Now in its seventh year, the New Zealand Young Writers is itching to get started, with a four-day packed programme delving into poetry, playwriting, performance and more.
The free to attend festival opens with a bang on Thursday 28 October at our cool new Writers Block venue at 53 Castle Street, Dunedin, hosted by the incomparable Marea Colombo (Improsaurus). We’ll be celebrating the launch of the festival with live music, tasty refreshments and even tastier performances. The event will also showcase the work of St Hilda’s students from their Creative in Schools programme, exploring poetry through sculpture, dance, drama, painting, and collage.
On Saturday, lit-enthusiasts can sharpen up their own poetry skills with How to Speak Words and Influence People, a spoken word workshop led by National Slam Champion, poet, and toast enthusiast Jordan Hamel. No experience is required for this fun and friendly spoken word how-to that explores different ways of performing your words.
Breaking boundaries is a mission statement for the festival and this year is no different with a programme full of workshops that explore the limitations society places on our bodies and how to overcome them through literature.
Playwright Dan Goodwin will deconstruct what it means to weave accessibility into narrative and ground our stories in the communities they emerge in with their workshop and writing mental health and disability theatre; and will join Jackson Nieuwland, Whina Pomana and Hana Pera Aoake, in Playing with the Trouble: Writing Gender and the Body, a conversation/performance about fluidity, gender, the body and how to write about it.
The programme continues to blur the lines between genres with events that celebrate artistic expression in all forms. In Put Your Body Into It: Somatic Writing Rituals, poet Rushi Vyas will lead participants on a short walk where they will enact a somatic ritual before writing a response to the experience; researcher Zoë Heine will be joined by Hana Pera Aoake, Jordan Hamel, Robyn Maree Pickens and Lily Holloway for a hybrid conversation/workshop on writing about climate change in Getting Our Feet Wet: Storytelling for Sea-Level Rise; and Dunedin’s celebrated Ōtepoti Writers Lab will be celebrating its second birthday with a showcase of writing in all forms. PaulaPaula
Taking creativity out of traditional spaces, two yet to be announced writers will be taking up micro-residencies in the Dunedin Botanic Garden for the duration of the festival, sponsored by online literary magazine Starling. Join the two writers, Starling editor Louise Wallace, Starling writer Lily Holloway and Jackson Nieuwland and Carolyn DeCarlo (Starling interview subjects) in a conversation/performance at the Writers Block on Saturday for a micro-residency wrap-up and celebration of the newest issue of Starling.
Festival Director Gareth McMillan said the festival was excited to inspire young writers and to encourage them to see the power in their words, whatever form they take, and to experiment with style.
“We’re really passionate about removing the boxes from the creative arts and this programme aims to show young people that it’s not about format, it’s about authenticity,” McMillan said.
“Whether you see yourself as a poet or a novelist, or neither, or a mix, it is about using your words to express what is important to you and we hope our events and workshops will provide people with the tools to do just that.”
Brand new for 2021, test your literary knowledge at the taskmaster-style Wordmaster: Festival Smackdown. Come along with a team, or make new mates on the night, to take on every literary challenge comedy legend Reuben Crisp can throw at you, from a spelling bee to charades and more.
And not forgetting our festival favourites, the Otago Poetry Slam returns this year MCd by Jordan Hamel with calibration poet Emer Lyons. Open to all ages, this fast-paced war of words will select a champion to represent Otago at this year’s nationals.
The last day of the festival will once again host Dunedin Zinefest offering a cornucopia of DIY wares from the city’s best poets, illustrators, artists, designers, and zinesters. With live entertainment, the event offers the opportunity to browse and buy – and be inspired to make your own zines at the Wake ‘n’ Make from 12pm-2pm.
A few of the people involved include:
Dan Goodwin (they/them), a Scottish-Pākeha performance poet, actor and writer, and winner of the Harold and Jean Brooks award. Dan is hosting an event called Accessible and Authentic. Having written about experiencing psychosis and in a world full of lockdowns, they want to help people work through their unexamined mental health in a safe way.
Hana Aoake (they/them), is an artist and writer who will be speaking at Playing with the Trouble: Writing Gender and the Body, where they bring their perspective on our flawed perspectives of gender. Their Māori ancestors talk about community living in pre-colonial times but today a pregnant Aoake faces daily reminders of society’s binary views when people ask the gender of their baby. They will also be part of Getting Our Feet Wet: Storytelling for Sea-Level Rise, talking about the human impact of climate change from an indigenous perspective (such as the returning of damaged resources to Māori) and a global perspective (climate change refugees).
Rushi Vyas (he/him) is the author and two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series (US). He will lead a workshop on somatic writing rituals, based on his research into how behavioural patterns set us up for certain activities, especially the creative. His work explores ritual in relation to colonialism and how to use it to decolonise arts.
Jordan Hamel (he/him) is a writer, poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and represented NZ at the World Poetry Slam Champs in the US in 2019. He will be using his expertise to lead a workshop on spoken word and host festival favourite the Otago Poetry Slam. He is also coeditor of an upcoming poetry anthology on climate change will talk about the power of poetry in activism in Getting Our Feet Wet.
Ora Nui 4: Māori Literary Journal (New Zealand and Taiwan Special Edition), published by Anton Blank, edited by Kiri Piahana-Wong and Shin Su. Cover image: Hongi 2012, Idas Losin, oil on canvas, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts Collection.
How to construct a piupiu for your Waitangi day celebrations
First the karakia to gather the family; the strength of your fibre depends on them. Next, measure the pattern and score with clear, even cuts— if you don’t do this yourself, your enemy will do it for you with year after year after year of protest. Expose the muka, the soft threads that will be so pale, so raw, that they will take on any colour they mix with. Pliability and adaptability are a gift. Don’t let them use it against you. Instead brace yourself, if your thighs can take it, and roll towards the knee. Boil these family strands until buttery smooth right down to the vein; the skin of nature. Sit close to that pain. It can sing. Then, by the threads of these taonga tuku iho, hang them where they are visible, until dry. They will curl in on themselves, shiny side hidden and become hollow chambers in a flaxen silencer. Finally, cold plunge them into dye. Constant interaction may result in uneven colouring, ignore this—do not cry for them here— their warpaint will be revealed, their pattern set. Those hardened tubes will have become whistle darts capable of long distance warning ki te ao whānui. Let their percussion begin. Let them whisper in the ears of your children.
Anahera Gildea
Anton Blank begins his introduction: ‘This issue of Ora Nui is a jewel; light dances across the words and images sparking joy and wonder. It is filled with contributions from my favourite Māori and Taiwanese writers and artists.’
Ora Nui 4 is indeed a vital gathering of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, essays and artwork, lovingly assembled by editors Kiri Piahana-Wong and Shin Su. When you bring together a range of voices in a literary journal – with distinctive melodies, admissions, experience, challenges, silences – conversations ensue. Electric and eclectic connections spark and inspire, both within the individual written and visual contributions, and across the volume as a whole. How much more heightened the connective tissues become when contributions are also drawn from Taiwan.
We are in a time when to slow down and listen, to linger and absorb, is the most satisfying advantage. This is, as Anton says, joy. Reading and viewing Ora Nui is to move between here and there, between love and longing, amidst myriad ideas, feelings, melodies. As Kiri underlines, Ora Nui is ‘all the richer for creative pieces spanning an incredible range of topics’. Shin astutely suggests that ‘when finished with this edition of Ora Nui, you the reader will be in possession of an empathetic understanding of the lives and histories of a great many people’.
Familiar names leap out at me: Aziembry Aolani, Marino Blank, Jacqueline Carter, Gina Cole, Amber Esau, Anahera Gildea, Arihia Latham, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Vaughan Rapatahana, Reihana Robinson, Apirana Taylor, Anne-Marie Te Whiu, Iona Winter, Briar Wood. And then – one of the reasons I am attracted to literary journals – the unfamiliar Aotearoa poets become the gold nuggets of my reading: Gerry Te Kapa Coates, Kirsty Dunn, Teoti Jardine, Hinemoana Jones, Michelle Rahurahu Scott, Jean Riki, kani te manukura. Add in the Taiwan voices, the fiction and the nonfiction, and this is a sumptuous reading experience. I am especially drawn to the mesmerising movement and harmonies in Etan Pavavalung’s artworks and poetry, that are internal as much as they are physical.
I travel from the spare and haunting heart of Jacqueline Carter’s ‘Picton to Wellington’ to the aural and visual richness of Amber Esau’s ‘Manaakitanga’. I want to hear them both read aloud, to be in a room with the voices of these poets, in fact all the poets, filling the air with spike and soothe and light. Anahera Gildea’s poems reach me in a ripple effect of sound and song, contemplation, challenge and sublime heart. Reading the collection, I draw in phrases, images and chords that boost a need to write and read and converse. To connect.
For example, this extract from Stacey Teague’s exquisite grandmother poem:
Every Christmas She would knit me dolls with yellow dresses, bright like egg yolks.
She had budgies, chickens, a cat called Mopsy.
She liked the TV show, Pingu.
On her headstone, it says: ‘Ko tōna reo waiata tōna tohū whakamaharatanga’.
My Narn sang waiata with her guitar until her voice stopped. Traded her guitar for a dialysis machine.
from ‘Kewpie’
The artwork is stunning. Take time out from daily routine and challenges, and sink into a double-page spread of art. I keep greturning to Nigel Borell’s Pirirakau: bush beautiful (2006) series. The artworks are an alluring and intricate mix of acrylic, beading and cotton in bush greens on canvas. Or his Hawaiki Hue (2010), an equally glorious mix of acrylic, dye and silk on paper.
Sleeping with Stones, Serie Barford, Anahera Press, 2021
Serie reads ‘The midwife and the cello’
Serie reads ‘Piula blue’
Serie Barford was born in Aotearoa to a German-Samoan mother and a Palagi father. She was the recipient of a 2018 Pasifika Residency at the Michael King Writers’ Centre. Serie promoted her collections Tapa Talk and Entangled Islands at the 2019 International Arsenal Book Festival in Kiev. Her latest poetry collection, Sleeping With Stones, was launched during Matariki, 2021.
We swim like foster children, our necks held high, we swim with open arms knowing water will always want us back, we swim like brides with beautiful feet, we swim like Russian thoughts.
We swim in caravans of water, we swim amongst floating chairs, a toaster, we swim with a lampshade on our heads and when the current surges west, we swim out into the open with the eels.
We swim like we are missed, we swim like we are bridled, we swim under bridges and when the boats come calling, we swim low, through scum, through ropes, we swim like rich people, always laughing.
Frankie McMillan
Frankie McMillan is a poet and short story writer who spends her time between Ōtautahi/ Christchurch and Golden Bay. Her poetry collection, There are no horses in heaven, was published by Canterbury University Press. Recent work appears in Best Microfictions 2021 (Pelekinesis) Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press), the New Zealand Year Book of Poetry ( Massey University), New World Writing and Atticus Review.
A few years ago I bought Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry because of the title and because there is, indeed, an awful lot of awful poetry that I have felt hatred towards. However, despite the title, the book, is ultimately a celebration of poetry and these are six poems I certainly find worth celebrating.
Tusiata Avia’s ‘How to be in a room full of white people’: I guarantee any person of colour who reads this poem will nod – if not cackle – with recognition at line after eviscerating line. One of my favourite grenade lobs: “ Listen to what funding white people have applied for again, now they have whakapapa.”
Hone Tuwhare’s ‘Rain’: When one of my oldest friends asked me to do a reading at her wedding, I chose Rain because it’s such a beautiful piece. The groom came up to me afterwards and was like: What the hell does that mean? (FYI: they are still married).
Tayi Tibble’s ‘Homewreckers’: The poem begins, amusingly, with a young Maori woman’s lament: “When I was a girl/God tested me with stepbrothers.” Samoan step-brothers, to be exact, who break shit and generally torment the narrator. But as the poem unfolds it gets more melancholic as the narrator reflects on truths about her own life.
Chris Tse’s ‘What’s Fun Until it Gets Weird‘: This had me at “bukkake.” Actually, it had me way before that as it recounts an excruciatingly awkward game of Crimes Against Humanity where the writer has to explain various sexual terms to his insatiably curious mother and aunties.
Talia Marshall’s ‘KIng of the Dive’: Talia’s essays always take me somewhere surprising, utilising language in a way that never fails to fill me with a mixture of jealousy and awe. Her poems are no different.
Aziembry Aolani’s ‘Parking Warden’: Aziembry wrote this when he was a student at the Maori and Pasifika creative writing workshop I convene at the International Institute of Modern Letters. He actually works as a parking warden and I love that he represents his specific point of view here, throwing shit right back at the people who throw shit at him.
Victor Rodger, September 2021
The poems
How to be in a room full of white people
See the huge room Count the brown and black people in the room again Count to one or two or maybe three again Count to only you again Breathe in onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnine / hold / Breathe out onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnine
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Listen to white people talk about_____________and___________ and________________________________ Listen to white people talk about writing Listen to white people who are writing as black men and black women Hush for prize-winning white people talking Listen to white people who are painting dead, black bodies with bullet holes Listen to white people say they don’t know why they are painting dead, black bodies with bullet holes, but their art-school tutors are encouraging them to keep going
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Hear white people pause before they miss the word they used to use Hear the tiny-tiny pause Hear white people say diversity again Wonder if you could unscrew that word like a lid, what might be inside the jar
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Listen to white people call you the name of the other brown woman writer again Repeat your name for white people who ask you to repeat your name again Listen to white people say: That’s such a beautiful name, what does it mean? again
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Listen to white people say: I went to Some-oh-wa on my holiday, I didn’t stay in Up-peer, I stayed on Siv-vie- ee, it’s traditional, they haven’t lost their culture like the Mour-rees, I stayed in the village, everyone was so authentic Listen to white people say: What do your tattoos mean? But do they have meaning? But were they done in the traditional way? We saw the proper ones – you have to be a chief to have them Hear white people say: My daughter has a tribal tattoo, it looks really similar. Celtic. again
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Hear white people say: I own a diary, the Hori kids steal the blue lighters and the red lighters Listen to white people say: Crips and Bloods Listen to white people say Hori again and look at you again Listen to white people say: Well, you’ll know what I mean? Listen to this in your head for weeks Listen to this in your head for weeks
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See white people clasp a brown hand Hear white people mispronounce te reo again Listen to white people talk about their roots and their discovery Listen to white people talk about their research and their discovery and the discovery of their great-great-great- great Listen to what funding white people have applied for again, now they have whakapapa
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Watch white people watch you as you enter Wonder if you’ll have to empty your bag again again again Breathe in / onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnine / hold / Breathe out / onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnine Breathe when you leave and then feel so angry that you walk back in and walk around again Pretend to white people that you’re not watching them watch you again Watch white people’s eyes follow you when you leave again Watch white people startle when you use the words white people together Listen to white people tell you they don’t like being lumped together like that Watch white people when black and brown people are killed again because they are black and brown people Hear white people say: It’s hard to be white too Listen to white people say: I feel culturally unsafe Listen to white people say: I’m a woman of colour, white’s a colour Listen to white people say: I don’t see colour Listen to white people say something about the human race and something about we’re all the same and that all lives matter again again again
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Try to reframe it again Try not to sound so negative again Try to stick your fingers down your throat and vomit up the poison pellet again again again Try to say something positive at the end of this poem, so you don’t come across as the angry brown woman again writing about the things that white people don’t want to be true.
Tusiata Avia
from The Savage ColoniserBook, Victoria University Press, 2020
Rain
I hear you making small holes in the silence rain
If I were deaf the pores of my skin would open to you and shut
And I should know you by the lick of you if I were blind
the something special smell of you when the sun cakes the ground
the steady drum-roll sound you make when the wind drops
But if I should not hear smell or feel or see you
you would still define me disperse me wash over me rain
Hone Tuwhare
from Come Rain Hail, Bibliography Room, University of Otago Library, 1970. The poem also appears in Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works, Hone Tuwhare, Godwit, Random House, 2011.
Homewrecker
When I was a girl God tested me with stepbrothers. I was eight years old. I was thirteen.
They were mean. I began to nurse a few feminist embers that they were happy to fan
with their grandmother’s leaf-shaped ili slapped on the back of my head or the whip of wet tea towels exposing the white in my legs. I wondered if it was true that you can grow too used to the feeling of pink pain spraying?
On a good day you might have called them spirited the same way Satan is spirited, all cigarette butts and stink bombs. I was offended by the audacity bleaching their bright Samoan smiles. Well,
I was soulful. Only used to baby-soft sisters and playing the piano and it physically hurt me.
Every wince seemed to shuck my ribs from my spine as I witnessed them pulling electronics apart like a carcass, searching for the static in the back of the stereo.
Then one Christmas an uncle whose actual relationship to anyone we couldn’t quite place gave the younger one a mechanical Beavis or Butthead I dunno which one but you’d press the button on his plasticated stomach and he would say something rude and crass and gross but ultimately forgettable.
He unwrapped it, studied it. It seemed like for once in his little brutal life he was actually considering his words, choosing tenderly until finally he gave his reply and his reply was Should I break it?
And we all sighed and rolled our eyes with the distinct feeling that life was suspiciously too predictable and already we knew everything that we would ever be doing. Well, I didn’t grow up wrecking things but very often the world wrecked itself around me.
Even if I was light on the kitchen floorboards the geraniums curtseyed, fish threw themselves from their fishbowls, punks crumpled on their skateboards and I always won Jenga.
Even my mother said I had a talent for extracting things from people and so had to be careful. No one was going to light up violently and tell me that I was taking something from them. Life’s not a game of Operation. Stop playing with people. But I’m a lonely Mum. I’m a Libra I’m a Libra just like you.
As a teenager, a man whose opinion I truly trusted said I was a dangerous girl and this made me so afraid of myself. I avoided being alone with her. I never left her unattended.
I made sure she had someone with her at all times. Even if they belonged to someone else, they were mine.
And pink pain became desirable. As an adult, the sensation found a home in my chest. It reminded me of tea towels and hidings and how fresh to death and nervous but alert, and alive I was then.
I can’t remember the last time I ever saw my brothers but recall
Playing Jenga and how long it would take to stack the blocks perfectly only to take turns trying to take without destroying. Which is where I learnt to understand the risk and do it anyway. I just hold me breath. Wait.
Tayi Tibble
from Rangikura, Victoria University Press, 2021
Chris Tse
Chris Tse reads ‘What’s Fun Until It Gets Weird’. Originally published in Aotearotica #4. Recorded at The Sex and Death Salon, WORD Christchurch, 1 September 2018. Thank you to Rachael King and WORD Christchurch.
King of the Dive
Lately, I have been feeling a little like the reaper but I’m drinking again and this guy from Auckland tries to tell me that when he walked into The Crown it felt like he was home and there’s not much of a moon but I still have to slay him, and I remind him that Friday was mob night and Jones is a good cunt and boy is there but I still tell the table he was conceived at The Crown Hotel well not literally but his father was playing pool and the other boys were noodles who fucked liked planks and he had excellent posture and loved Johnny Marr and Tuhoe Joe would jam up the jukebox with $2 coins to stop me because I was the gold heron that was not there for the band I wanted Prince, Dragon and George McCrae and Tuhoe Joe would put pies in the warmer because I was the only bitch who ever asked for one at 2am
Talia Marshall
Parking Warden
My colleague says my skin colour shows that I like rugby. I tell him, ‘I don’t follow rugby …’ He says, ‘Your skin tells me though …’ My skin has never spoken to anyone.
A man yells from a moving vehicle, ‘Get a fucking real job!’ He extends one of his fingers towards me. That. Is. Talent.
A woman says the job I do is ridiculous. Despite paying for the wrong space, she continues to question my presence. ‘Like why do you even?’ Is that even a question? ‘I’m actually quite odd,’ I reply— awkward and triumphant silence.
I am called a fat shit. The driver isn’t in the best shape himself. ‘Why don’t you go for a run, ya fat shit!’ He snatches the fresh white print. I try to catch laughter in the middle of my throat. I walk almost 30 kilometres a day, and I’m Polynesian.
At a pedestrian crossing, I overhear a woman tell her child, ‘You see, son. If you work hard at school, you won’t have to do a job like that.’ She points to me. I turn to the child, ‘And I have a walkie-talkie!’ The child smiles. To his mother’s evil eye, I pull a thumbs up.
Two elderly ladies ask for directions. One lady says, ‘Darling, you don’t speak the way you look …’ The other: ‘You’re a very polite young man … Good for you …’ I pity them.
I see taxis on broken yellow lines double-parked on a one-way street. A driver spots me and alerts his companions. ‘Go, go! The brown one is here! The brown one is there!’ I see panic spilling out of their ears and exhaust pipes.
‘Does anyone give you shit, bro?’ asks a man gripping a can of beer. ‘Why would they? Look at you …’ I attach a printed headache to a vehicle. ‘You’re a big dark-skinned brother. No one will give you shit, my kill!’ I have a sudden vision of myself, as fresh kill, on the roof of a parked vehicle.
A mechanic spots me checking resident and coupon zones. He screams, ‘Warden! Warden!’
Just another white jaw rattling to remind me of what I am.
Aziembry Aolani
from Turbine 2020
Victor Rodger is an award-winning writer and producer of Samoan (Iva) and Scottish (Dundee) descent. Best known for his internationally acclaimed play BLACK FAGGOT and for spear heading the revival of Tusiata Avia’s WILD DOGS UNDER MY SKIRT, his works of fiction have been included in the Maori/Pasifika anthology BLACK MARKS ON THE WHITE PAGE as well as the upcoming LGBTQIA+ anthology OUT HERE. His first published poem, SOLE TO SOLE, is also part of the upcoming Annual Ink poetry anthology, SKINNY DIP. Victor leads the Maori and Pasifika creative writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters and was this year named an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to theatre and Pacific Arts.
Tusiata Avia was born in Christchurch in 1966, of Samoan descent. She is an acclaimed poet, performer and children’s book writer. Her poetry collections are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a one-woman theatre show around the world from 2002–2008), Bloodclot (2009), Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), shortlisted at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, and The Savage Coloniser Book (2020), winner of the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry. Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Hawai’i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was also the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. In the 2020 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Tusiata was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts.
Hone Tuwhare, of Ngāpuhi descent, (1922 – 2008), was born in Kaikohe and moved to Dunedin in 1969 as the Robert Burns fellow. He spent the last years of his life at Kākā Point on the South Otago coast where his small crib has been renovated for an upcoming creative residency. He was a boiler maker, husband, father, and as one of Aotearoa’s most beloved poets received numerous awards and honours. His poetry has been gathered together in Small Holes in the Silence, a big anthology that contains many poems translated to Te Reo Maori (Random House).
Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington. In 2017 she completed a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize. Her first book, Poūkahangatus (VUP, 2018), won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book of Poetry Award. Her second collection, Rangikura, is published in 2021.
Chris Tse is the author of two poetry collections published by Auckland University Press – How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of Best First Book of Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards) and HE’S SO MASC – and is co-editor of the forthcoming Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers From Aotearoa.
Talia Marshall (Ngāti Kuia, Ngāti Rārua, Rangitāne ō Wairau, Ngāti Takihiku) is currently working on a creative non-fiction book which ranges from Ans Westra, the taniwha Kaikaiawaro to the musket wars. This project is an extension of her 2020 Emerging Māori Writers Residency at the IIML. Her poems from Sport and Landfall can be found on the Best New Zealand Poems website.
Aziembry Aolani (Ngāpuhi / Kanaka Maoli) is a poet with a sweet tooth and a love of animals, and he is a mad gamer. He has been studying at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, and his work was recently published in Anton Blank’s Ora Nui Journal.
COVID has again meant that New Zealand has gone into lockdown.
Divine Muses would like to thank the Central Library for enabling this year’s reading to go online and thanks the poets for their time in taking part in the reading.
Writers, our online journal TURBINE | KAPOHAU – A NEW ZEALAND JOURNAL OF NEW WRITING is now accepting your submissions – poetry, creative nonfiction and fiction all welcome, but please read our submission guidelines first!
Vaughan Rapatahana begins many of his poems with a whakataukī. He is reading English versions of his poems that are then read in Spanish, but I love the way he brings in te reo Māori. Words say so much that are lost in translation, especially in poetry where each word is a rich vessel – words such as karakia and whanaunga. Vaughan’s poems consider death, place, whānau, significant issues such as global warming, the treatment of Māori. One poem particularly moved me: ‘Talking to my son in a funeral home’. Vaughan wondered why he keeps writing poems about and for his son who committed suicide 16 years ago. He shares his recent epiphany: that he writes of his son to keep his son alive. Later he reads a second poem, ‘The Zephyr’, a list poem, that is equally compelling (‘The zephyr that is my lost son still frisks me’). Ah. Ah. Ah. He reads a love poem he has written in te reo Māori to his wife, because he says he finds it easier to write how he feels in his first language.
To hear this coming together of te reo Māori, English and Spanish – a poetry meeting where words are held across distance to draw upon depth and intimacy – is a rare and glorious treat. Thank you.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. Additionally, he has lived and worked for several years in the Republic of Nauru, PR China, Brunei Darussalam, and the Middle East.
from one spark: Skylla draws the planet as three lippy women
the planet as Klytaemnestra
don’t shove you everywhere the tail yours don’t sear you the fish to the lips my like the fish out of water δεν τρέμω the fish stinks from the head like the fish σαν out of water won’t cut I the throat my το ψάρι won’t lower I the tail my won’t shake like the fish I
the planet as Medea
show I the teeth my squeeze I the teeth my armed until the teeth fight I with nails and with teeth talk I inside from the teeth talk I outside from the teeth if don’t you have teeth can’t you to bite you can’t dodge this δράκου δόντι να’χεις δεν γλιτώνεις not even with a dragon’s tooth
the planet as Antigone
from one spark grows a bushfire put I the hand to the fire from one spark είμαι grows a bushfire am I lava and fire the eyes my throw sparks fall I φωτιά to the fire the eyes my throw sparks grab I the fire και put I the hand λάβρα to the fire grab I the fire am I lava lava am I and fire and fire
Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece. She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (Seraph Press).
NZ Poetry Shelf 