Iona reads three toikupu from In the shape of his hand lay a river – ‘Morass’, ‘Ara Toi’ and ‘Lodestone’.
Let my voice give meaning to this ending That I may shatter and shelter what lies between And in fragmented friction remain upright
from ‘Voice’
In the shape of his hand lay a river, Iona Winter, Elixir & Star Press, 2024
The section titles of Iona Winter’s new poetry collection underline the tidal wave of grief that drives the poems, the slam of loss, the invisible currents, the arteries of the heart: Torrents, Subterranean, Estuaries, Confluence, Tributaries. Iona draws us into the darkest crevices, into the painful afterslam of her beloved son’s suicide. She is navigating and retrieving, remembering and recording. No rules, no model for the parent savaged with grief. Ah. How to move and speak and scream and rage? How to write? This utterly moving sequence of poems, so brutally honest, so open for viewing.
How to write your darling when ‘in the shape of his hand lay a river, the warmth of his heart a universe’. He is there in the space between and above and within the lines, he is there on the beach, in the doctor’s waiting room awaiting diagnosis or prescription. How to replenish and heal the empty husk of self, the swollen heart, the need to love? Iona is singing her son, as she sings and screeches her grief, moving into incantation, moving between dark and light, mother-earth and infinite sky, between the impossible questions and the difficult answers. And with every step, with every ache, she never loses sight of love.
I am reading Iona’s poetic testimony, her aching revelations, her poetry that stitches grief to love, and I recognise this as deeply personal but as more than that. Her personal tributaries signpost imperative questions for us as a nation, as communities, questions that consider how to keep our young people safe, how to nurture and protect our vulnerable youth, how to foster self love and self growth, how to stand up and fight for what is precious. Look around us, look at the stockpiling wounds and losses and dislocations.
Iona has written poetry in the shape of her heart and it sings.
you have no choice but to withstand the storm, or break open
like a flooded plain, where green-leaved rākau are briefly dazzled by the returning sun
from ‘Three years without summer’
Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) is a poet, essayist, storyteller and editor. She has several published collections of poetry and short fiction; most recently In the shape of his hand lay a river (2024). Her upcoming book A Counter of Moons, creative non-fiction speaking to the aftermath of suicide, is due for publication in 2024. In 2023, Iona founded Elixir & Star Press, as a dedicated space for the expression of grief in Aotearoa New Zealand. The inaugural Elixir & Star Grief Almanac 2023, a liminal gathering, included over 100 multidisciplinary responses to grief. Widely published and internationally anthologised, Iona creates work that spans genre and form, and lives in the Buller region.
i jokingly suggest you change your relationship status to it’s complicated & i’ll change mine to engaged we have exactly six mutual friends on here probably a matt & you know which freckles to kiss to keep this true call them fret markers or like don’t when bree asks if we’re………Official is that the rehearsal what steve albini wrote in his letter to nirvana the licking pattern of which dog at the bowl it’s only complicated if you paraphrase the dream in which i meet you at the airport with my girlfriend because i love you like no amen at all & meaningful clutter is a brilliant title for a poem or a song………i won’t call this that you can have it i’m not even talking about your house just maybe a busy gap our bodies on a sunday the novel somebody else writes on the plane in this heat anything is nowhere else a thing i used to have a thing for & this is new & great & new & pinched harmonics in my search bar
Amy Marguerite
Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet and essayist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2022. Her poetry has appeared in Spoiled Fruit, the NZ Poetry Society Anthology white-hot heart and various literary journals. Amy is currently working towards the publication of her debut poetry collection.
They spoke animatedly about capacity and he tangata. I replaced their water, tried not to hover.
I imagined making good points – cake-cutting, smiling – my words spoken like spells over a cauldron.
They were the last table to leave. One woman had a work card, so the bill was thankfully simple.
She’d adored the baby pāua on its bed of lavender foam.
I wiped down, stacked and vacuumed. Omar was prepping for tomorrow. He gave me dahl and roasted cauli to take home.
Time slows when you’re tired. It took forever to unlock my broomstick and attach the lights. Did I have everything? I rechecked my backpack.
Distance chimed its distant chime. Every lurch of headlights brought a brief bow-wave of fear, but I love the small hours when they open out under the stars.
A final climb, then the sweep into the suburb where I roomed … some jumpy clouds across the moon … the calabash run away with the spoon.
James Brown
James Brown lives in Wellington. His Selected Poems was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2020. ‘Waiting’, ‘The Magic Show‘ and ‘Love Poem‘ are from Slim Volume (Te Herenga Waka University Press, forthcoming 2024).
The Caselberg Trust and UNESCO City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand are pleased to announce that the Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature writers resident for 2024 will be poet Alison Glenny. Alison was selected by the judges from a strong field, and will be welcomed to the Caselberg House in Whakaohorahi/Broad Bay from the start of November till mid-December this year.
Alison Glenny was born in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, and lived in the UK and Australia before returning to Aotearoa, where she lives on the Kāpiti Coast. Her Antarctic-themed collection of prose poems and fragments The Farewell Tourist was awarded the Kathleen Grattan prize for a collection of poetry and was published by Otago University Press in 2018. A second collection, Bird Collector, was published by Compound Press in 2021. A third collection is forthcoming in 2024, also with Compound Press, and her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies.
The Caselberg Trust Margaret Egan Cities of Literature Writers Residency is run jointly and collaboratively by the Caselberg Trust and City of Literature Dunedin, New Zealand. Funding from the Caselberg Trust is provided through a generous bequest by the late Margaret Egan.
We’re so excited to announce the incredible Renee Liang as judge for the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize 2024!
The prize will be opening on 1st June, so start polishing your best unpublished poems!
Dr Renee Liang 梁文蔚 MNZM is a poet, paediatrician, playwright and essayist. After exploring open mics in Broken Hill, Australia, Renee joined the MC team at Poetry Live, becoming known for running slams. Since then Renee has become a jack of literary trades: she wrote, produced and nationally toured eight plays; makes operas, musicals and community arts programmes; and her poems, essays and short stories are widely anthologised. The Bone Feeder, a play adapted into opera for the Auckland Arts Festival in 2017, was one of the first Asian mainstage works in New Zealand and one of the opening works at the Waterfront Theatre in Auckland.
The annual takahē Monica Taylor Poetry Prize honours the memory of poet Monica Taylor, with the generous assistance of her whānau, and with the kaupapa of encouraging new generations of poets.
There’s more information about the Monica Taylor Poetry Prize here
Poetry event at Gore Library Touring poets Kay McKenzie Cooke and Jenny Powell will read and discuss their writing. Local poets are invited to read their work in the Open Mic section. Gor Library 11:30 am
Poetry Reading and Panel Discussion with Sara Hirsch, David Eggleton, Kay McKenzie Cooke and Jenny Powell; Invercargill Library meeting room, 7pm, Koha entry.
Friday 7th June
Conversation on the Couch with Tusiata Avia. An opportunity to hear from poet, writer and performer Tusiata Avia, about her journey and experiences as a Pacifica writer in Aotearoa. Repertory House, 7pm. Limited ticket sales, max 2 tickets per person. $30 each. (Note the bar will not be open). No door sales.
Saturday 8th June
Poetry writing workshop with Sara Hirsch, 9-11am Invercargill Library Meeting Room $20 (or both workshops for $30) Have you always wanted to learn how to write poetry? Have you been writing for ages and would love the chance to get some tips and tricks? Whatever your background and experience everyone is welcome at this inclusive workshop, from newbies to the poetry obsessed. The session will introduce you to some fun activities to get you scribbling. We will play with words, sounds and images until we find the poems that need to be written, spoken, shouted at the top of our voices. This workshop is for anyone who has something to say, even if you don’t know what it is yet. Come join in some games, meet some like minded people and explore poetry in ways they don’t teach you in school.
Poetry performance workshop with Sara Hirsch, 12-2pm Invercargill Library Meeting Room $20 (or both workshops for $30)
Taking words from the page to the stage! Whether you are new to the microphone or a seasoned slam poet, this performance workshop is for you. Come and join this inclusive, fun and interactive session centred around poetry in performance with UK Slam Champion Sara Hirsch. We will explore performance techniques and practice speaking poems in a safe supportive space to help you build confidence and enjoy the power of spoken word. Poetry Masterclass with Tusiata Avia, 2.30-4.30pm Invercargill Library Meeting Room $30
Ah. What pleasure it was this week assembling a feature to celebrate Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by David Eggleton, Vaughan Rapatahana and Mere Taito (Massey University Press). Listening to the audios, reading the conversation the editors contributed to, it was skin-pricklingly good. Inspiring.
I also listened to a terrific conversation that originally aired on RNZ National in 2010 as part of the ‘Books that Built New Zealand’ series. Justin Gregory asked academic Dr Alice Te Punga-Somerville: how can a book that was never published, and never read, tell us about who we are? In my research for Wild Honey, I had come across the author of the missing novel, Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan. She had published a collection of poetry, Opening Doors. I went back to my copy of Wild Honey and reread what I had written. I would love to give a few signed copies away (message me or email paulajoygreen@gmail.com), but here is an extract:
Patuawa-Nathan grew up in Maropiu, Northland. When she was twelve, she left home and worked in hospitals, hotels and factories. Twenty years before her debut and, to my knowledge, only poetry collection, she wrote a novel that Collins in London was keen to publish, but the edited manuscript got lost in the post and she abandoned it. With poet Hone Tuwhare and author Harry Dansey, she tried unsuccessfully to establish a society for Māori writers. After periods abroad, she moved to Sydney permanently, where she taught in a private school and worked with women prisoners, and apparently wrote under another name. I find scant mention of her in New Zealand archives, have a single book of her poetry, and her poetic melodies cling to me. Like so many other women writers, she is a puzzling gap.
Patuawa-Nathan’s poetry, moving with grace and exquisite economy, reveals a formidable attachment to home. Like Vernice Wineera, her poetic return to origins, throughout the collection, resembles a tidal movement that both reveals and conceals: a return to her village and valley, with its summer hues, ‘holds aloft scarlet-tipped fingers/ halting the hours/ so I may know again/ this hesitant valley of my birth’.[i] In ‘Distant Village’, separation is an ache-channel across the Tasman Sea that poetry fertilises with poignant detail, with little repetitions like the breath of the wind returning: ‘Distant village/ your essence reaches me/ from the broad hill sounds/ hung over northern valleys.’[ii] But the detail carried on the breath of the wind, like the detail carried on the force of the line, is surrogate, a pale substitute where words grapple to hold the physical anchors of home. As readers we are left with a melancholic trace: ‘You reach me/ touch me/ find I am of stone.’[iii]
Many of Patuawa-Nathan’s poems are evocative postcards on the surface, but as you delve deeper, and like the kumara she references, tendrils of ideas stretch and search: this is who am I, this is where I am from. In ‘Waikato Lament’, the poet calls upon repressed stories that need to be told, in melodious lines that counterpoint the ghostly violence, the damaged people, the smothered and unjust events: ‘Green wandering fingers/ of kikuyu/ prying into an old kumara pit/ playing over limestone belly/ and naked rock/ have not quite covered,/ cannot hide,/ the faded emblems/ of a land lost people.’[iv] The poet stitches the essential heart-hit of narrative into her poem, and the legacy of oppression that she carries along her ancestral bloodline, as she sings:
Blood soaked, in time’s memory, spirits of Taupiri raise keening voices anthem of injustice echoing down through the night.[v]
On other occasions, the injustice is made bitingly, and sometimes sardonically, clear. In ‘Aboriginal on the Last Train Home’, a tiny anecdote harbours the greater, national injustice. The Government pays for an Aborigine’s train ticket back home to the mission. Patuawa-Nathan turns it into wry and caustic joke: ‘Another ten such years of travel/ and they would have paid him a fair price/ for New South Wales.’[vi] In ‘Education Week’, a group of students are taken to visit the local jail, and in that moment of checking, a prescient mirror glass suggests social injustice infects both education and crime statistics: ‘In a small concrete cell/ bare/ but for the humour/ of wall graffiti,/ they reach among comments/ for names of cousins/ and brothers/ and fathers.’[vii]
The blurb of Opening Doors, suggested Patuawa-Nathan had a new collection for publication in Sydney, but sadly, I can find no trace of it; sadly, because her slender debut of 24 poems signalled a poet to savour and invite more from. Her succulent detail coupled with crafted melodies forms a way of anchoring home, and in that anchorage, the poems shelter strong opinions, reclaimed history and familial connections. In the final poem, ‘Taraire Berries’, with te reo words italicised, the words form a skinny spine on the page, akin to a family back bone.[viii] The music resonates on the tongue, sibilant sounds brush against sharper consonants, single-syllable words are adjacent to longer word-notes. Visually the effect is equally sumptuous:
Blue-black taraire berries tart on the tongue. Bush tracks sun-dried and hoof-worn to powdery earth by grazing cattle.[ix]
The poet’s harmonies echo the way home dreams down through her writing pen, just as she passes memory and dream to her son: ‘Memory/ dreams down/ through a son/ seeking his mother’s country./ Seeking the taraire,/ the titoki and karaka.’
This week I have devoted large chunks of time to reading the poetry collections by Vincent O’Sullivan on my shelves in preparation for next Friday’s tribute. I also found a few more in second-hand bookshops. I think I might do more of this second-hand book shop trawling for poetry! I spotted Twenty-Five Poems of Protest by Rewi Alley (Caxton Press, 1968) in Jason’s Books and nabbed the copy. Such a spiky book to read now, when all these decades later, there is still so much to protest about. Rewi protested the inhumanity of the war in Vietnam. You can feel his rage, his helplessness and his need to speak out. In his introduction, Gordon McArthur writes: “One of the poems is about love, a love that goes deep and selfless and does not slam the gate on outsiders, or forget the loved flesh littering Vietnam fields. Hard to take, rough, brutal and honest. You may not like the bitter medicine; but for some of us, these poems of protest are an alarm that rings in the sleeping conscience. This is the time to be awake.”
Rewi writes in his preface: “If these lines that have been written can do a ploughing job so that the seeds of understanding can be sown, if they can stir some hearts and minds to see reality as it is, and too, if they can help some hands to action, they will have been worthwhile.”
ON LOVE . . .
Love makes a man dare to fight— Love for the many looted of so much love. Yet love can grip a man so that he turns deaf ears to the cries of Vietnam children burnt, while thinking only of his own, his precious ones, slamming the gate on all outsiders. A queer thing, this love! Love for the good woman who is all good things brought together. Love for a whole world of lovely things: white seagulls over blue seas, children under apple trees, or swimming in the river. The love of the close-knit family living as part of one another— the perfect mother, the understanding friend. All these are loved as part of living. But what of the world of the denied, where anxious children watch each morsel others eat? The two thirds of the world where sickness strikes the helpless—where practical and down to earth love is the crying need? All must join together in their basic cause and fight, or be enslaved for long to come. So easy to prate of love, the magic of her touch— life taking on new meaning, and all the happy things of love! But remember too that loved flesh littering Vietnam fields, scattered there by enemies of all good men.
Editors Mere Taito, David Eggleton and Vaughan Rapatahana Katūīvei Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand cover art: Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck ‘a gift of thanks’ Massey University Press, 2024
Violet puts down the paperback. Those stories have been imprinted over the veins in her wrist. Over and over. Again and again. So much has been written over the margins of her stories. She can no longer read her own writing. The blue ink against caramel wrists, smear into the waves that lapped against the shores of her homeland, the waves that battered the boat across the South Pacific. Waves goodbye.
Ruby Rae Lupe Ah-Wai Macomber from ‘Storytelling’
Thank you to the poets who made audios, and to the editors, Mere, Vaughan and David, who have answered a few questions with both heart and care – you have made this post special. So moving. So very moving. I imagined being able to listen to an audio book, as I often do with a poetry collection or anthology I love so much. Thank you.
Many peoples of the Pasifika diaspora now live in Aotearoa, multiple generations that have come from multiple departure points. The editors of a new anthology of Pasifika poetry, David Eggleton, Vaughan Rapatahana and Mere Taito, have assembled a vital and magnificent weave of voices. Katūīvei is lovingly produced in a hardback version by Massey University Press. In their introduction, the editors write: ‘Pasifika peoples represent almost 10 percent of the population, are one of the fastest growing demographic groups in the country, and contribute profoundly to New Zealand society in all kinds of ways, including through a vibrant efflorescence of cultural activity, from music and dance to art, theatre, film and literature.’
The editors acknowledge poets who have paved the way – with publications, performance spaces, mentoring, teaching. From the first Pasifika poet to be published here, Alistair te Ariki Campbell, with his Mine Eyes Dazzle (Pegasus Press, 1950) to Albert Wendt whose writings, poetry, teachings and mentorship have been a touchstone for generations, to Grace Iwashito-Taylor, Daren Kamali and Ramon Narayan forming the South Auckland Poetry Collective, to Selina Tusitala Marsh who has inspired new generations of poets through her own writing, performances, teachings and honours, to Doug Poole’s Blackmail Press, to anthologies edited by Albert, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan. To the ongoing wave of poets who, with new books published, slam, spoken word and festival appearances, enrich our writing communities. As David Eggleton writes: ‘By the beginning of the second decade of the millennium, Pasifika poetry had undeniably become a major presence in New Zealand literature, helping to illuminate our understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand and its place in the world on a number of levels and in a variety of ways.’
‘Katūīvei’ is a hybrid term, especially coined for the occasion, bringing together ‘kavei’ – meaning navigate, and the double voice box of the ‘tūī’. A perfect word for a collection of writing that is an act of ‘wayfinding’ between cultural spaces and creative discoveries. Katūīvei is an anthology of multiple forms, melodies, subject matter, visual images, epiphanies, confessions, challenges, grief, wounds, healing, but there is a connecting current, a deep and shared love of words, of poetry, kinship, self navigation.
As I read, I am gathering words like talismans, as steeping stones, like echoes that connect and enhance and draw me in deeper, deep into the richness of this sublime meeting place.
I am moving with the political Emalani Case navigates ‘On Being Indigenous in a Global Pandemic’, and challenges the mantra that ‘we’re all in this together’, calling this, ‘But in a global pandemic / being indigenous means / writing, / speaking, / crying, / and protesting // your people into existence’.
. . . to the personal In ‘Straightening Out’, Luke Leleiga Lim-Cowley navigates homophobia though a tangle of hair – ‘Our hair is poetry. / Don’t forget this. / Even when / words land in you like wounds / There’s a poem here / So I write this to you’.
. . . to names and naming such wounds, such vital pathways into how names and naming matters, from the searing brilliance of Selina Tusitala Marsh to Denise Carter, Aziembry Aolani, Aigagalefili ‘Fili’ Fepulea’-Tapua’i, Serie Barford.
. . . to family the anthology is infused with family, giving presence to mothers fathers brothers sisters cousins genealogies kinship. Listen to Schaeffer Lemalu‘s breathtaking ‘im’:
i guess a lot of younger people are discovering their pasts and what it means for their future
thats beautiful
i feel stuck in the blotchy pigments of michael jacksons face
unsure of who i am now that i im who i always was to begin with
just me
a constantly evolving entity
Schaeffer Lemalu, from ‘im’
. . . to body I am splintered splattered recast by Serie Barford‘s ‘Into the world of light’ and its ripples of wounded heart – ‘I resolutely lanced my heart / a swollen fist about to burst / with a shark tooth plucked from a dream // poured honey into the first chamber // soothed gnawed memories / sent them west with wild bees’.
. . . to the compounding questions What is your name? Where are you from? What do you speak? Who are you? Where are you from? I am thinking of Tusiata Avia‘s ‘We are the diasporas’ and Audrey Brown-Pereira‘s ‘who are you, where you come from, / where have you been your ()hole life’. For a start.
. . . and to love and loving whether it is the love of home and place in Daren Kamali‘s ‘Duna does Otara’ or Grace Iwashita-Taylor‘s ‘Dear South Auckland’, or Lana Te Rore‘s ‘A Letter to a Younger Self’, or Karlo Mila‘s loving ode to Albert Wendt:
You’ve traversed it all, charting outsider territory with black star after black star, before us. The relief of another way of mapping.
Karlo Mila, from ‘After Reading Ancestry’, for Albert Wendt
Katūīvei is an extraordinary weave of experience, ideas, issues, challenges, recognitions, community. It is a book to travel with, to hold to your heart, to talk about, to set you in search of collections by individual poets, to savour the familiar, and to set sail with the new. Every time I open the anthology, I discover a new reward. This book is a labour of infinite love, by the editors, by the publisher, by the contributors, and now it is over to us as readers, to navigate, to map, to imagine and to realise how good our place, in all its awe-inspiring and humane dimensions, can be.
Looking at rain too long has given me eternity. A mirror cut away from my country and sea. I lived in a fruit that fell from a child’s hand, now I cry when the moon is in my dream.
I was made out of wood and my heart was full of saltwater; chasing a shadow from my body led me to this secluded room, here I watch the horizon be a photograph
John Pule, from ‘Looking at rain too long has given me eternity’
Launch at the Newtown library
Karlo Mila
The readings
Daren Kamali
Photo by Julia Mageau Gray
Daren reads ‘Duna Does Otara’
Daren “dk” Kamali – poet and multidisciplinary artist based in Aotearoa. Wrote this poem “Duna Does Otara”, while studying a Bachelors Degree in Creative Arts at MIT, Otara in 2011, also featured in Landfall Journal under South Auckland.
Working on my next collection of poems “I’m Not Your Coconut” inspired by James Baldwin. Also indulging in a research-revival-art, a touring exhibition and series of self published books known as the “Ulumate Project: Sacredness of Human Hair” since 2013 with a collective known as Na Tolu.
Emalani Case
Emalani reads ‘On Being Indigenous’
Emalani Case is a Kanaka Maoli writer, teacher, and aloha ʻāina deeply engaged in issues of Indigenous rights and representation, colonialism and decolonisation, and environmental and social justice. She is the author of Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki (2021). She is from Waimea, Hawaiʻi.
Joshua Toumu’a
Joshua reads ‘Veitongo’
Joshua Toumu’a is an 18 year old poet of Tongan, Papua New Guinean and Pākehā descent studying at Te Herenga Waka. He was the winner of the Schools Poetry Award in 2022, and a finalist in the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition in 2023. His work has also been published in Starling and The Friday Poem.
Serie Barford
Serie reads ‘Into the world of light’
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother (Lotofaga) and a Pālagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie performed from her collections at the 2019 Arsenal Book Festival in Kyiv, where the Ukrainian translation of Tapa Talk was launched. In 2021 Serie collaborated with film-maker Anna Marbrook for the ‘Different Out Loud Poetry Project. Her most recent collection, Sleeping With Stones,was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham NZ Book Awards. In 2022 she collaborated with Dutch artist Dorine Van Meel, whose video and performance piece, ‘Silent Echoes’, was exhibited in various European cities to address colonial practices and climate crisis through poetic contributions.
Amber Esau
Amber reads ‘Liminal’
Amber Esau is a Sā-Māo-Rish (Ngāpuhi / Manase) writer of things from Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and professional bots. She is co-editor of Queer Poetry Anthology, Spoiled Fruit (Āporo Press, 2023). Always vibing at a languid pace, her work has been published both in print and online including in Puna Wai Korero, Rapture, Te Awa o Kupu, Skinny Dip! and Annual, NZ poetry Shelf, Ora nui, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook and Going West Poetry Videos. She is a recipient of the emerging Pasifika writer’s residency from the Michael King Writers Centre and the ideas in residence residency from the Basement Theatre.
Tulia Thompson
Tulia reads ‘The Girl That Grew into a Tree’
Tulia Thompson is of Fijian (Rukua village from Beqa), Tongan, and Pākehā descent. She has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Auckland University and a PhD in Sociology. Her book Josefa and the Vu, a fantasy adventure for 8-12 year olds was published by Huia in 2007. She writes poetry and essays.
Aconversationwith the editors
Paula: What were the key joys in assembling this special anthology? The challenges? The surprises?
Mere: A high was discovering poets who were writing outside the scrutinising glare of the literary establishment. I am referring to poets (and there are many of them in Aotearoa!) like Maureen Fepuleai, and Faalavaau Helen Tau’au Filisi who take on print publication projects on their own without the involvement of presses like AUP, and OUP, or poets who write/perform/publish on social media. I thought of Janis Freegard’s research during the reading phase of Katūīvei and I wondered if our narrative of ‘publication’ was really a story of deficit especially if we consider other ways in which Pasifika poets are ‘publishing’. Another joy, was finding poets who have incredible range of voice like Cook Island writer Rob Hack. He can be belly-aching funny and deathly serious in his work. Buy his collection Everything is Here. Finding contacts of a few poets was a challenge but we were determined and treated this almost like an operation by sharing networks and leads. Surprises? – the volume of Pasifika poetry produced in the last 10 years! On that note, a big vinaka vaka levu to Massey University Press for taking on this project!
Vaughan: There were many joys, among them discovering and exploring the sheer range of topoi, the diverse range of approaches to writing a poem – the styles – as displayed, for example, by the intricacy of the work of Pelenakeke Brown, and the pleasure I found in the work of poets whom I did not earlier know much about, such as Rob Hack and his fine toikupu. Indeed, his work was a surprise and brought home firmly for me the fact that there are many very gifted Pasifika poets residing in Aotearoa. Younger poets such as Rhegan Tu‘akoi, who are the next generation of Oceanic poetasters. More awe!
Another joy was the fact that we three editors were able to locate and include a wide range of poets from young, new, exciting talents, to poets with little if any publishing record, to the esteemed founts of Pasifika poetry within Aotearoa New Zealand, such as David Eggleton himself, Tusiata Avia, Albert Wendt, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Serie Barford, Karlo Mila, Courtney Sina Meredith, John Pule, Daren Kamali, Grace Iwashita-Taylor, Simone Kaho, Leilani Tamu, among several others – indeed that list is lengthy!
Challenges? The only wero I faced was ensuring we could include as many gifted poets as possible in Katūīvei, especially after we continued to discover more and more of them.
David: The aim in putting Katūīvei together was to celebrate the intertwining currents of Pasifika poetry connecting Aotearoa to the peoples of the Pasifika diasporic migrations and their descendants. We knew there had been a lot of Pasifika poetry published in the past decade, with important collections from Selina Tusitala Marsh, John Puhiatau Pule, Leilani Tamu, Tusiata Avia, Simone Kaho, Daren Kamali, Karlo Mila, Courtney Sina Meredith and others, but between us we uncovered a great flowering of very recent poetry that we felt it important to acknowledge as transformative in novel and exciting ways. We wanted to showcase these poems not only as a form of truth-telling about the diasporic experience, but we also wanted to show how various Pasifika innovations — the cross-overs, blendings and provocative fusions, with the English language as the common denominator — are helping to re-energise and re-direct New Zealand’s poetry traditions at this point in the nation’s cultural narrative.
Paula: Did you discover things about yourself as a poet? About writing, reading, who you are?
Mere: My practice was already shifting when we started work on Katūīvei. I have been working with archival texts in my doctoral research and responding in kind with multilingual visual poetry via digital platforms so during the reading for Katūīvei, I found myself drawn to collections and writing that experiment with visual forms such as typeface, spacing, text arrangement, and graphics. Pelenakeke Brown’s work and Selina Tusitala Marsh’s graphic poem ‘Ransom’ in Dark Sparring are form-focused and visual examples. Writers who are bilingual also got my attention. It is wonderful to see other languages on the page other than English. I also discovered that I am drawn to writing that brings fresh and new perspectives to familiar tropes such as atua, ancestors, vaka, sea, and identity. These new approaches got me sitting up straight. The fresher, weird and more off-centre the poems were, the more appealing and interesting they were for me.
Vaughan: I guess I was reminded that poetry, ngā toikupu, is such a wide-ranging activity and that one always must be expanding one’s own craft outwards, as to encompass as many new directions – subjects, themes, stylizations, socio-political stances – as are relevantly viable. That I have many potential vistas to visit and visions to vivify, some of them in response to and as te tautoko o Katūīvei and especially the more politicized pieces proselytizing its pages. As for example the fine first poem in this anthology, Marina Alefosio’s Raiding the Dawn and also many others such as Sala‘ivao Lastman So‘oula’s Blackbird. Indigenous peoples share so many experiences, and they are not all salutary: indeed, some have been, continue to be, and need to be confrontational.
David: Well, this is not a book about one poet. This is a book about bringing poets together and how we might do that. It is an anthology responding to poetic expressions of a sense of community identity, and what that might be. The three of us worked with talanoa, with dialogue, with protocol: to try to reach out to all the interesting poets in the Pasifika community in New Zealand. This was not easy and we did have to have some practical constraints in terms of choices to make the project feasible. We began work on this book at the beginning of lockdown, so it has been a long journey, checking and double-checking. We have not tried to force any messaging or impose any theoretical framework, but instead we responded to the richness and complexity, and tried to represent it correctly. If we have an emphasis, it is one that is specific to the Pasifika way of doing things, of seeing, listening and telling. We might talk about new work, ground-work, story-work, blood-work, heart-work: this is what the poets themselves had to do, and make it manifest. I include myself here.
What I get from this assembly of poems is a sense of diversity with an underlying unity, which comes from an implicit outsider status that most Pasifika poets have felt in the past, certainly. So, there are poems that celebrate, that remember, that investigate, that recriminate, that affirm, that argue. There are poems about rejection and poems about acceptance. There are poems that show us language’s capacity to empower, or that return to the succour and solidarity of family, or that show the conflicts and the uprooting — the wrench — associated with re-location to a place where you had to measure up to different standards. There are poems that deal directly, or else obliquely, with the pledge and promise of life in a different country, and with the baggage of old colonial hierarchies and assumptions. Two takeaways: the ocean is central and so is resistance, in myriad forms.
Paula: Like so many people in these troubling times, I keep agonising over what and how to write, what and how to blog. Your anthology is a gift. Is the local and global inhumanity affecting you as a writer, as reader?
Mere: For sure. I mean the vulnerability of my mother tongue Fäeag Rotuạm Ta brought on by the globalisation of English is a key factor in my going ‘multilingual’. I have made it a life-time mission to include at the very least, a Rotuman word in all of my works going forward. My research focuses on Indigenous texts so I have been reading writers like Natalie Harkin’s archival poetics that broadly looks at institutional trauma on Australian Aboriginal people and re-discovering and re-reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry against the atrocities of the Palestinian genocide. Reading works of writers like Harkin and Nye allows me to recentre and appreciate communities and people who have been ‘occupied’ and ‘unceded’. I think of my ancestral home Rotuma and its political relationship with Fiji and how our position of dependency could turn ‘occupied’ in the hands of a problematic government. I shove this at the back of my mind and cross my literary fingers because it is too traumatic to imagine.
Vaughan: Inhumanity! Affecting me? Always has done, always will do, especially as he kaituhi Māori writing in te reo Māori against an all-too-often monotonously monolingual and monocultural backdrop. Katūīvei does make me feel better, as so much of its content is a bastion of Pasifika mana and indeed humanity, is a crucible of individuals both seeking and confirming their Pacific/Aotearoa identities, in the face of the above-mentioned majoritized backdrop both within and outside this skinny country we reside in. Accordingly, I want to continue to write as a repeller against inhumanity, wherever it may be, and not only via poetry either. *
* More especially nowadays, as I continue to combat this bloody cancer invading my body and which I am currently being zapped via radiotherapy every day for!
David: Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said ‘the state of the world calls out to poetry to save it’. However, Percy Bysshe Shelley claimed: ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. But his friend and contemporary Thomas Love Peacock mocked him, saying poetry is: ‘minds capable of better things, running to seed in the specious indolence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual assertion’.
The sad truth is that history shows even ruthless authoritarians and regime tyrants virtue-signal by writing poems, and then get books of them published. In the end, poetry is the most paradoxical of art forms: it is there to provoke, but also to console; it is the music of what happens. As W.H. Auden wrote: ‘Will you wheel death anywhere in his invalid chair? … Time will say nothing but I told you so.’
Mere Taito (Malha’a, Noa’tau (Rotuma)) is a Rotuman Island scholar and creative writer (Poetry, flash fiction, short story) based in Kirikiriroa. Her creative work has been published widely in anthologies and journals such as Landfall, Bonsai, and Best New Zealand Poems. Her PhD studies at the University of Otago focuses on the contributions of Rotuman archival texts and digital technology toward the writing of visual multilingual Rotuman poetry.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Te Whiti) is a poet, novelist, writer and anthologist widel published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English. He is a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of Indigenous tongues. His most recent poetry collection, written in te reo Māori (with English language ‘translations’), is titled te pāhikahikatanga/incommensurability. It was published by Flying Islands Books in Australia in 2023. Vaughan lives in Mangakino.
David Eggleton is a poet and writer of Rotuman, Tongan and Pākehā heritage. His collection The Conch Trumpet (Otago University Press, 2015) won the 2016 Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. He also received the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry. David was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021. He lives in Dunedin.
Please join us to celebrate the launch of ‘Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another’, edited by Jennifer Cheuk 卓嘉敏.
This pukapuka is a landmark anthology that brings together the creative work of twenty-seven mixed-heritage creatives from across Aotearoa.
Saturday 25th May 113 Taranaki Street PŌNEKE / WELLINGTON 6:30pm – late Free entry, all welcome
Featuring poetry by Cadence Chung and romesh dissanayake Performance by The Nooklings and Cecilia’s Crop
Nibbles will be served thanks to Anarcuisine, and we have sponsored drinks from our pals at Pals!
Free entry, all welcome Immense thanks to Foundation North for the putea that made this all possible, and to Pals for providing the drinks for our launch night!
Books will be for sale, or can be purchased presale here
The Nooklings Smooth jazz standards played by sweet selection of musical friends — Alex, Bonnie and Jared — formed around the voices of two wāhine who share delight in the songs they have sung through life.
Cecilia’s Crop Cecilia’s Crop is a groovy little band based in Aotearoa’s capital. Blending funk, RnB, some acoustic soul, and an odd dash of pop punk, we love to write music that gets people dancing, swinging, and maybe even falling in love. The band usually consists of Carlin, Jack, Rodney, and Sam but this will be a stripped back set with just our guitarist, Carlin, and Sam, the singer.
ABOUT THE BOOK
EVERYTHING THAT MOVES, MOVES THROUGH ANOTHER is a landmark anthology that brings together the creative work of twenty-seven mixed-heritage creatives from across Aotearoa. Weaving together a range of artistic mediums and giving space to both emerging and experienced creatives, this anthology lays the groundwork for deeper and more empathetic conversations around the experience of mixed-heritage individuals.
Through an open call for contributors in 2023, this publication was created in response to the lack of authentic representation for biracial, mixed-heritage and multi-ethnic individuals living in Aotearoa. Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another features photography, comics, essays, poetry and multimedia art.
AUTHOR AND CONTENTS LIST
Nina Mingya Powles – a creative response Kim Anderson — Where r u really from? Cadence Chung — Visitations Kàtia Miche – What melts into air? Damien Levi — Ngā mihi Jefferson Chen — blending in standing out Ivy Lyden-Hancy — te manu and the sky waka Jessica Miku 未久 — What Kind of Miracles Ruby Rae Lupe Ah-Wai Macomber — My Moana Girls Ying Yue Pilbrow — Wayward Emma Ling Sidnam — Sue Me Jimmy Varga — The Asian Jill and Lindsey de Roos — What are you? Daisy Remington — What Makes Up Me Chye-Ling Huang — Black Tree Bridge Evelina Lolesi — Self Portrait: Mapping Tidal Whenua Eamonn Tee — Innsmouth Emele Ugavule — For Ezra Harry Matheson — Between A Rock And A Hard Place kī anthony — Never Quite Home Maraky Vowells — Created Communicated Connected Dr Meri Haami and Dr Carole Fernandez — Kechil-kechil chili padi: Ahakoa he iti, he kaha ngā hirikakā Nkhaya Paulsen-More — Walking Between Two Worlds Yani Widjaja — Oey黃 is for Widjaja Chyna-Lily Tjauw Rawlinson — My Whānau romesh dissanayake — A Remembered Space Jake Tabata — STOP FUCKING ASKING ME TO WATCH ANIME WITH YOU
EDITED BY: Jennifer Cheuk 卓嘉敏 PUBLISHED BY: 5ever books
Needlepoint rain is static against the pines running alongside this endless beach that stretches further to my left and then to my right With no way to turn I must stand very still
There is detritus all around: a motorbike’s green rusted petrol tank, a bright pink single mattress half buried in the sand blue and white ice-cream containers scattered like impossible stepping stones
There is theme music too: fantails’ song and the whoops and cries of men playing cricket A fallen pine gathers seaweed and plastic bags in its rib-cage A man riding a horse talks on a cell phone
The rate of teenage suicide is at its highest ever The local kids drag race their souped-up Ford Escorts leaving thick black stripes that come to abrupt endings
Therese Lloyd from Other Animals, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2013
It’s a strange experience to live with a poem for almost two decades. I must have read this one first in 2007 or so. It came in as a submission for an issue of Landfall I’d been asked to edit, and I could see at once that it had to go in.
Why? Because it stopped me dead in my tracks.
With no way to turn I must stand very still
And why must this speaker stand so very still? Because they have nowhere to turn to, that’s why. There’s so much activity going on all around – cricket, cell phones, motorbikes – and yet they’re stopped still by something, something unnamed: just the sheer extent of the vista, perhaps; or by something else, off the edge of the screen.
A bit later on, I needed some poems for a class anthology I was editing. It was for Stage One Creative Writing students at Massey University, and I’d broken down the “poetry” section into a series of weekly themes. Therese Lloyd’s poem came in under “Figures of Speech.”
That may sound a bit reductionist, but I was very struck by the way she’d folded so many strategic metaphors and similes into this otherwise seemingly photo-realist description of a local scene:
“Needlepoint rain” – with the implication of embroidery (of course), but also of a certain stabbiness in the narrator.
“ice-cream containers / scattered like impossible stepping stones” – it’s that extra word “impossible” which (I feel) conveys the sense of futility, tragic waste which pervades the poem.
“A fallen pine gathers seaweed / and plastic bags in its rib-cage” – that’s a personification, rather than a metaphor, if you want to be pedantic (and I usually do). It projects the fallen pine as an animate being with a ribcage – which, after all, is what it is. The poem as a whole is full of a sense of animism: of things which seem at least as alive as people.
I don’t recall any Levin patriots protesting at the picture Lloyd painted of the place. I think it had just come top of some nationwide poll of youth suicide rates at the time, but it’s really the coast to the west of town which is the setting – a postcard-perfect Kiwi beach setting.
I called the picture it paints “photo-realist” above, but perhaps a better term would be “hyperreal.” It has the air of a place that you see with exceptional vividness because you’ve just had a terrible shock of some kind. I don’t know what that shock could be, but those last lines about the “souped-up Ford Escorts”
leaving thick black stripes that come to abrupt endings
might give us some sort of clue.
This is a poem to read when you need to be reminded of the intensity, the momentousness of the things all around you. Fantails, logs, raindrops all live side by side with more human relics in Lloyd’s vision: the mattresses, ice-cream containers, petrol-tanks we leave behind us.
You can ride on by on your horse if you need to, wheeling and dealing on your phone, but if you’re prepared to invest in the world of “In Levin”, you have to stop, look around, and try and see all there is to see.
Jack Ross is the author of six poetry collections, four novels, and four books of short fiction. His latest book of short stories, Haunts, is due out from Lasavia Publishing later this year. He lives with his wife, crafter and art-writer Bronwyn Lloyd, on Auckland’s North Shore, and blogs here.
Therese Lloyd lives in Wellington and grew up in Christchurch and Napier. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Other Animals (VUP 2013), and The Facts (VUP 2018) which was shortlisted for the Ockham Book Awards in 2019.
NZ Poetry Shelf 