Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Pegasus Poetry Readings are back
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Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Elizabeth Smither ‘The moon that harms animals’
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.
Poetry Shelf responds: Anna Jackson in conversation with Kim Hill
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
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2021
Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2021, edited and introduced by Kate Camp
The trees stand solitary. Clouds wring
the odd star out of the dark. We’re
walking on nothing. We’re the road, unlined.
Pippi Jean from ‘11.11pm’
This week I spent days reading and replying to all the children who sent me bird poems for Poetry Box’s March challenge. It is a sad glad task as so many children didn’t get picked to be posted, yet there were so many gold nugget poems. My Poetry Box aim is to nourish poetry at the grass roots, to encourage children and teachers to play with poetry. To explore poetry as a way to liberate words, to say what we think and feel, to see and hear with words. To break rules, to create rules. To let imaginations go flying and to draw upon memory. For a start.
I know what is like picking poems for anthologies, for Best NZ Poems, even books for the NZ Book Awards, and it is a painful pleasure, because not everyone gets picked, no matter how many best books and poems there are.
I do squirm and recoil from the word best with its unavoidable hierarchies and exclusions, its biases and neglects – especially how we edited and selected in the past. But still today, these leanings exist.
Despite my aversion to the concept of best, I am also grateful. I pick up poetry anthologies, journals, I scan book award lists, and I delve into Best NZ Poems because there are always rewards. I get to encounter poems/books I have loved, I get to hunt down poems/books I am not familiar with but tempt me, and I sigh over and return to astonishing poems/books that have not made the selector’s cut.
I am a selector every week on Poetry Shelf! And I know from emails how some poets find it tough when I don’t review their books or post their poems. This choosing tug is not easy.
Here I am back at our kitchen table watching the kererū squat greedily in the cabbage tree and I’m musing on the wide fields of poems published in 2021. The luminescent communities of poets writing, exchanging, conversing, publishing. It was a bonanza year on Poetry Shelf as I sought to counter the personal and global challenges of the year with themes and readings, and as many poems, interviews and reviews as I could manage. The poetry luminosity in Aotearoa is to be celebrated. This poem aliveness.
Poetry now is ‘an urgent medium of conversation that takes place’, Anna Jackson said to Kim Hill on the radio this morning. On the page, in performance, in social media. I love this. So many poets are writing with this sense of urgency, a need to half understand why we are writing it, a need to shine lights, and get personal, hold a hand out to the past, and a hand forward to the future. To find stable ground to stop the heart and mind shaking. To shake and tilt and free float.
And so with this peculiar introduction I celebrate the arrival of Best NZ Poems 2021. There are poems from books I have loved and engaged with deeply, there are poems by poets I have not yet read. It is a weekend road trip. A getaway car. A time to linger and imbibe and stall.
You can read editor Kate Camp’s comments on why each poem delighted her.
You can read the poems selected, and treat as a weekend retreat.
You can listen to some of the poets read.
Poetry Shelf review: Gregory O’Brien’s House & Contents
House & Contents Gregory O’Brien, Auckland University Press, 2022
What is this particular brightness we expect of poetry? And on what or whose account? If the times are dark, oppressive, tunnel-like – as they seem presently – maybe poetry can be a lantern. Or a firefly, or the glowing bud of a cigarette on a dark night. But for poetry to be these things it can’t simply reflect its times – it has to radiate on its own terms, within and beyond that darkness. It is poetry’s job to flicker and glow and, with luck, emit some mysterious luminescence. At times I feel those are its only real criteria.
Gregory O’Brien ‘Notes to Accompany the Poems and Paintings’
I love coming to a new book with no idea what the book is about. And here am I about to share some responses to Gregory O’Brien’s magnificent collection House & Contents with you. I have had the book sitting on my desk for a month and every time I walk past, I stall on the title and the cover. The skeletal tree, the blocks of cloud, sky, hill and roof. The nod to insurance policies, and an expectation the collection might transform ‘house’ into home, ‘contents’ into Gregory’s ability to amass fascinating detail.
In the endnote, Gregory talks about how in the past he has used paintings to shed light on the poetry, and poetry to converse with the artwork. In this collection however, where there is a substantial presence of both image and word, he wanted the artwork and the poem to have a ‘co-equal’ relationship.
One poem, ‘House & contents’, acts as a fractured faultline of the collection. It records experiencing an earthquake in Wellington Te Whanganui-a-Tara – a poem in pieces over the course of a day, over the course of the book, little interruptions. It lays a thread of uncertainty, a stave of different sounds, and shifts how I view the title and cover.
The artwork, with motifs repeating like embers on the canvas, like lamplight, like mysterious tugs and echos, is magnetic. No question. You bend in and become hooked on the light and dark. Full of questions. Breathing in the mysterious because there is anchor but there is also instability. Hill might be corrugated boat might be corrugated house might be hill. The echo of chimney smoke might be that from a volcano. I think of the cigarette butt glowing in the dark. Bend down into these paintings and you are wrapped in mystery – the bed outside might be resting on the hills or in the sky or driving a dreamscape. Words loom small not large, and might be bookshelf or textured wall or miniature poem. There is a brick red burnt umber hue signalling earth, and there are the infinite possibilities of blue.
The poetry is an equal compendium of fascinations, an accumulation of rich motifs and hues, knots and splices. The wading birds by a Canterbury river are the poet’s acupuncture. The world is an open book, where streets and mountains, sky and weather, are busy reading each other. Nothing exists in isolation. A library floor might catch a waterfall or flood of books. The poet tracks an interior world and then stitches it to a physical realm, whether present or mourned. The intensely real might collide with the surreal – ‘coins dance / in an upturned hat’. At times I am reading like a chant – both hidden and out-in-the-open lists that make music, that beckon heart and drifting mind. You can’t skim read, you need to enter the alleyways with a flask of tea, and set up camp for ages.
A poem that particularly stuck with my heart is ‘For Jen at Three O’Clock’, the final poem in the collection, a love poem, a luminous list, an ember glow upon the stretching canvas of life. Here are the opening lines:
With us, ice melt and low land
fog, creaking thornbush,
sandarac and walnut lawn. With us
towers and minarets
of the asparagus field, each blink
and muffled cough, each
recitation and
resuscitation, mountain
torrent and gasping stream.
Glorious. That is the word for House & Contents. No question. The light will flicker and gleam in artworks and poetry. Reading this collection is retreat and vacation and epiphany.
Gregory O’Brien is an independent writer, painter and art curator. He has written many books of poetry, fiction, essays and commentary. His books include A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (Auckland University Press, 2011) and the multi-award-winning introductions to art for the young and curious: Welcome to the South Seas (Auckland University Press, 2004) and Back and Beyond (Auckland University Press, 2008), which both won the Non-Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. His book Always Song in the Water: An Oceanic Sketchbook was published in 2019, and a major work on the artist Don Binney will appear in 2023. Gregory O’Brien became an Arts Foundation Laureate and won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in 2012, and in 2017 became a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit and received an honorary doctorate from Victoria University of Wellington.
Auckland University Press page
Poetry Shelf: ‘Streets and mountains’
Conversation with Lynne Freeman on Standing Room Only, RNZ National
NZ Booklovers interview
Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Tate Fountain ‘Sunday 7 November’
Sunday 7 November
I am always mid-gulp of fresh air and love poems
and so I understand that in any other story the
hothouse hike I take at the birth of November
would be leading me to you—and perhaps it still
is, and neither of us know yet; in which case, what
oncoming rapture—but: for the moment, in this
story, there is glorious living light dispersed rich and
heavy through the trees and my hair and these flowers,
the ones I spent $9.99 on after seeing them in a box
outside one of arguably-too-many corner-shops on
the same straight-down road. And they’re hard to carry,
just slightly, a bit awkward to hold, but a sweet joy
nonetheless bracketed in the crook of my arm—
and I, well, I have had practice at this; I am far
better attuned to wanting things than I have ever
been to having them, and the day is clear, and the
scent of the kitchen of each nearby restaurant is
carrying. And I am alive, and I am settling in, and
I have in my hand at last something I could not
bear to lose, some fibrous imperfect gift of a life
in the place of theoretical triumph: blistered heels
and my mother’s old dress and a self I can face
in the mirror; three long-stemmed lilies wrapped
in cellophane, an unripe blushing hydra, five
dust-pink tongues unfurled to catch the light.
Tate Fountain
Tate Fountain is a writer, director, and rule-of-threes captive published in Aniko Press Magazine, The Agenda, and Min–a–rets (Annexe), among others. She is currently a member of the Starling editorial committee, and is probably being loud about it on Instagram.
Poetry Shelf review: Frances Samuel’s Museum
Museum, Frances Samuel, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022
Up here in the thin green air,
I’m feeling the wind on my face
with the joy of a dog on a family car trip,
head out of the window.
from ‘Exhibition (DNA)’
Frances Samuel worked in a museum writing texts for exhibitions for many years. For me, museums are an endless source of fascination and marvel. I wrote about the intoxicating thrill of museums in New York Pocketbook. Standing, for example, before a pair of child’s boots in Ellis Island’s Immigration Centre or moving with the wonders of the Natural History Museum. Or the roll call of museums that fed my Italian degrees. There are the hungry gaps of the past that you seek to fill by studying scuffed toes, wrinkled leather, the uncanny emptiness, the child that once ran or skipped or hid. In my self-imposed lockdown, picking up Frances’s new collection felt like a trip to a museum and, as happens on the threshold of any museum space, I felt a heady mix of anticipation, joy, curiosity. Where would this book take me?
I pass through the book’s opening poem, ‘Exhibition (Security)’, and then move through three exhibitions: ‘SUPER(NATURAL) WORLD’, ‘(IM)MATERIAL WORLD’ and ‘OBJECT LESSONS’. I am following the poet, the museum maker, but the museum on offer is porous. It reaches out beyond walls and still life into the air we breathe, and with each poem I track twist unfold pursue peruse fold untwist. Just like I do on Ellis Island. Or in Roma. It is discovery and it is magical.
The poem ‘Climate Change’ proposes a change in perspective. Inventive in its start:
Since we are all made up of atoms and vibrations,
let’s rearrange ourselves.
You be a bird and I’ll be a buffalo,
stand on my back and off we go, carefully
stepping over our discard clothes
And utterly moving, when you reach the final stanza. I keep bouncing back to the poem’s title, just as I might switch and flick between museum diorama, museum label and someone else’s shoes:
From above, we watch travellers on the trails
tying and retying their loads to donkeys’ backs.
They take a few steps and the load slips again.
Over and over again, agreement can only come
when the bird in me bleats
to the buffalo in you.
Frances writes lightfootedly. It’s not just a matter of weight but a matter of luminosity. If the poems were written in ink, the ink would be imbued with a wonder that slips in and out of view. You need to read each poem whole to get the effect of fitting together, but certain lines stand out and settle on you, little talismans, little points of fascinations.
‘Rain is hole-punching its way in.’ from ‘Moonhopppers’
‘My friend wears a grass jumpsuit / teeming with ants and worms.’ from ‘Fashion’
‘A poet explodes at a kitchen table / taking everything else with her.’ from ‘Pottery’
‘The words are falling from him like seeds.’ from ‘Fast Forest’
‘If one hundred thousand leaves / can make a clean break every day / then what are you waiting for?’ from ‘Seed/Leaf/Tree’
In the first section/exhibition, you enter forests, mountains, deserts, fields, physical exhibition spaces. In the second section/exhibition space, the immaterial shifts my view on existence. Ghosts and trees jangle eyes. Things leap off the page, the canvas, out of the shadows, or from the anecdote, to gain provisional flesh, and you are back in the invigorating and mysterious air of the world.
And suddenly it’s a good thing
you extinguished your shoes
because now you are walking on air.
And when you are walking on air
you can go anywhere.
from ‘Exhibition (Shoes)
And then poet becomes mother, and the maternal role, reframed time and fatigue, chores and the tendering, are made visible. The mother is still of course poet, and the third section/exhibition refuses to keep the world confined in glass cases. The domestic enters and still the writing mind roves and creates and muses. In such an airy space, the wonder and discovery expands. For both reader and writer. In ‘Coin Rubbings’, the speaker finds buried civilisations and buried self elusive, so she tries this:
(…) So maybe it’s as easy
as placing the paper over your own face
and rubbing to see what impression
you are making on the world.
In each section/exhibition space, you turn upon notions of perspective, ways of absorbing and reacting, seeing and feeling. Your place(s) in the world comes into question, or into view, or dissolves, and you turn the page and keep reading. This sublime stanza appears in ‘The Kindness of Giants’ and appears in other guises or translations throughout the book.
Your feet are shod in cruise ships, and your eyes
look though spectacles made of frozen lakes.
Trapped fish obscure your vision.
When I first visited foreign museums in my twenties, I found them dead. Nothing jumped out and poked me in the eye or heart. Yet all these decades later, both poetry and museums are alive to me. I get to carry bits of humanity, song, epiphany, storytelling, dread, mystery, roadmaps, possibility atlases, the real, the unreal. The power of words, in both locations, along with the power of objects, get to sing in heart and mind. I finished France’s new collection and, how can I explain it, I was bursting with gladness and sadness. Maybe because instead of listening to the 11 am announcement on Covid changes yesterday, I read the book. I reread the collection today, writing this on one breath, on the wire of living, on the lightning rod of uncertain times, and as I put the book on my shelf, I am busting up with joy. That is what poetry can do. Read this book.
Inside your heart, a museum
and not the free-entry kind,
not the kind with a rollercoaster
and a cafe and a shop.
from ‘Museum Without an End’
Frances Samuel‘s first book was Sleeping on Horseback (VUP, 2014). Her poems have appeared in many print and online publications, including Sport, Best New Zealand Poems, Short Poems of New Zealand, and the National Library exhibition The Next Word: Contemporary New Zealand Poetry.
Te Herenga Waka University Press page
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Submissions open for Starling
New Zealand writers under 25, we are seeking submissions for the 14th issue of Starling! Send us your best poetry, prose, and anything in-between by 20 April 2022.
Full details here
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: Registrations open for participation in the 25th National Poetry Day on 26 August
Aotearoa’s countrywide celebration of poetry is preparing to mark its 25th anniversary with plans for the broadest range of events and promotions yet, as registrations open today for participation in Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day on 26 August 2022.
National Poetry Day co-ordinator Erica Stretton says that after two years of largely online events, the NPD team, poets and organisers are all eager and optimistic about a return to the usual feast of in-person and community events across the motu.
She urges organisers to register their interest early in hosting an event on or around 26 August, in order to access the seed funding available and to be included in the heavily promoted official calendar of NPD events.
“We’ve all learned so much in the past two years about the power of the digital reach in showcasing poets and poetry, and online will continue to play an important part in our promotions. But we can’t wait to see poets and enthusiasts unleashing the power of poetry again in theatres, cafes, marae, bookshops and libraries, in parks and on beaches, pavements and public transport, anywhere and everywhere!”
In 2019 a massive 160 events took place nationwide, bringing together acclaimed poets, new voices, young writers and poetry enthusiasts of all ages.
This year also marks the 40th anniversary of NPD sponsor, Phantom Billstickers. CEO Robin McDonnell says the company has plenty planned to mark its special milestone, but that poetry will always be at the heart of what they do. “Phantom’s founder Jim Wilson was sharing the works of New Zealand poets on posters in New Zealand and around the world well before the company was even formed. We can’t wait to take the power of poetry to the streets of Aotearoa again in our 40th year, in a nationwide poster campaign in the lead up to National Poetry Day 2022.”
Interested organisers can access registration documents, templates and a full range of planning and promotional resources via the NPD website.Registrations for seed funding close at 5pm on 1 June 2022. The official Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2022 calendar will be announced on 1 August.
For further information contact Erica Stretton at poetryday@nzbookawards.org.nz and to keep up with plans for NPD 2022, follow NZPoetryDay on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Poetry Shelf noticeboard: The Under Rough Ridge Writers’ Retreat Residency
Full details here
NZ Poetry Shelf 