
– See more at: http://www.awkwordpapercut.com/13/post/2014/04/writers-writing-about-writing-about-love.html#sthash.Nnocbapg.dpuf
This is a wonderful discussion — Kim Hill and Gregory O’Brien talking about Alan Brunton and Alan’s new book, Beyond the Ohlala Mountains. It was terrific hearing archival material of Alan reading on the show. You can hear more of that here. You can also catch up with the splendid book launch here.
From Saturday Morning on 05 Apr 2014
Tuesday Poem recently celebrated their fourth birthday and this is how they did it (follow the link below to find the poems). Michelle Elvy sums the blog up on the birthday entry:
Today marks the fourth birthday of Tuesday Poem.
The series began on April 13 2010 after a casual start with a bunch of poems on Mary McCallum’s blog O Audacious Book. From there, the group migrated to this site and grew in contributors and mission. Each week a different Tuesday Poet takes a turn at editing the main page here — selecting a poem, getting permission to run it, and writing up a response. A personal choice and response each week, and many more opportunities to share poetry at members’ blogs as well (see sidebar, left).
We celebrate poetry every week, but birthdays are special because each year in March/ April we build something collaboratively in one giant poetry celebration. Each of our ‘birthday poems’ has been unique in its blend of voices and rhythms. In 2011, the first birthday saw an ode to Tyr in honour of Tuesdays and the way we celebrate poetry; in 2012 we wrote a collaborative poem line-by-line, each poet building on the previous poet’s cadence and image; last year, we chose a jazzy riff as our theme, with participating poets contributing entire stanzas to a poem that unfolded over weeks in rhythm, repetition and syncopation.
This year, we tried something a little different. We asked contributing poets to send a line that included something about either birthdays or food or both, and to send the line blind — that is, without seeing any other contributions. We gathered the lines one by one and rearranged them into a whole. We tried several different approaches but we finally settled on four small verses, each creating something special. It was much much harder than we imagined when we set out to paste these lines together — how to fit blue cake with a clarinetist’s curls, or fairy bread with the explosion of candles? In the end, these four vignettes fitted together to form what feels like a whole and including a birth and a light, a cake and a secret, a moment and a memory, and anticipation and celebration.
We hope you are as delighted as we are with how this experiment turned out. What fun to have such rich images to work with. What a pleasure to glue pieces together and watch this poetry page take shape — this line moved from there to here; this image matched with this sound.
I should also add the note that only one of the three editors working on this birthday poem knew the identity of the poets submitting, so it’s a special birthday surprise as well to see who has contributed such delicious morsels to this sweet feast. Thank you all!
–Michelle Elvy, TP Hub sub-editor, with Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon
Three plus one: Four poems for a birthday
NZ Poetry Shelf 