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Poetry Shelf Monday poem: Elizabeth Welsh’s ‘all the intertidal meadows’

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all the intertidal meadows

 

my therapist casually suggested that I embody seagrass; this seemed dangerously close to social prescribing, but I had been reading Fontaine with its daymares repeatedly that autumn, together with articles on forest bathing, which seemed earthy, hungry, darkly prescient, so I experienced the briefest of pauses before I embraced it, placing a dark halo over a quivering body evolved from terrestrial plants, returning to the wide-open space of underwater hollows, to silence, to quaking, glittering light. they have flowers and seeds and roots and leaves and connective tissues; they have ribboning foliage, holding firm in built-up silt on tidal flats.

when we found the audio recorder we wanted to buy, the sales assistant outlined the different ways I could record conversations, as if this was the object’s sole purpose. I thought about the taking of another’s voice, the permission we were granting ourselves to grasp the sung shrieks of grass, and I turned to look at your mended lips, reading their unhurried movement. we took the handheld recorders into the soft carpet marsh of the wetlands, stopped our footfalls and created slight archives of our meagre silence, our scant pause. you were annoyed when I interrupted to ask how we define aural stimulus; but what is noise and what is sound? is there a moment – a blurred boundary? is a sound always so fitfully tender and sinking?

your lungs of clay heaved with the cold and unsympathetic air, my tendons stretched, elastic over our loud together loneliness. if you took a diecut mould and used it on me, you’d find: there’s your body and hers and safe and hard and compost and squeaking tedium and peaty soil; there’s microbes and knuckles and luminescence and practice and precarity and crushing blends of all this. we sign up for a noxious plant maintenance scheme when we leave via the ranger’s hut, and she informs us that it is mainly cordgrasses that we will be tackling. they strangle the groundcover, she murmurs earnestly, and we know to nod many times and make appropriate noises. all the intertidal meadows are swollen, she grows tiny as she talks, and I struggle to lip-read what she’s saying as she moves closer and closer to the compressed, rising earth

Elizabeth Welsh

Elizabeth Welsh is a poet, papermaker and academic editor. She is the author of Over There a Mountain, published by Mākaro Press in 2018. Her poetry has been published in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and she is Auckland Council’s Artist in Residence for 2021, creating site-specific poetry and handmade paper on/from the wetlands at Āwhitu Regional Park. She lives in Titirangi with her husband and daughter.

Poetry Shelf backlist: Min-a-rets 10

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Min-a-rets 10, Compound Press, editor Sarah Jane Barnett

Poetry Shelf has put me in the sublime position of receiving pretty much every poetry book and journal published in Aotearoa NZ – but I never have enough time or energy to review everything. Yes I only review books I love, but I don’t get a chance to feature all of them. There is always a hopeful pile of books and journals that have enchanted me but that I have not yet shared. I guess it is even worse this year as I have cleared space for my own writing in the mornings and I don’t want to encroach upon that. I am really grateful that most poets don’t badger me and expect superhuman efforts on a blog that runs on the currency of love and my fluctuating energy levels. I have decided to make little returns to that hopeful stack and, every now and then, share something that you might want track it down.

I sometimes pick a poetry book hoping it will offer the right dose of rescue remedy – a mix of poetic inspiration along with heart and mind sustenance. My return to Min-a-rets 10 did exactly that. Poet Sarah Jane Barnett has edited an issue that is supremely satisfying. In her introduction she expresses anxiety at not being ‘cool’ or young enough to edit a journal that is to date cutting edge, experimental, younger rather older. But once she had read the 100 or so submissions, her fears were allayed. I totally agree with her summation of the Min-a-ret gathering:

In the end I had nothing to worry about. The poems I’ve selected are beautiful, painful, challenging, thought-provoking, heartbreaking and funny. They reminded me that good poems shine no matter their genre or when they were written. They make life feel intense and bright. While this issue includes mid-career poets, there’s definitely a new generation stepping forward, and I have admiration for their commitment to craft, and to sharing an authentic experience—to not conforming. That’s cool.

10 poets with art by Toyah Webb. A slender hand-bound object published by Compound Press. Within a handful of pages, the poetry prompts such diverse reactions, it is like the very best reading vacation. I laughed out loud, I stalled and mused, I felt my heart crack. Above all I felt inspired to write. That exquisite moment when you read the poetry of others that is so good you feel compelled to write a poem.

essa may ranapiri has written a counting poem from tahi to iwa, with deep-rooted personal threads that underline there are myriad ways to count self and the world and experience. Memory. Then the honeyed currents of Elizabeth Welsh’s mother poem that free floats because motherhood cannot be limited. And yes Erik Kennedy made me laugh inside and then laugh out loud as the ending took me by surprise. Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor transports me from the optician leaning in to staring at strangers to probability to ‘wow’. I am so loving the little leaps that intensify the scene.

Oh the aural genius of a Louise Wallace poem, especially when she pivots upon the word ‘trying’.

Or Joan Fleming’s line ‘Some confessions stick like stove filth’. Or Travis Tate: ‘Love is the sky, pitched black, radiant dot / of white to guide young hearts to this spot’. Or Eliana Gray’s: ‘We can’t save the people we love from drowning when it / happens on sand’.

Two list poems from Jackson Nieuwland, a witty serious funny precursor to their sublime award-winning collection I am a human being (Compound Press). And finally the laugh-out loud glorious prose poem by Rachel O’Neill where reason becomes raisin: ‘If only there was one good raisin left in the world, you think.’

Read this body-jolting issue and you will surely be inspired to get a subscription.

Compound Press page

Poetry Shelf connections: Elizabeth Welsh’s ‘steady’

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steady

 

day i

i am trying to imagine a body of water from the confines of our green space.

my neighbour reads an excessive number of library books on hydrotherapy,

and i become accustomed to skimming these surreptitiously before returning

them for her. there is a composure to the watery diagrams that i pore over,

searching for instructions beyond mere bodily mechanics, some sort of cure

for aloneness in one’s body. we must stay safe at home, i repeat, but it means

very little to you beyond a sibilant silkiness on your tongue. and sometimes,

although you don’t know it yet, harm can come from within too. these days,

our neighbour calls out to us from her bedroom window each morning

when we are once again wandering undirected in the early flinching bush

and your face breaks, like a wave at its apex, about to crash. to distract,

we lean in to green. you choose the seaweed stick of chalk, and we draw

pulsing trees together. later, finding a grove of wild ginger, you insist

it’s a treasure, protecting this weed with its pervasive rhizomatous roots,

shielding it with your splayed hands and then draping it over your shoulder

along with your foraged Hormosira banksii, claimed at mid-tide on our last

evening swim. everything equal in your mind, you stroke the leaves

and shrivelled olive beads sleepily, lulled by a saturated silence from

the deserted road above; watching you, i think of habits and how they form,

and hope we keep some or all of these we are forming. my pelagic fish,

the silt in your river of isolation came when you realised the sea was lost

to you, and you struggled to use those branching chains of water-filled veins

to withstand the ebbing tide

 

day ii

morning light hits shivering rimu fingers in a way i didn’t notice before,

like it’s plunging, trying to pick something up that’s lost at the bottom

of a council leisure centre pool; abandoned goggles, cap, stick, stone.

i want to find that thing we’ve forgotten, or maybe all the owners

of these churning lost things that help us stay buoyant or otherwise.

my maternal grandfather was a daily wild swimmer and treated it with

a reverence bordering on panic. it’s the alteration of body temperature

that releases, relieves. it made him feel sound of mind, but maybe not safe

of body, given the lacey shape of the fractured greywacke rocks he dove from

at the inlet they called home. i can visualise a breathlessness, and then

a bruised flying. and I wonder, is that how he felt? did the propulsion

into water, coupled with that numbing, knotty coldness, shake him wildly loose?

like him, you exercise an immersive love that demands return to one salty,

thrown-about body, tangling us up in green scribbles, circles and untraceable

starfish scratches. how deep you want to measure, to fill up every space

between us, the air we share. at breakfast, while slicing apple suns,

we discuss the air quality index and the Clean Air Act and what this means

for cities and transport and adverse health effects. afterwards, floating in

the bathwater on your back, eyes closed to me, i watch the soft depression

of your chest cavity and talk to you about the humming bee breath,

closing one ear to all surrounding sound

 

day iii

we bend and collect fallen kauri and tanekaha leaves to dry downstairs

for making into sheets of paper, and i feel like calming, wake-like

into the warmness of the leaf litter underneath peeled-bare branches,

sighing into all the worries of the basalt, granite and rock crust

that should be frustrated with us for failing to care. we do not

have kauri rot, and our ritual to ensure this has something of prayer to it.

understanding, you chastise any who visit, pointing to which boots

are allowed to be worn on your indecipherable map filled with rising

lines, eddies, swells. you are rooted deep to your watery west coast clay.

today, we read of the cormorants that have returned to Venice,

as the seaweed-thick fragile lagoon ecosystem is visible again, shorn

of tourism and motor transport disturbance. and while you flick through

photographs, I worry that we will forget too soon. you replay the narrative

again and again, hopping and spinning about and hot-headedly insisting

on mimicry. my body still baffles me after birth; refusing, uncooperative,

not at all one with my clamorous mind, it carries me along through

this time of confinement but feels weightless in a frightening way,

as though i am an alluvial river, and not at all certain how to halt

the erosion of these shores

 

day iv

stories are one thing we agree upon, resting flock-like on steaming

beds of compost mulch, chopping up rotting weeds and long, prickling

stalks from harvested Jerusalem artichokes. we argue over a pair

of turquoise-handled scissors like siblings until i take your

little finger and link it through mine, pleading silence while i weave

another marshy history. the blue hue of the ocean is largely constructed

from chlorophyll and disintegrating organic bodies, and this seems

to be the only likely truth i can hear. there are more snarled news reports

that i mute furtively, my fingers washing away a wider belly of current,

holding it back for just a little longer. i am selfish in this skimming

of possible narratives, but i want you to be a water-skating insect,

legs as flotation devices, ridged with grooves marked on tiny hairs

that trap air. please slide across this surface without pause; you will learn

to scull or drift through swampy nodes and puckers soon enough.

for now, all you have is the woven ribs of trees, and the light running deep,

keeping us very nearly afloat. sometimes, if i rise early and walk into

the aqueous-lit yawn of bush before you wake, i can hear our neighbour

singing, just ever so faintly

 

 

 

Elizabeth Welsh is a poet, papermaker and academic editor. She is the author of Over There a Mountain, published by Mākaro Press in 2018. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She lives in Titirangi with her husband and daughter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf in conversation with Elizabeth Welsh

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Elizabeth Welsh, Over There a Mountain, HoopLa Series, Mākaro Press, 2018

 

Elizabeth Welsh’s debut poetry collection, Over There a Mountain, is an exquisite read: surprising, absorbing, complex. She is an academic editor working for international university presses, she founded the online journal The Typewriter, and co-edited Flash Frontier. Her poetry has appeared in local and overseas journals and in 2012 she won the Auckland University Divine Muses Emerging Poets Award. She lives in Auckland with her family.

The collection brought Anne Kennedy’s marvelous Time of the Giants to mind as Elizabeth has also produced a long narrative poem made of glistening pieces and fluent lines. There is a sense of magic at work, a myth-like underlay, seams of real experience, and a satisfying blend of true and invented settings. This is the story of a daughter whose parents are mountains  – who puzzles and struggles and faces what it is to be a mountain daughter, to be with a mountain mother and a mountain father. This is fable but this is also satisfyingly human as the mountain daughter navigates how she is formed ‘by’ and ‘outside’ relationships.

Over There a Mountain was one of my favourite poetry reads of 2018.

 

Over-there-a-mountain-cover

 

 

It’s hard to know how to be    with a mother who is

a mountain. It’s hard to feel how to be   with a father

who is a mountain. It’s hard to understand how to be.

It’s hard to explain that luminous bond, that bewilderingly

stretched distance.

 

 

Paula: Narrative and character mattered so much as I read Over There a Mountain. What poetic effects were you drawn to as you wrote?

 

They were slow-moving, glistening tail-lights

in the guttering of a kasrt dawn.

 

Elizabeth: Yes, both narrative and character are central to Over There a Mountain, given its form as a narrative poem. It was actually near to completion when the poem evolved and settled into a book-length narrative (albeit split into three distinct parts – the mountain-daughter’s childhood, adulthood and last years), tracing the arc of the mountain-daughter’s life and eventual transformation. As it is involved in, or at least plays with, contemporary myth-making, the oral quality and auditory effects were particularly important to me. When I was unable to find a specific sound or rhythm, I took liberties with words, much to the confusion of my publisher at times. I remember ‘alpinic’ and ‘huffly’ both resulting in interesting discussions.

 

Paula: I love the liberties with words, the sonic playfulness, because that added to the mysteriousness, the strangeness. You hear mystery. Poetry is all the better for made up words.

I was totally captivated by the protagonist daughter – the underlying daughterness – and her electric movements. What discoveries, joys and struggles unfolded as you wrote your way into the daughter?

 

Her mountain-father found it easy, catching sight of her

in a bottle-green jersey scaling a vertiginous cliff, shoulder

blades painted with a dipped sphere of wet Cheshire moon;

 

she became all manner of oceans.

 

Elizabeth: Thank you – I’m really pleased you felt that way about the mountain-daughter. It was an interesting exercise, as I fell pregnant and gave birth to my daughter around roughly the same time (tracing my notes back, it appears the mountain-daughter began to emerge about a year before I fell pregnant when I was living far from home in south London). Whether it was timing or synchronicity or chance, I became increasingly fascinated by familial bonds and ways to refigure, disrupt, defamiliarise them. The domestic is traditionally wrought as such a safe, sanitised space, but is so expansive in its reach; it maintains such a hold on us, even as we age. And the mountain-daughter is both us and not-us, she struggles in ways we don’t and struggles in ways we do; at times, it was quite liberating to construct her character. The particular challenge for me was tracing her ‘daughterness’ – I love that word(!) – throughout her later years as a chronicle of growth, with grafts and accretions, trying to do justice to the shape her inheritance would take. I’m sure we never lose our sense of being the child of our parent(s), whatever form that relationship takes.

 

They told her the mountain stories as love stories, taking

her each dusk to pick bear’s garlic together. Not touching,

they bobbed like pendulums as she murmured: we just keep

hardening and hardening and hardening until all we are

is unfolded, thrown wide.

 

Paula: I love the way I build a setting for the narrative in my head that draws upon my own mountain experiences. Did you have real places that loomed large in your imagination?

 

Sleeping afterwards in the southern heat of a midday sun,

she dreamed of Tākaha Hill, Pancake Rocks, both faint

and singing outlines.

 

Fa!

 

Elizabeth: The collection is deeply rooted in the New Zealand landscape, so there are quite a number of real places that surface throughout the poem. But while parts of the poem are specifically geographically located – including Mount Saint Bathans, Punakaiki, Mount Peel, Tākaka Hill, Mount Aspiring, Dolomite Point, Miranda and Picton – a significant portion of the narrative is deliberately hazy as to its precise location. The Southern Alps, around the Mackenzie country, particularly Lake Tekapo and Mount John, as well as Arthur’s Pass, heavily influenced ‘the mountain-daughter’s childhood’. And the edge where the Waitākere Ranges meets the Tasman Sea provided inspiration for the final section – that wild, untamed, rugged topography ‘what is this line of sea she came to? […] Bucking the empty trug to the picketed boundary of sopping, wolfing dunes’.

Also, venturing globally, a very fortunate and well-timed encounter with the ancient Montserrat (and the Benedictine Abbey there, complete with Holy Grotto), a multi-peaked mountain range that is part of the Catalan Pre-Coastal Range in Spain, spurred on the narrative and general ‘mountain thoughts’.

 

Paula: Ah maybe that is one part of the strong connections I feel with the book – like a channel for subconscious attachment- because I see the tail end of the ranges and smell the Tasman Sea from our place and I drive around the Mackenzie country and Central Otago with my partner artist.

Do you have a cluster of poetry books with which you have strong goosebump connections? Whatever they might be?

Elizabeth: Oh yes, I know what you mean – that feeling of simultaneous exhilaration and unease/disquietude. Poetry collections that I have felt an extremely strong kinship with over the years and which, without doubt, have hugely informed my creative practice include Maggie Nelson’s Bluets – these fragments/propositions change me, confront me every time I read them with their candour, urgency and meditative illumination – Anne Kennedy’s Sing-Song, Mary Oliver’s Swan, Alice Oswald’s Dart – the primal, polyvocal, experimental quality of this poem still haunts me – as well as Woods etc., Fleur Adcock’s Tigers, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, Anna Livesey’s Ordinary Time – this collection is a true gift; it lived within arm’s reach when my daughter was very young – Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Mary Stanley’s Starveling Year, H.D.’s Helen in Egypt and for its shimmering poetic sensibility, Jessie Greengrass’ Sight.

 

 

 

 

Paula: I love this list! I haven’t read Jessie Greengrass. I have been musing on activities that augment poetry writing. For me: running, walking, gardening, cooking and of course reading. Listening to music. What activities enhance writing for you or keep it in balance?

Elizabeth: So much of my life is filled with motherhood at the moment, which enriches and enhances my writing and thinking and being in every way (although actually getting words to paper can be somewhat challenging). In particular, baking bread with my daughter each week is such a therapeutic act for us both and always leaves me poetically inspired. Tending to our garden and wild span of bush also slows me down and reminds me to be patient, to be present.

 

Two mountains encase a flushed fire,

two mountains eat hot soda damper with their daughter.

 

 

Elizabeth reads from Over There a Mountain

Mākaro Press page

Extract at Turbine / Kapohau

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry Shelf audio spot: Elizabeth Welsh reads from ‘The mountain-daughter’s last years’

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from ‘The mountain-daughter’s last years’ in Over There a Mountain, Hoopla Series, Mākaro Press, 2018

 

Elizabeth Welsh is an academic editor, poet and short fiction writer. Over There a Mountain, her debut poetry collection, was published by Mākaro Press in 2018 as part of the Hoopla series. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in journals and anthologies in both New Zealand and the United Kingdom. In 2012, she won the Auckland University Press – Divine Muses emerging poet prize. She lives in Titirangi with her husband and daughter.

 

 

 

 

 

Celebrating poetry 2018 in pictures and words

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A Readers and Writers evnet with the New Zealand Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who performed her epic “The Queen’s Sequence”, inspired by her meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 and other queens. After the interval fellow poets Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford and former Laureate Jenny Bornholdt who shared selected readings, with poet Paula Green as chair. Tusiata Avia.
A Readers and Writers evnet with the New Zealand Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who performed her epic “The Queen’s Sequence”, inspired by her meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 and other queens. After the interval fellow poets Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford and former Laureate Jenny Bornholdt who shared selected readings, with poet Paula Green as chair.Serie Barford.
A Readers and Writers evnet with the New Zealand Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who performed her epic “The Queen’s Sequence”, inspired by her meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 and other queens. After the interval fellow poets Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford and former Laureate Jenny Bornholdt who shared selected readings, with poet Paula Green as chair. Jenny Bornholdt.
A Readers and Writers evnet with the New Zealand Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who performed her epic “The Queen’s Sequence”, inspired by her meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 and other queens. After the interval fellow poets Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford and former Laureate Jenny Bornholdt who shared selected readings, with poet Paula Green as chair.
A Readers and Writers evnet with the New Zealand Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who performed her epic “The Queen’s Sequence”, inspired by her meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 and other queens. After the interval fellow poets Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford and former Laureate Jenny Bornholdt who shared selected readings, with poet Paula Green as chair.
A Readers and Writers evnet with the New Zealand Poet Laureate, Selina Tusitala Marsh, who performed her epic “The Queen’s Sequence”, inspired by her meeting Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 and other queens. After the interval fellow poets Tusiata Avia, Serie Barford and former Laureate Jenny Bornholdt who shared selected readings, with poet Paula Green as chair.
Brendan O’Brien and Hannah Mettner in the Turnbull Gallery.

 

m y    h i g h l i g h t s

 

I have had endless opportunities to transform the days and nights of 2018 with poetry musings. What good is poetry? Why write it? Why read it? Because it energises. Because it connects with the world on the other side of these hills and bush views. Because it gives me goose bumps and it makes me feel and think things.

I am fascinated by the things that stick – the readings I replay in my head – the books I finish and then read again within a week – the breathtaking poem I can’t let go. So much more than I write of here!

I have also invited some of the poets I mention to share their highlights.

 

2018: my year of poetry highlights

I kicked started an audio spot on my blog with Chris Tse reading a poem and it meant fans all round the country could hear how good he is. Like wow! Will keep this feature going in 2019.

Wellington Readers and Writers week was a definite highlight – and, amidst all the local and international stars, my standout session featured a bunch of Starling poets. The breathtaking performances of Tayi Tibble and essa may ranapiri made me jump off my seat like a fan girl. I got to post esssa’s poem on the blog.

To get to do an email conversation with Tayi after reading Poūkahangatus (VUP) – her stunning debut collection – was an absolute treat. I recently reread our interview and was again invigorated by her poetry engagements, the way she brings her whanau close, her poetry confidence, her fragilities, her song. I love love love her poetry.

My second standout event was the launch of tātai whetū edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis and published by Seraph Press. Lots of the women read with their translators. The room overflowed with warmth, aroha and poetry.

At the same festival I got to MC Selina Tusitala Marsh and friends at the National Library and witness her poetry charisma. Our Poet Laureate electrifies a room with poems (and countless other venues!), and I am in awe of the way she sparks poetry in so many people in so many places.

I also went to my double poetry launch of the year. Chris Tse’s  He’s So MASC (AUP) – the book moved and delighted me to bits and I was inspired to do an email conversation with him for Poetry Shelf. He was so genius in his response. Anna Jackson’s Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (AUP) delivers the quirkiest, unexpected, physical, cerebral poetry around. The book inspired another email conversation for the blog.

Tusiata Avia exploded my heart at her event with her cousin Victor Rodger; she read her challenging Unity and astonishing epileptic poems. Such contagious strength amidst such fragility my nerve endings were hot-wired (can that be done?). In a session I chaired on capital cities and poets, Bill Manhire read and spoke with such grace and wit the subject lit up. Capital city connections were made.

When Sam Duckor-Jones’s debut collection People from the Pit Stand Up (VUP) arrived, both the title and cover took me to the couch to start reading until I finished. All else was put on hold. I adore this book with its mystery and revelations, its lyricism and sinew; and doing a snail-paced email conversation was an utter pleasure.

I have long been a fan of Sue Wootton’s poetry with its sumptuous treats for the ear. So I was delighted to see The Yield (OUP) shortlisted for the 2018 NZ Book Awards. This is a book that sticks. I was equally delighted to see Elizabeth Smither win with her Night Horses (AUP) because her collection features poems I just can’t get out of my head. I carry her voice with me, having heard her read the poems at a Circle of Laureates event. I also loved Hannah Mettner’s Fully Clothed and So Forgetful (VUP), a debut that won best first Book. How this books sings with freshness and daring and originality.

I did a ‘Jane Arthur has  won the Sarah Broom Poetry Award and Eileen Meyers picked her’ dance in my kitchen and then did an anxious flop when I found Eileen couldn’t make the festival. But listening to Jane read before I announced the winner I felt she had lifted me off the ground her poems were so good. I was on stage and people were watching.

Alison Glenny won the Kathleen Grattan Award and Otago University Press published The Farewell Tourist, her winning collection. We had a terrific email conversation. This book has taken up permanent residence in my head because I can’t stop thinking about the silent patches, the mystery, the musicality, the luminous lines, the Antarctica, the people, the losses, the love. And the way writing poetry can still be both fresh and vital. How can poetry be so good?!

I went to the HoopLA book launch at the Women’s Bookshop and got to hear three tastes from three fabulous new collections: Jo Thorpe’s This Thin Now, Elizabeth Welsh’s Over There a Mountain and Reihana Robinson’s Her limitless Her. Before they began, I started reading Reihana’s book and the mother poems at the start fizzed in my heart. I guess it’s a combination of how a good a poem is and what you are feeling on the day and what you experienced at some point in the past. Utter magic. Have now read all three and I adore them.

At Going West I got to chair Helen Heath, Chris Tse and Anna Jackson (oh like a dream team) for the Wellington and poetry session. I had the anxiety flowing (on linking city and poet again) but forgot all that as I became entranced by their poems and responses. Such generosity in sharing themselves in public – it not only opened up poetry writing but also the complicated knottiness of being human. Might sound corny but there you go. Felt special.

Helen Heath’s new collection Are Friends Eectric? (VUP) was another book that blew me apart with its angles and smoothness and provocations. We conversed earlier this year by email.

A new poetry book by former Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen is always an occasion to celebrate. Otago University Press have released Poeta: Selected and new poems this year. It is a beautiful edition curated with love and shows off the joys of Cilla’s poetry perfectly.

Two anthologies to treasure: because I love short poems Jenny Bornholdt’s gorgeous anthology Short Poems of New Zealand. And Steve Braunias’s The Friday Poem because he showcases an eclectic range of local of poets like no other anthology I know. I will miss him making his picks on Fridays (good news though Ashleigh Young is taking over that role).

 

Highlights from some poets

 

Sam Duckor-Jones

I spent six weeks reading & writing poems with the students of Eketahuna School. They were divided on the merits of James Brown’s Come On Lance. It sparked a number of discussions & became a sort of touchstone. Students shared the poems they’d written & gave feedback: it’s better than Come On Lance, or, it’s not as good as Come On Lance, or, shades of Come On Lance. Then someone would ask to hear Come On Lance again & half the room would cheer & half the room would groan. Thanks James Brown for Come On Lance.

 

Hannah Mettner

My fave poetry thing all year has been the beautiful Heartache Festival that Hana Pera Aoake and Ali Burns put on at the start of the year! Spread over an afternoon and evening, across two Wellington homes, with readings and music and so much care and aroha. I wish all ‘literary festivals’ had such an atmosphere of openness and vulnerability!

 

Jane Arthur

Poetry-related things made up a lot of my highlights this year. I mean, obviously, winning the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize was … pretty up there. I’m still, like, “Me?! Whaaaat!” about it. I discovered two things after the win. First, that it’s possible to oscillate between happy confidence and painful imposter syndrome from one minute to the next. And second, that the constant state of sleep deprivation brought on by having a baby is actually strangely good for writing poetry. It puts me into that semi-dream-brain state that helps me see the extra-weirdness in everything. I wrote almost a whole collection’s worth of poems (VUP, 2020) in the second half of the year, thanks broken sleep!

A recent highlight for me was an event at Wellington’s LitCrawl: a conversation between US-based poet Kaveh Akbar and Kim Hill. I’m still processing all its gems – hopefully a recording will show up soon. Another was commissioning Courtney Sina Meredith to write something (“anything,” I said) for NZ Poetry Day for The Sapling, and getting back a moving reminder of the importance of everyone’s stories

This year I read more poetry than I have in ages, and whenever I enjoyed a book I declared it my favourite (I always do this). However, three local books have especially stayed with me and I will re-read them over summer: the debuts by Tayi Tibble and Sam Duckor-Jones, and the new Alice Miller. Looking ahead, I can’t wait for a couple of 2019 releases: the debut collections by essa may ranapiri and Sugar Magnolia Wilson.

 

Elizabeth Smither

Having Cilla McQueen roll and light me a cigarette outside the Blyth

Performing Arts Centre in Havelock North after the poets laureate

Poemlines: Coming Home reading (20.10.2018) and then smoking together,

cigarettes in one hand and tokotoko in the other. Then, with the relief that

comes after a reading, throwing the cigarette down into a bed of pebbles, hoping

the building doesn’t catch on fire.

 

Selina Tusitala Marsh

To perform my ‘Guys Like Gauguin’ sequence (from Fast Talking PI) in Tahiti at the Salon du Livre, between an ancient Banyan Tree and a fruiting Mango tree, while a French translator performs alongside me and Tahitians laugh their guts out!

Thanks Bougainville
For desiring ‘em young
So guys like Gauguin
Could dream and dream
Then take his syphilitic body
Downstream…

 

Chris Tse

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This year I’ve been lucky enough to read my work in some incredible settings, from the stately dining room at Featherston’s Royal Hotel, to a church-turned-designer-clothing-store in Melbourne’s CBD. But the most memorable reading I’ve done this year was with fellow Kiwis Holly Hunter, Morgan Bach and Nina Powles in a nondescript room at The Poetry Cafe in London, which the three of them currently call home. It was a beautiful sunny Saturday that day, but we still managed to coax people into a dark windowless room to listen to some New Zealand poetry for a couple of hours. This is a poetry moment I will treasure for many years to come.

 

Sue Wootton

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing and reading plenty of poems by plenty of poets this year. But far and away the most rejuvenating poetry experience for me during 2018 was working with the children at Karitane School, a small primary school on the East Otago coast. I’m always blown away by what happens when kids embark on the poetry journey. Not only is the exploration itself loads of fun, but once they discover for themselves the enormous potentiality in language – it’s just go! As they themselves wrote: “Plant the seeds and grow ideas / an idea tree! Sprouting questions … / Bloom the inventions / Fireworks of words …” So I tip my cap to these young poets, in awe of what they’ve already made and intrigued to find out what they’ll make next.

 

Cilla McQueen

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25.11.18

Found on the beach – is it a fossil?

jawbone? hunk of coral? No – it’s a wrecked,

fire-blackened fragment of Janola bottle,

its contorted plastic colonised by weeds

and sandy encrustations, printed instructions

still visible here and there, pale blue.

Growing inside the intact neck, poking out

like a pearly beak, a baby oyster.

 

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Living in Bluff for twenty-two years now, I’ve sometimes felt out on a limb, in the tree of New Zealand poetry. I appreciate the journey my visitors undertake to reach me. A reluctant traveller myself, a special poetry moment for me was spent with Elizabeth Smither and Bill and Marion Manhire at Malo restaurant, in Havelock North. Old friends from way back – I haven’t seen them often but poetry and art have always connected us

 

Tayi Tibble

In September, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend The Rosario International Poetry Festival in Argentina. It was poetic and romantic; late night dinners in high rise restaurants, bottles of dark wine served up like water, extremely flowery and elaborate cat-calling (Madam, you are a candy!) and of course sexy spanish poetry and sexy poets.

On our last night, Marcela, Eileen and I broke off and went to have dinner at probably what is the only Queer vegan hipster restaurant/boutique lingerie store/experimental dj venue in the whole of Argentina, if not the world. Literally. We couldn’t find a vegetable anywhere else. We went there, because Eileen had beef with the chef at the last place and also we had too much actual beef generally, but I digress.

So anyway there we are eating a vegan pizza and platter food, chatting. I accidentally say the C word like the dumbass crass kiwi that I am forgetting that it’s like, properly offensive to Americans. Eileen says they need to take a photo of this place because it’s camp af. I suggest that Marcela and I kiss for the photo to gay it up because I’m a Libra and I’m lowkey flirting for my life because it’s very hot and I’ve basically been on a red-wine buzz for five days. Eileen gets a text from Diana, one of the festival organisers telling them they are due to read in 10 minutes. We are shocked because the male latin poets tend to read for up to 2584656 times their allocated time slots, so we thought we had plenty of time to like, chill and eat vegan. Nonetheless poetry calls, so we have to dip real quick, but when we step outside, despite it being like 1546845 degrees the sky opens up and it’s pouring down. Thunder. Lightening. A full on tropical South American storm!

It’s too perfect it’s surreal. Running through the rain in South America. Marcella and I following Eileen like two hot wet groupies. Telling each other, “no you look pretty.” Feeling kind of primal. Throwing our wet dark curls around. The three of us agree that this is lowkey highkey very sexy. Cinematic and climatic. Eventually we hail a taxi because time is pressing. Though later that night, and by night I mean at like 4am, Marcella and I, very drunk and eating the rest of our Vegan pizza, confessed our shared disappointment that we couldn’t stay in the rain in Argentina…  just for a little while longer….

We get to the venue and make a scene; just in time and looking like we’ve just been swimming. Eileen, soaking wet and therefore looking cooler than ever, reads her poem An American Poem while Marcella and I admire like fangirls with foggy glasses and starry eyes.

“And I am your president.” Eileen reads.

“You are! You are!” We both agree.

 

Alison Glenny

A poetry moment/reading. ‘The Body Electric’ session at this year’s Litcrawl was a celebration of queer and/or non-binary poets (Emma Barnes, Harold Coutts, Sam Duckor-Jones, essa may ranapiri, Ray Shipley ). Curated and introduced by poet Chris Tse (looking incredibly dapper in a sparkly jacket) it was an inspiring antidote to bullying, shame, and the pressure to conform.

A book. Not a book of poetry as such, but a book by a poet (and perhaps it’s time to be non-binary about genre as well as gender?). Reading Anne Kennedy’s The Ice Shelf I was struck by how unerringly it highlights the salient characteristics of this strange era we call the anthropocene: crisis and denial, waste and disappearance, exploitation, and the destruction caused by broken relationships and an absence of care.

A publishing event. Seraph Press published the lovely tātai whetū: seven Māori women poets in translation, with English and Te Reo versions of each poem on facing pages (and a sprinkling of additional stars on some pages). An invitation, as Karyn Parangatai writes in her similarly bilingual review of the book in Landfall Review online (another publishing first?) ‘to allow your tongue to tease the Māori words into life’.

Best writing advice received in 2018. ‘Follow the signifier’.

 

essa may ranapiri

There are so many poetry highlights for me this year, so many good books that have left me buzzing for the verse! First book I want to mention is Cody-Rose Clevidence’s second poetry collection flung Throne. It has pulled me back into a world of geological time and fractured identity.

Other books that have resonated are Sam Ducker-Jone’s People from the Pit Stand Up and Tayi Tibble’s Poūkahangatus, work from two amazingly talented writers and friends who I went through the IIML Masters course with. After pouring over their writing all year in the workshop environment seeing their writing in book form brought me to tears. So proud of them both!

Written out on a type-writer, A Bell Made of Stones by queer Chamorro poet, Lehua M. Taitano, explores space, in the world and on the page. They engage with narratives both indigenous and colonial critiquing the racist rhetoric and systems of the colonial nation state. It’s an incredible achievement, challenging in form and focus.

I’ve been (and continue to be) a part of some great collaborative poetry projects, a poetry collection; How It Colours Your Tongue with Loren Thomas and Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, a poetry chapbook; Eater Be Eaten with Rebecca Hawkes, and a longform poetry zine; what r u w/ a broken heart? with Hana Pera Aoake. Working with these people has and continues to be a such a blessing!

I put together a zine of queer NZ poetry called Queer the Pitch. Next year I’m going to work to release a booklet of trans and gender diverse poets, I’m looking forward to working with more talented queer voices!

The most important NZ poetry book to be released this year, it would have to be tātai whetū. It was published as part of Seraph Press’s Translation Series. It features work from seven amazing wāhine poets; Anahera Gildea, Michelle Ngamoki, Tru Paraha, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Maraea Rakuraku, Dayle Takitimu and Alice Te Punga Somerville. These poems are all accompanied by te reo Māori translations of the work. I can only imagine that it would be a super humbling experience to have your work taken from English and returned to the language of the manu. By happenstance I was able to attend the launch of tātai whetū; to hear these pieces read in both languages was a truly special experience. It’s so important that we continue to strive to uplift Māori voices, new words brought forth from the whenua should be prized in our literary community, thanks to Seraph for providing such a special place for these poems. Ka rawe!

 

Anna Jackson

This has been a year of particularly memorable poetry moments for me, from the launch of Seraph Press’s bilingual anthology Tātai Whetū in March and dazzling readings by Mary Rainsford and Tim Overton at a Poetry Fringe Open Mike in April, to Litcrawl’s inspiring installation in November of essa may ranapiri and Rebecca Hawkes hard at work on their collaborative poetry collection in a little glass cage/alcove at the City Art Gallery. They hid behind a table but their creative energy was palpable even through the glass. I would also like to mention a poetry salon hosted by Christine Brooks, at which a dog-and-cheese incident of startling grace brilliantly put into play her theory about the relevance of improv theatre theory to poetry practice. Perhaps my happiest poetry moment of the year took place one evening when I was alone in the house and, having cooked an excellent dinner and drunken rather a few small glasses of shiraz, started leafing through an old anthology of English verse reading poems out loud to myself, the more the metre the better. But the poems I will always return to are poems I have loved on the page, and this year I have been returning especially to Sam Duckor-Jones’s People from the Pit Stand Up, while I look forward to seeing published Helen Rickerby’s breath-taking new collection, How to Live, that has already dazzled me in draft form.

 

 

happy summer days

and thank you for visiting my bog

in 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hoopla Poetry 2018 – Auckland book launch

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Mākaro Press, Elizabeth, Reihana & Jo invite you to celebrate the Auckland launch of the 2018 Hoopla poetry collections.

Come to the Women’s Bookshop on Saturday 3rd November from 5pm to hear some wonderful poetry from our 2018 poets, have a glass of wine and some nibbles.

Books will be available for purchase at the launch.

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HOOPLA aims to entice people to buy and read poetry books through the quality of its poets, the attraction of a series with three books launching at once, vibrant design and the accessibility of a clear narrative or theme. We like strong work that steps onto the tightrope without hesitation and gives the performance of its life.

Hoopla series