I have recently had an unfolding email conversation with Chris Tse, prompted by the arrival of his sublime new collection Minority Super Model. It got me musing on why and how we write poetry. On what the point of poetry is in a world so fragile, so out of step, so overwhelming at times. Chris’s poems, and his contribution to our conversation, underline how poetry can matter so very much. Poetry can get to the heart and lungs of being, of existence.

I also read and loved Gregory O’Brien’s endnote in his new collection House & Contents where he says:

And I listened to Anna Jackson ‘s terrific conversation with Kim Hill where she says: ‘Poetry is an urgent medium of conversation that takes place not only on the page and between readers and at readings, but on social media as well.’

Kim said Anna’s book reminded her of reading George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I agree. Plus George raises some crucial questions that resonate (before he considers some Russian short stories): ‘How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing?’

How can we feel at home, I am asking myself, when we are divided by what we want for the good of the world, for our neighbour, our children, our parents, ourselves? How do we keep safe and keep our loved ones safe? How do we cope with the misuse of the concept of ‘freedom’? War, poverty, climate change.

How do we write, read and share poetry?

No matter how dark everything feels, poetry is a light, an energy force, significant connections, a transcendental moment (think uplift), necessary communities.

And so out of a love of reading and writing, I have created this paragraph room for other writers to share what poetry means to them.

Thank you.

The paragraphs

I want poetry to be the missing link in the evolution of my soul. I want poetry to be the lover who decides every day he wants to be with me. I want poetry to be the mega-stacked megaphone the kid down Avondale road ties to his BMX to blare K-pop tunes at 11pm. I want poetry to be the thin patch of cotton on the shoulder of Granny’s cardy, the place I’d lay my head. I want poetry to be my AA meeting with its 12 steps to freedom. I want poetry to be the pōhutukawa tree in my own back yard, the tree that walks its roots in cliff edge, sea rock and deep earth.

Selina Tusitala Marsh

I always want something that gives me that feeling that I’m learning something new or seeing something in language in a new way be it a word being used strangely, or the integration of te reo Māori into poetry. I want something that I can read out loud and in doing so it slows time and everything down into the words before and after each other. I have been reading a lot of older poetry by takatāpui writers including Cathy Dunsford, Marewa Glover, Keri Hulme, and Robert Sullivan (am so excited for his new book Tūnui|Comet!). These are writers that form a crucial part of the whakapapa of takatāpui poetry. So I guess what I want in 2022 are words that slow this world and give us takatāpui a sense of our place in it.   

essa may ranapiri

2022 has brought me back to writing poetry again. It’s such a frantic, bleak, weirdly interminable year that the pockets of time I have for processing and expression are perfectly suited to drafting a poem; or, sometimes, they successfully get my head out of 2022. Reading poetry does the same thing: I can’t meditate, but I can focus intensely on reading a poem so everything else dissolves for a few good minutes. Lately, that’s more than enough to ask of poetry or anything.

Jane Arthur

When we were kids, we had a bad habit of leaving the last couple of inches of cereal in the Weetbix package uneaten. No amount of persuasion would convince us that this unwholesome looking mess was as good as the perfectly formed biscuits we’d started off with. That is, until my father came up with the term chocolate weetbix. All of a sudden, we were competing to have a bowl of chocolate weetbix scraps rather than those boringly predictable rectangles. I’m still not sure why those two words made such a great difference to us – the mystique of chocolate transforms all it touches, I suppose. But it was more than that. It was my first experience, not so much of the power of advertising, as of the inherent magic of putting the right words in the right place. My father was a clever and eloquent man, but even he must have felt some slight disquiet at manipulating us with such ease. Since then, as a writer and a teacher, I’ve become increasingly aware of the extent to which one can transform other people’s experience of the world simply by describing it in a particular way. It’s a fearsome responsibility, and not to be taken lightly. This year, as so many of our assumptions about the society we live in crumble around us, I’m more conscious than ever of the power of poetry – ‘language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree’ – and its ability to affect reality. We can, quite literally, change lives with our words: but what is it, exactly, we want to say?

Jack Ross

I wasn’t reading or writing very much at the beginning of the year. I was actually quite frightened by words and their certain power; my head seemed full enough of things (brimming, even) of significant emotional valence, and I was too familiar with the repercussions of emotional burnout to consider overloading the already dizzying load. I was furious with myself for not being able to read or write, especially with my MA approaching, and especially given the ways poetry has previously been there for me in moments of deep grief. But I am grateful now for that break, and for being frightened, as painful as it was. It is necessary to honour your body and your brain that is so much part of your body. It is necessary to honour a present moment and present feeling. Now and going forward into the rest of 2022, I stand by this. Now I am reading and writing poetry again, and having lovely conversations about reading and writing poetry again, and reading (no, inhaling) Anna Jackson’s splendid writing on reading and writing poetry. I am slowly but surely—like condensation trickling down a shower wall—relearning how to welcome all that poetry brings, all that poetry is. I want to read more and more poetry that stirs me, that resonates like a dream dreamed and recalled, that takes me out of myself and delivers me a new, mysterious ground. I want to write more and more poetry that does all of these things for other people, and perhaps most crucially, I want to write poetry that can be there for people when their world isn’t. Poetry should be there for you, even if it isn’t touched, even if it is resisted, it should be there like a shoulder, or a spine.

Amy Marguerite

When I was a student, we were made to paraphrase patches of poetry. When Hamlet said, “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt” etc, you had to reduce his inner thought-process to simple, sensible modern English – to what you believed was its meaning. In this way you learned the limits of paraphrase. It turned out that Hamlet’s soliloquy only made sense as itself! What do I want from poetry in 2022? I still want the poem itself. I want the thing that can’t be paraphrased.

Bill Manhire

In my life the purpose of poetry is varied. I haven’t always had a good relationship with poetry. I have written a lot of it. I have published a fair amount of it. I have written a PhD about it. I have argued with people about it. I have had poetry and poetic language mansplained to me. I have struggled with misogyny in the canon and in contemporary poetry by cis straight men. I’ve realised that my education in poetry has been very white and that poetry in Aotearoa is still on the whole, disproportionately white. For me, as a Pākehā cis woman writer, it feels important that I continue to write, but it feels more important that I help to change the status quo by listening more, buying and reading the work of BIPOC writers, trans and non binary writers, and going to events that involve these writers. It’s also important that I don’t turn this into a performative act about what a good reader and audience member I am. I think it is the responsibility of people with privilege to actively dismantle that privilege and to make space for less privileged people to have a voice. This could include checking our own work for bad attitudes and stereotypes, giving constructive feedback to editors of publications if those publications are not representative, and making sure we are including diverse voices if we are in a position of editing, reviewing, curating or organising events. So I think the question is not just what I want from poetry but how am I able to help? I don’t think the poetry I write, however political, is ever going to change the world. Alongside writing we need to continue to develop our toolkits for enacting change.

Airini Beautrais

As Seneca wrote centuries ago, fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling. Somewhere between the breathless hush and the blinding light, the pulled pin of the Covid-19 hand grenade and the mists of mellow fruitfulness, there will come a time for the prophetic sonnet, with its hopes and deliriums. Poetry in 2022 is the music of the everyday, a waving of poetical palms and a singing of hosannahs, as always. Poetry is incorrigibly plural, wrote Louis MacNeice; the world is too much with us late and soon, said Wordsworth, William; while William C. Williams anticipated another container-load of red wheelbarrows arriving from China, as clapped-out ironies groan in their supply-chains. We poets, those Hart Crane called the visionary company of love, make world-order from word-order, as unacknowledged legislators, legends in our own minds; and so poetry advances one poem at a time, all at once and everywhere, just like that.

            But what makes a poem stand out, to engage us, challenge us, delight us, speak to us? Word salads are a matter of taste for non-conformists and formalists alike. Sometimes it’s alright for poems to sound unruly and awkward, as they reach for connection. Will they last forever, as Shakespeare promised a lover in a sonnet, or will they last as long as an April shower, freshening the air for a moment, then be gone? Some poems encourage us to unpack possibilities endlessly; other poems can’t wait to be rid of us and retreat into the catacombs of the forgotten. What is the core business of a poem, was the question the Sphinx asked, and Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ answers it as a prophetic sonnet: ‘Nothing beside remains.’ As we each reach for a poem, for a favourite stanza, for a remembered lyrical line or terse phrase, may we all be stuck fast in the happy and glorious moment of that poem, long to reign over us — that slice of heaven, that heaven in a wild flower.

David Eggleton

I have considered this question in relation to Sir Mason Durie’s health model, Te Whare Tapa Whā, and the legacy of Dr Moana Jackson. The correlation between health and wellbeing has been accentuated by the coronavirus pandemic which still grips the world. The four pillars of the model are 1. Taha tinana (physical health), 2. Taha wāirua (spiritual health), 3. Taha whānau (family health) and 4. Taha hinengaro (mental health). We are into the third year of the pandemic; my mother has turned 90 and my father has been diagnosed with lung cancer. I need these pillars to remain strong as I negotiate yet another year impacted by a virus likened to a crown. Poetry is my Psalm 23. What I lean on, clutch, attach to like a limpet when my world wavers and implodes. Poetry is a portal. The transit lounge, the journey, and the destination. It has become my waka, the vehicle that supports and transports me through life changing events as both a reader and writer of verse. Moana Jackson loved poetry. And he deftly challenged the Crown and its associated institutions. I gifted him a copy of my Tapa Talk collection after I was deeply moved by his presentation at a literacy conference many years ago. It was a way I could say ‘Kia ora’. Give something of myself in return. A bespoke (mainly poetry) anthology was gifted to Moana during a 2020 Koha Aroha ceremony that the bulk of the audience attended via Zoom, due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions. Moana was ill. We gifted him our stories. The essence of who we are. Poetry is our souls revealed and transmitted in stories pared to the quick. If you want to know someone – explore their poetry. 

Serie Barford

I feel that poetry is in a way, an essential thing in making sense of the world when we have so much information constantly being blasted at us. While in many ways, it is a good thing that we now have access to so much media, news, and knowledge, it gives us a huge sense of urgency. We feel we need to be doing something about every bad thing we’re hearing about, which is obviously an impossible task and only drains us emotionally. The reason I particularly love poetry as an art form is that it condenses everything down into a tiny micro point, a little anchor to understand a certain emotion, issue, or even moment in time. It’s a way to make very large concepts small enough to fit into a few lines on the page, lines that still pack as much punch as a paragraph. As a reader I’m always after poems that pack some sort of gut-punch, a poem that I just viscerally get even if I can’t articulate it – a poem that condenses complex ideas into a wash of feeling. As a writer of poetry, I never really consciously think about what I’m writing, but I often find that after I’ve written it, the poem seems to make sense of something I didn’t even know I was feeling. Poetry is a sort of divination, a form to render our complexities into bite-sized verses.

Cadence Chung

At fifteen, poetry meant John Keats; at twenty-five, Sylvia Plath and C.P. Cavafy; at thirty-five, Elizabeth Bishop and Hugo Williams; at forty-five, W.H. Auden and Horace. Since then, poetry has meant the work of any poet from any time or culture whose inner world I feel I can enter and which enlarges my own. Starting a poem is usually an involuntary act: a phrase, a rhythm, a lurch in the mind. Then it’s trying to make something that didn’t exist before, also bringing to light something inside that I didn’t know was there. Sex is great, but poetry is better.

Harry Ricketts

Reading (and maybe writing) in uncertain times

About 15 years ago I was invited to be part of a small group of friends who meet to read poems to each other. Not our own poems, poems we have discovered to share. People in the group have come and gone over the years but we have continued meeting for an hour once a fortnight – with a few chosen poems and water only as refreshment. Until this year. 2022 is my 79^th year, the virus is evident around me and the poetry group has become another loss. A by-product of the 15 years, however, is a poetry shelf full of little paper strips marking and recording where I have been, where I’ve found the poems that have done ‘poetry’s job’ – as Greg O’ Brien puts it – to ‘flicker’ or ‘glow’. For me the chosen poem might give consolation, insight, laughter, clarity, fellow-feeling, delight. In a group the ‘luminescence’ can create a little lift, a gasp or sigh, or a conversation. Even occasionally a stunned silence. On my poetry shelf I have a small anthology of poems that a student once gave me: Poems to Live by in Uncertain Times and I see it has 5 little tags. The first tag is for a Billy Collins poem called ‘Passengers’ where he manages a fear of flying with his familiar humour. The second is by Bertolt Brecht, who says ‘Truly, I live in dark times!’ …‘The man who laughs/ Has simply not yet had/ The terrible news.’ ‘Northern Pike’ by James Wright is the third tag. It tells us that that we are all going ‘to die in a loneliness/ I can’t imagine and a pain/ I don’t know’ and that to go on living and let the living go on living he will prepare and eat the fish. It is a lovely poem ending with: ‘There must be something very beautiful in my body,/ I am so happy.’ Sharon Olds writes of a mother fare-welling a son on the Summer Camp Bus. ‘What ever he needs, he has or doesn’t/ have by now./ Whatever the world is going to do to him/ it has started to do.’ The last poem is ‘On Prayer’ by Czeslaw Milosz. It reminds me that sometimes in dark times prayer ‘to someone who is not’ is all that we can do.

‘All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge/ And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard….’

Dinah Hawken

As a reader, I think I want poetry to be a place of reflection, illumination, celebration and repair. It can’t be all those things at once, but different poets can offer these things in different ways. I want it to offer music, surprise, and if it can’t offer narrative tension, I want it to offer structural intrigue. Books and reading feel ever more essential to me as we hunker down and avoid crowded indoors or social venues. They’re a chance to experience a form of contact and connection with other people where the only contagion is of ideas and inspiration. As a writer, I want poetry to help me untangle some difficult psychological terrain, to capture an atmosphere of thought the way music might if I could compose. I’ve realised the past few years how much I still need poetry as a way of understanding and recording experience (not only my own), even when I don’t feel a strong impulse to publish individual pieces. 

Emma Neale

I think what has really stuck with me over the lockdowns and in the aftermath of Covid-19 is the sense of community within the poetry sphere and the generosity of the people within it. It’s always felt particularly special, but I think it is particularly obvious now that other aspects, like in-person launches and readings, are few and far between and we have had to find new ways to support each other. There is this reciprocal relationship wherein you often read and actively engage (through reviews, book buying, or plain ol’ compliments) with the work of people who also actively engage with your work. I feel real pride being able to share work with poets whose work I admire and great excitement when someone in the community publishes something new. This close-knit feeling is something I am really grateful for. It’s so refreshing that it isn’t an environment that emphasises competition. So, yeah, poetry has really come to signify connection for me, and a particularly crucial one to stave off the lockdown blues. The generous support, mentorship, and encouragement from other poets (given so freely, too) has changed my life. I read something a while ago from Nathan Joe (or maybe I heard him say it somewhere) about the importance of having others believe in your work at the beginning of your practice, particularly from those with more experience. Other poets have certainly done and continue to do that for me and I hope I can one day do that for others.

Lily Holloway

Something I’m realising more and more is how delicious poetry is to me as a kind of construction and/or documentary exercise. The poems I’m most interested in are those that feel they could have only been written by one person—that there is a specific voice, or viewpoint, or a distinct craftsmanship, that might be inspired by the same thing as hundreds of other poems, but could have only been expressed this way once. Part of it, I think, comes down to the fact that no matter what form a poem takes (and sometimes form itself is the thing), writing reveals us. It reveals what we see as important, whether it’s witty, or loving, or pastoral, or political—or all of the above. Poetry reveals what we want to devote space and time to, whether we intend for it to or not. And I think there’s something so lovely in that; you know, “in times like these, what do you love? What are you reaching for? What do you feel is, or isn’t, reaching back for you?”. To feel you’ve been plunged into someone’s perspective, and exposed to their priorities, and to how the world might be viewed through the combined lens of both (regardless of whether the poet and the speaker are one and the same), is an absolute gift. It’s an exchange I’ve always valued but one I especially cherish now, when it’s so easy to feel removed from everything. Predictably, I suppose my approach as a writer is similar; it’s very much a “here is a text I have built; here is how I see it (whatever ‘it’ is); here is what matters to me.” And I’ll certainly never capture every single thing I care about in poetry—nor do I have the desire to, frankly!—but with circumstances as they are, while I have the choice, I don’t know why I would write about anything else.

Tate Fountain

In 2022 I am trialing some of the ways that I can make poetry my bread and butter. One of my goals for the year is to read more of the collections of poetry that I already own, and to prioritise the reading of poetry over the other forms of writing which I find more accessible. In other words, to challenge myself to read poems even when I may not be in the mood. It’s a bit like physical exercise, isn’t it? You know it’s good for you, yet sometimes it slips out of your routine, and getting back on the horse feels like a huge ask and then you realise- actually, I like this and it makes me feel good. As a writer, I’m about to stop editing my first manuscript. I hope to send it away soon and clear the decks. But also, this year I’m having a go at teaching people about poetry! I tutored some school students in the summer and now I’m tutoring tertiary students. It’s a complex position at times, I frequently feel the need to remind my students that I’m not the poetry police and their readings are just as valid and true as mine. My goal is to guide them to an attitude of curiosity about what words can do. What I want from poetry is a means to grow our community of appreciative readers and writers.

Claudia Jardine

Gah!!! Poetry. At the moment poetry means to me lots of boring hard admin, which is obviously wrong and bad. All I want is to be swallowed by it (as both a reader and a writer) and feel something, but at the moment I have to skate across the top of it while I make my attempts to put it in front of people, and I hate skating across the top of anything, emotionally speaking. But I’m doing it cos what I really want from poetry is for it to move big audiences. I know that poetry can have this exceptional power on a stage, and having seen it, felt it, that’s what I want more and more of. Unfortunately it’s also harder and harder to make it happen, and the longer I go without having people in a room together getting moved, the less… substantial I feel. What I want from poetry is to be in a crowd, watching artists make language transcend itself, feeling the room – and myself – totally alive with it.

Freya Daly Sadgrove

2021 on the internet felt like the Hundred Years’ war of those who proclaimed poetry is a vital life force and those who pronounced it deeply pointless. As the self-appointed arbiter of taste I have decided poetry is both and that’s ok. In 2022 we have declared the year of discourse dead and rung in the new flesh, 2022 is the year of New Zealand poetry, don’t forget that. I just read ‘Poetry to make boys cry’ in Super Model Minority and fulfilled the Chris Tse prophecy, I devoured Meat Lovers with the salt of my enemies, I pre-order collections, I sit at the window and wait for the new word from Michael Steven/essa may ranapiri/Erik Kennedy/50 other NZ poets like a war widow. I briefly forget I have my own book coming out, for a minute I shamefully wish everyone else just chilled and put out their career-defining works next year instead. I swallow humble pills until the feeling passes, the feeling passes, I pre-order more collections. 2022 is a fence post year in the vast paddocks of NZ poetry history, it will not be forgotten. As for writing poetry, in the early hours of Thursday morning, high on sleep deprivation, I wrote my first poem of 2022, it is deeply weird, a slick, writhing thing you wouldn’t want to hold for long, but I like it, maybe there’s some blood left in the engine.

Jordan Hamel

Poetry has always been a lifeline to me. As a teen, the reading and writing of it felt like it saved me over and over again. I could figure out how I felt by piecing together words and phrases. I had access to people and experiences that did not exist around me. As an adult, in this time, poetry is a pause in my afternoon, it’s something I read with breakfast and coffee, it’s what I read before I sleep. It reminds me that I am alive, that there are so many things I don’t understand, but that I don’t have to understand. I just have to live and keep on living. 

‘Poetry is not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.’ Kim Addonizio

Emma Barnes

The last couple of years have caught me at my most vulnerable: favouring Netflix, staying in my dressing gown, and with little demarcation between days. My mind’s been elsewhere, preoccupied with Covid instead of what’s happening in contemporary poetry. I needed to read things that were recognisable, so I found myself turning to old classics of the canon: Milton, Barrett Browning, Yeats, and Eliot among others. These are the same poets I naively dismissed as an undergraduate for being irrelevant. But reading them now, on my own terms, their verse feels structured and orderly. Their voices feel assured, helping me make sense of how we ended up here in the first place. It’s comforting to think of people having adored and laboured over them for centuries, and how their words still felt immediate after all this time. 

Anna Jackson’s new book Action & Travels, has been a welcome introduction back to contemporary voices, and a reminder that the past and present can be read together. I’m thrilled to see Becca Hawkes and Hera Lindsay Bird, for example, in conversation with Keats and Coleridge. On Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning, Jackson explains poetry’s magnetic ability to capture that “intensity of feeling” we often can’t make sense of. Poetry is last night’s dream we don’t understand, an unearthly Bill Hammond painting, or the mental rehearsal of a conversation we never have. I write poetry to try and make sense of that resonance, of that something that seems important, that something that’s too big to carry my head. 

Tim Grgec

I just had a pepi so writing has been a challenge so far this year. I have been trying to find moments to read and have been re-reading Strands and Lost Possessions by Keri Humle. I don’t think there will ever be another Keri Hulme. Hulme was special because she could be many people, many places and many things. She also stylistically never wrote in a very linear way, for instance some of her poetry could be seen like short stories or dialogue or pūrākau. I want to read more poetry that transgresses form.

Hana Pera Aoake

Being someone who writes toikupu in 2022 has, to date, been unsettling. I’m seriously wondering if I’ve lost my mojo. Let’s face it, who actually wants to read about suicide bereavement during a pandemic? It’s not light and fluffy, which is possibly what people are after as a means of escape. I don’t blame them, but I’m exhausted from trying to figure it out. The serious lack of funding, in an equitable spread, within our literary sector is concerning, and probably contributes to creatives feeling isolated and hōhā. I’ve noticed my skin has become thinner, in that I’m less able to slough off multiple rejections in the ways I did before. There’s some fantastic new mahi coming out which I’m excited to read, and I’d love to see NZ libraries buying LOADS MORE copies of NZ pukapuka, and making them accessible to readers who can’t afford to buy them. 

Iona Winter

The biggest thing poetry means for me is a community. The people it’s brought into my life and the time I spend with them is something I’m so grateful for. Getting together with other poets to write, or sing karaoke, or just talk shit, is a balm. I used to think people who write just for their friends were too exclusive, but if you do it well, anyone who reads your poems can feel like they’re your friend—like it’s for them. I read poems by people I don’t know and I get that feeling. Poetry is so fluid that it can do something different every second, but that human connection is always there. These past couple years, that’s mattered so much.

Ash Davida Jane

Poetry means making to me. The making new in the face of tearing down, and cutting down, and Faustian pacts and costs. Since the start of this year I’ve been poeting with poetry students and every day they make new rooms for us to walk into and look out from. They assemble kit for kōrero, connecting ropes, magic tricks, leaps of faith, wild dances, wild gardens in the badlands. Our workshops see poetry splashed against the walls and bounced against the windows. But it’s resilient stuff and carbon footprint friendly. I read that the carbon impact of an average Marvel movie is the equivalent to 11 trips to the moon – poetry can get us to multiple other moons whenever, however, and – this is miraculous – without the terrible toll. 

Vana Mansiadis

There’s one week left to submit for the winter issue of Starling! New Zealand writers under 25, send us your new work by 20 April 2022 to be considered – full submission guidelines can be found here.

invoice

$100 less tax for
mince
1 pkt cheese
1 litre of milk
1 loaf of bread
2 rolls of loo paper
       paid for
        my poem

fall

gnarled burnt weathered
twisted toppled rotting
arms raised skyward
falling earthbound
this tree is dying

Apirana Taylor

Apirana Taylor is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer and novelist. He’s been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He tours globally presenting his poetry. He’s written and published poetry, plays, short stories, and novels and is included in many anthologies nationally and internationally.

Titus Books 

is pleased to invite you to the launch of three new collections of poetry:

Gorse Poems by Chris Holdaway

Resonating Distances by Richard von Sturmer

Sonnets for Sio by Scott Hamilton

Introduced by Murray Edmond 

Saturday 23 April from 2.30pm

at Grey Lynn Library Hall, 474 Great North Road

All Welcome

Acclaimed New Zealand author Tracey Slaughter presents The Longest Drink in Town, debuting at The Meteor Theatre from April 27^th – 30^th.  A dark, lyrical and brooding snapshot of the fallout of a parental affair; The Longest Drink in Town marks the first of Slaughter’s works to be adapted for the stage.

            On the inspiration behind The Longest Drink, Slaughter says, “The situation took place on the roadside of my own childhood: I’d been a passenger in my mother’s car to be delivered for ‘visitation,’ and my new stepmother met us at the drop-off point. The detonation was instant. The two women scrapping it out at the T-bone where a servo met a pub met a fleet of display homes – as a child all I could do was freeze in the gravel  intersection and witness. That set-up became the nexus for a storm of childhood reactions to the everyday spectacle of a ‘broken home,’ taking me into stories that touched the dark core of what divorce is for the small players who don’t get to choose it. The ‘chick fight’ was more than just late Friday arvo entertainment. The scene transfixed me, and never left. It was inevitable that writing would one day drive me back there.”

            Tracey Slaughter is the author of deleted scenes for lovers (2016), Conventional Weapons (2019), and most recently Devil’s Trumpet (2021). She’s received numerous awards, including the international Fish Short Story Prize, the Bridport Prize, the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award, the Landfall Essay Competition and was the recipient of the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary.

            This exciting project is brought to you by One Question Theatre and Mayhem Literary Journal, who have lifted Slaughter’s prose from the page, without losing an atom of the yearning and the ache of her novella.

            Co-directors’ Dave Taylor and Liam Hinton say of the project, “It’s a tremendous privilege to be gifted such a generous text and to have our shared hand in bringing it to life.”

            On seeing the story alive on stage, Slaughter says, “Many of their stories were fragments of mine. But they weren’t just vehicles for my catharsis – they had bloodstreams and hair-ties, longings and school-shoes, ugly old dollies and busted hearts. They felt alive to me in the writing, and I loved them. To meet them now, walking round The Meteor, is an experience near indescribable. They’re not just suffering – they’re leaping with wildness, wriggling with mischief, and rocking with anger and lust. They are a joy to behold. I’ll always be intensely grateful to the group of actors who took this journey to bring my characters to life.”

Tracey Slaughter’s The Longest Drink in Town

Where: The Meteor Theatre (1 Victoria Street, Hamilton)

Time: April 27-30, 7:30pm

Book at themeteor.co.nz

For Mature Audiences – contains depictions of self-harm, sexual themes and strong language.

Apertures, Makyla Curtis

Through the eye of time

When I receive one of 40 precious copies of Makyla Curtis’ chapbook, Apertures, it comes carefully wrapped in layers: tissue, cellophane, paper. It is the prelude to digging down through the meticulous archeology of Curtis’ poetry.

As she journeys in ever widening circles to find the fragments that will fill in the gaps of who she is, she also finds spaces. From Auckland’s West Coast to Scotland’s North Sea, Curtis finds touchstones in the landscape. A hagstone that allows her to see through time. Greywacke stones that she piles into a cairn.  Filmy ferns that she plucks and imprints onto the pages of the book itself.

on the shore I sweep my feet for a hagstone to cast a vision
to find a doorway in the rock, in the earth, in time
to cast a moment of an ancestor’s eye

Apertures is a work of art: one of several text-and-art pieces that Curtis made in fulfilment of her 2021 Master of Visual Arts project.  The other pieces have been displayed in a recent exhibition at the Angela Morton Room at Takapuna Library (https://www.instagram.com/angelamorton.room/), along with videos, photographs and found objects all collected on Curtis’ journey of self discovery. Leanne Radojkovich, the Angela Morton Room’s curator, tells me the response to the exhibition has been warm, searching and curious: much like Curtis’ words on the page. 

The book in my hand is small but heavy for its size. Its compact square form, made of heavy paper, are carefully bound and the pages open up to lie flat.  The text is the dark blue-green of the ocean. Interspersed, allowing me to breathe between the intense experience of each poem, are pages of impressions: leaves, threads, wood in a delicate pink.

The poems advance and recede across the page, gradually revealing Curtis’ purpose and her journey. From beach to bush to council records, the ephemera are footprints left by migrant ancestors. Some are even physical objects, such as her great great grandmother’s sewing machine which she restores and then brings back into modern-day use.  The act of making with a physical object connects her directly with the hand of her ancestors and creates a new history, a continuation of the old:

When you ask me what I am making I twist the threads through
the shuttle boat bobbin, we are the colour of rust
when the sky leans against us
                                                  I am threading us through
the eye of a 130 year old needle, I cannot see the gap
only feel it there.

 

Curtis’ purposeful journeying is a trail of stones for us to follow, one version of the search for identity that most of us undertake in our lives. In doing so she deals with difficult intersections: how did her ancestors’ path cross with that of Māori?  How then does she reconcile their building of their own histories on top of those that were already there?  But as with any journey, the spaces and silences are opportunities, too.  Sometimes it’s just as satisfying not to know the whole story. To accept you will never know and grow yourself into the silences:

where there is a gap in things there is a threshold

this is where I go in a lacuna – through the gaps
in the rain and see across time in the holes in the leaves
their multitude is vast in possibilities – across the threshold
I am a different kind of whole, a tardigrade in every corner of the earth
connected at core essence; no longer isolated
on a patch of stolen land.

Apertures, pages 20-21

I sent some questions to Makyla after reading her work and seeing the exhibition.

When you embarked on your Master’s project, what were your initial driving questions?  How did that shift over time?

My initial question, or goal, came out of my Master of Arts in English project: I was researching the interpretative possibilities of reading image and text together. I was looking at the work of Cilla McQueen and John Pule and the way their work intertwines image and text as a simultaneity of storytelling.

I wanted to try this theory out in my own artistic practice and chose to do a Master of Visual Arts as the grounding for that experiment. I have been studying te reo mē ngā tikanga Māori for a few years at a few different institutions, and asking a lot of questions about the history of Aotearoa and what it means to be Pākehā.

These two things came together while I was working on my MVA research project. In responding to your question, I’ve returned to the research question I constructed for an assessment early in 2019 and I talk about the ‘(im)possibility of simultaneous presence in Aotearoa and Alba (Scotland),’ and I think that remained a driving force. To be Pākehā is to be fully present in Aotearoa and guided by a Māori worldview, which means knowing where you are from. But in returning to Scotland (I lived there from 2008-2011), despite it being my mother’s birthplace, I was not seen as Scots. And so, there is a contradiction: for me, to be Pākehā is to be Scots, but in Scotland I am not Scots and I am not Pākehā.

The shifts over time were more about how I might explore my complicity in colonisation alongside ideas of identity and belonging here as a settler descendant. I began with wider questions about what a Pākehā identity might be, and then brought it in closer as to what my Pākehā identity might be.

The poems in Apertures have a sense of fluidity – the sense of place and time shifts constantly.   What were your poetic influences, and what types of writing techniques did you experiment with?

I’m glad that fluidity comes across. I was looking for that ‘simultaneous presence.’ Cilla McQueen is a huge influence in that regard. Her poems (particularly those in Markings and Soundings) take you to McQueen’s ancestral home in the Western Hebrides of Scotland while keeping you in the South Island of New Zealand in her drawings. The places become kind of overlaid, and that becomes an identity in a way.

Other big influences while I was writing were Ruby Solly, Tōkū Pāpā (Kai Tahu), Roseanne Watt, Moder Dy (Shetlean), Frances Presley, Halse for Hazel (English), Natalie Harkin, Archival Poetics (Narungga). Early drafts of a lot of the poems included a lot more te reo Māori and Scots Gaidhlig, and those languages certainly guided me a lot, but ultimately, I didn’t feel it was quite appropriate for me to keep so much of them in the final poems.

Apertures, pages 24-25

The images in Apertures are contact prints of items you found on your journeys to places of significance to your family.  How did you make them, and are they the same in each book?

There are a few different methods of print in the Apertures collection. I printed with found objects including threads, ferns, sliced driftwood, kawakawa leaves, but they’re not all ‘contact’ prints as you describe them, for example some are printed from the remnant ink impression. All, though, are a form of planograph monoprinting (printed from a flat printing plate or surface to create one-of-a-kind single prints that cannot be reproduced in the same method). The prints were photographed and digitised to be included in this book. The originals are in other artworks and single edition books. The images are all the same across the copies because the book was printed using risography (a digital duplicator, it uses screen printing methods but functions more like a photocopier).

When I read your poetry, I feel an urgency – a sense of searching for identity.  The Pākehā search for identity in this country now seems to carry with it a sense of shame or shyness – I’ve had friends tell me they have ‘no’ identity. What’s your take on that?

There’s a term I used a lot when teaching at the university that I think was coined by Stephen Turner: ‘productive discomfort.’ This is the active side of the white guilt coin. ‘White guilt’ doesn’t help anyone, least of all Pākehā. The shame, or shyness, makes us inactive, and you can sink into it and drown in it. But productive discomfort allows for the unpleasant feeling of facing our complicity in colonisation of ngā tāngata Māori, but enables us to use it towards action and reparation, even if that reparation is small.

No one has ‘no’ identity. Everybody has culture. If you think you don’t have one, it just means yours is so ubiquitous that you haven’t had to think about it. Something that causes me great concern is that when people think they don’t have a culture or an identity, it can lead them to seek out and steal the culture of others. Cultural appropriation is a further act of colonisation and violence. We need to ward against that by exploring our own culture. I think that we Pākehā have been very lucky to have been given a unique identity that acknowledges that our ancestors are from elsewhere but that we can belong here in Aotearoa. Māori gave us this identity and I think it is an extraordinary gift and privilege. We can be proud to be Pākehā, but it should include that productive discomfort.

Your poems however show that you ultimately uncovered a richness and depth to your past, and a real sense of connection to Aotearoa through the actions of your ancestors. Was this an easy journey for you personally?

Overall, I have found the journey extremely rewarding so far. I been able to spend a lot of time with my Dad because the project was, for the purposes of the thesis, focused on my Dad’s side of the family. I’ve especially enjoyed that aspect. My Dad has come along on the journey with me as an active participant, asking a lot of the same questions as I have.

There have been some very joyful discoveries: learning about the owner of our heirloom sewing machine, Eliza Riley, and repairing the sewing machine to working order; finding an amazing photograph of my great grandparents Florence Annie and Ernest, with Florence’s parents Sarah Ann and Thomas, with Sarah’s sister and her husband and baby. And some very surprising discoveries: I found my great great great grandfather, Thomas Riley, in the Auckland Lunatic Asylum records. We’re still working through what we can find of Thomas Riley’s life; it may well be he was involved in the invasion of the Waikato before he was committed.

It isn’t easy, and I don’t think it should be. If it’s easy, I’m not asking hard enough questions! But it is rewarding, and I recommend anyone who doesn’t know much about their history, to give the search a go. And if you are Pākehā and can’t find your own ancestors, it’s a good idea to learn about our shared settler colonial history and use that to help understand your identity as Pākehā, because the wider history still shaped your identity and our present.

Tell me about how you typeset and printed your book and about your design choices.

I had been writing poetry throughout the project, and snippets of it was finding its way into the single edition books I was making. It wasn’t until February last year (’21) when I attended a workshop introducing the risograph machine at AUT that I thought of compiling the poems into a printed collection. So, the typesetting and design was informed by what I thought I could do using risography, and the fact that I would be handbinding the book (I used the French lace method). You can only print one colour at a time, and because I hadn’t done a lot with riso in the past, I decided on a straightforward split: teal for the text and pink for the images, and then brought them together for the cover. In the rest of the project I was working with Garamond, Bodoni, Univers, and assorted wooden type, because I was working with material type: metal and wooden moveable type, letterpress. But this was a digital design, and so I jumped at the chance to work with two of my favourite typefaces, both from leagueofmoveabletype.com: Fanwood and Raleway. That was, however, occasionally frustrating because Raleway doesn’t have any macrons so I had to add them manually. These two faces weren’t too much of a divergence, though, from the general feel. I think the added typefaces to the project here were enriching rather than distracting. They give the poetry collection its own voice, amid the voices of the other books that worked with text in a different way.

I’d love to know more about your research into letterpress, on this project and others. How did you develop your macron typeset, and what are future projects you’re contemplating?

The first ever language to be printed in Aotearoa was in te reo Māori. The grounding of language and print in this country is te reo Māori, and that is important to remember, especially while English remains dominant.

There have been two letterpress research projects I have conducted, the first was in 2016 and was the creation of a contemporary case for handsetting te reo Māori. The second was in 2019, an experiential research project to handset He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

2016: I found it frustrating to handset metal type in te reo using an English lay out case: there aren’t enough k’s, and what k’s there are, are in a small compartment on the far left. Likewise, the p’s and w’s are relegated to smaller compartments. Meanwhile, the English case has e as the dominant vowel, when in Māori it is the a, and the s, h, d, c, y all take up prime real estate. Add to that the lack of macrons, and it was becoming clear I needed a new case to set from.
In 1834 William Colenso was hired by the Church Missionary Society to come to New Zealand and print Te Paipera (the Bible). He made numerous requests to his employers for the tools he would need on arrival, but they missed the memo and when he arrived one of the major things he was missing was type cases, the trays that hold the type. There are loads of different type case layouts, even just in English, but the premise is that the most often used letters are near the centre bar, and the less often used ones are in the outer compartments. Colenso had learned a little bit of te reo on the boat over, so he designed some new cases and had them built by a carpenter in Kororāreka. He filled the cases with the type his employer had ordered from England, but didn’t bother to unpack the English only letters. I used Colenso’s design of his upper and lower cases as the basis for my contemporary job case (upper and lower cases in the same tray) design, and built the case. We purchased some new type in Garamond with macrons from a typecaster in Upper Hutt. The case is now filled with the 14pt Garamond, and I used it to print a poem by Vaughan Rapatahana, and a poem by Cilla McQueen translated into te reo.

2019:  In 2019, I commissioned a cabinet-maker in Kaiwaka to build Colenso’s cases based on drawings from 1890s. Then, using these cases I handset He Whakaputanga and Te Tiriti o Waitangi to look as like the original printed versions of these documents as I could (only bigger, I used 18pt). It was an experiential experiment. What was it like to print these documents using these type case layouts as they had been by Colenso in 1835 and 1840. For me, when I handset type, I get very close to the text, I address every letter individually and bring it together. It’s intimate and familiar, and it was an amazing way to get up close to these two documents: documents that are the basis of how I came to be living here in Aotearoa, and are a guide for how to do so.

NB. There’s often confusion with these projects that I designed a typeface for te reo, that is not so. These are all about the tray layout of where the material metal type is stored and where you get it from to handset with it. It would be similar to talking about the qwerty keyboard and alternative keyboard layouts.

Two images from a whole story in the eye of the sea, artist book, 390 x 220mm, silk-cotton pages, 14 leaves, hardcover with stab-binding

This book is one of several that you made, but the rest are much more limited edition, and are experimental in their choice of materials. Can you tell me about these and the process you used to make them?

My MVA project (titled ‘Folding Time’), was made up of a number of fabric printed hangings of collected and pressed ferns (‘Ink Herbarium’, ‘Pteridomania series’); the printing of HW and ToW and an accompanying zine with a collection of poetry, short essays and documentary photographs (Ka mua, ka muri); eight single edition books; the poetry collection Apertures (edition of 40); three essay zines; and two photo zines. Of the eight single edition books, one was digitally printed with a page for each site visit and field trip I conducted for the project between March 2019 – May 2021 (there were 45), and bound as a concertina book so that it can unfold into one very long page. Of the remaining seven, two are printed on rice paper and five are printed on silk-cotton fabric.

By your question I am assuming you are most interested in the five fabric books.

They are titled: advance / recede; a whole story in the eye of the sea; an aperture shows me an arrival; gaps / thresholds; and little archives. They’re handprinted using relief printing (letterpress – metal and wooden type) and planograph monoprinting (mentioned earlier) with found objects (threads, pressed leaves, sliced driftwood), and some lasercut mdf. When working with fabric, it’s all handprinted, usually on my kitchen table. Occasionally I used a Farley proofing press, but I found it more effective to print with the pressure of my hands. Some prints have the remnants of my finger marks (although those are more evident in the fabric hangings). A lot of the time I will print from the remnants of an impression. By that I mean that I ink up a plate, place a pressed fern, for example, on the plate, print that to produce a negative, or an outline (which I usually throw away) and then remove the fern and place the fabric against the plate. I get the remnant, or the shadow, or an ink impression. It’s a fun and beautiful way to print. Every print is a discovery.

advance / recede, artist book, 150 x 200mm, silk-cotton pages, 21 leaves, hardcover with stab-binding. Courtesy of the Angela Morton Room Collection, Takapuna Library

What new projects have come out of this course of investigation?

The where to from here is that now that I’m not bound by the confines of the thesis, I am exploring my mum’s side of the family. I’ve just moved to West Auckland, and this is where my mum grew up. Earlier this month (March 2022) my mum, Nana and I did a driving tour of West Auckland to look at the houses they lived in, and where they worked and studied, and I’ve begun conducting oral histories with them too. My maternal grandparents and my mum came to NZ in 1957 as ’£10 poms.’ It’s quite a different story to the six ships that brought my paternal family to NZ.

I recorded my journey in a blog (which I’ve been meaning to update) and on my Instagram @makylac

You can hear Makyla read from Apertures here

Renee Liang is a poet, playwright, paediatrician, medical researcher and essayist.  She is the Asian Theme Lead and a named investigator on landmark longitudinal study Growing Up In NZ. As an established writer, Renee has collaborated on visual arts works, film, opera and music, produced and directed theatre works, worked as a dramaturge, taught creative writing and organized community-based arts initiatives such as New Kiwi Women Write, a writing workshop series for migrant women, and The Kitchen, a new program nurturing stories in local kitchens. Her work The Bone Feeder, originally a play, later adapted into an opera, was one of the first Asian mainstage works to be performed in NZ. Renee has written, produced and toured eight plays. In 2018 she was appointed a Member of the NZ Order of Merit for services to the arts, and won Next Woman of the Year for Arts and Culture.

Makyla Curtis is Scots Pākehā and lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, printer, and artist. Makyla is a volunteer compositor in letterpress at MOTAT, Museum of Transport and Technology. She has a Masters in English from the University of Auckland, and a Masters in Visual arts from Auckland University of Technology.

The moon that harms animals

It’s going to harm animals, this moon
rising so full and huge at dusk
over this little bald hill at the edge
of a field of stubble. Stalks and
black earth, already gleaned
and dark as the darkest desire
which will come on the animals tonight.

And here, in proof, is the ragdoll cat
carried draped over a child’s arm or
worn around the neck of another, sore
and torn, hardly bearing to be held
because of the savage bites she bears
for venturing, unstoppable, through the cat door
and yielding herself, in fealty, to the moon.

Elizabeth Smither

Elizabeth Smither’s most recent publication is a collection of short stories, ‘The Piano Girls’, (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2021). A new collection of poems, ‘My American Chair’ will be published by AUP this year.

Saturday morning and I switch the radio on to hear Kim Hill in scintillating conversation with poet Anna Jackson. The aim was to explore Anna’s new book Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (AUP). The result is a warm, articulate and joyful celebration of poetry. I loved it so much, I Iistened again this morning.

In the new book, Anna takes around 100 poems and considers what she loves about them, what the poems are doing. Kim Hill was intrigued and delighted by the unexpected inhabitants in each chapter. I saw them as little neighbourhoods with surprising guests that shone renewed light on the chapter theme and upon poetry itself.

A few gold nuggets but you need to hear the whole conversation:

Anna: I was ‘cutting the landscapes of poetry in different directions to see what those combinations would bring out in each poem’.

Anna on younger poets and ‘what it does to poetry to be so current and alive and shared and important’: ‘Poetry is an urgent medium of conversation that takes place not only on the page and between readers and at readings, but on social media as well.’

Anna after reading Maggie Smith’s much shared ‘Good Bones’ on air: ‘That’s the wish of poetry … What can we salvage? What’s beautiful? What can we will ourselves to see as beautiful without turning away from what’s terrible? What we know is real?’

Kim: ‘Have you read George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain? I liked your book in the same way I liked his book.’

Anna: ‘The more poems you read, the more qualities you’ll be likely to recognise.’

Listen to conversation with Kim Hill here, Saturday Morning RNZ National

Poetry Shelf conversation with Anna Jackson

Auckland University Press page

Anna Jackson website