Music is the first poetry attraction for me. I am drawn to poems that sing. Poems sing in multiple keys with affecting and shifting chords, rhythms, harmonies, counterpoints, pitch, cadence, codas, crescendo. Tune your ear into the poetry of Karlo Mila, Emma Neale, Sue Wootton, Bill Manhire, Hinemoana Baker, Michele Leggott, Nina Mingya Powles, Lily Holloway, Alison Wong, Chris Tse, Mohamed Hassan, Gregory Kan, Anna Jackson, David Eggleton and you will hear music before you enter heart, mystery, experience, startle. Take a listen to Bernadette Hall or Dinah Hawken or Anne Kennedy. Anuja Mitra. Louise Wallace. How about Grace Iwashita Taylor? Ian Wedde. Tusiata Avia. Tayi Tibble. Rebecca Hawkes. Helen Rickerby. Selina Tusitala Marsh. Murray Edmond. Apirana Taylor. Iona Winter. Rose Peoples. Sam Duckor Jones. Vincent O’Sullivan. Kiri Pianhana-Wong. Jackson Nieuwland. Serie Barford. Listening in is of the greatest body comfort and you won’t be able to stop leaning your ear in closer. I think of one poet and then another, to the point I could curate an anthology of musical poets. I can name 100 without moving from the kitchen chair. Ah. Bliss.

But for this theme I went in search of poems that speak of song. The poems I have selected are not so much about song but have a song presence that leads in multiple directions. And yes they sing. Once again I am grateful to publishers and poets who are supporting my season of themes. Two more themes to go.

The poems

poem to Hone Tuwhare 08

the master

adroit composer of

‘No Ordinary Sun’

has gone

and still

the music grows flows
grumbles and laughs

from his pen

only the old house has fallen
to the wind and storm

death shakes the tree
but the bird lives on

Apirana Taylor

from A Canoe in Midstream: Poems new and old, Canterbury University Press, 2009 (2019)

Between Speech and Song

I’m sorry, you said.

What for, I said. And then

you said it again.

The house was cooling.

The pillowcases had blown

across the lawn.

We felt the usual shortcomings

of abstractions. I hope,

you said. Me too, I said.

The distance between our minds

is like the space

between speech and song.

Lynley Edmeades

from As the Verb Tenses, Otago University Press, 2016

Dust House

my sister is humming

through wallpaper

the front door is shutting

and opening like lungs

to kauri trees

leaping upwards through air

my lungs are pressed

between walls

grey warblers sing like

dust moving through air

the sunflower is opening

and shutting like lungs

my lungs are shifting

the air

Rata Gordon

from Second Person, Victoria University Press, 2020

Lullaby

The woman next door sings so slowly someone must have died. She practices her sorry aria through the walls. When we bump on the steps she is neighbourly, maybe, with her purpled eyes. She tries for lightness. The radio tells me it is snowing somewhere south. Drifts fall down for days. The presenter uses the word ghastly far too often. In the ghastly snow, he says, animals dig for their calves. When we meet on the path my own voice is chestnut and dumb. ‘It’s a ghastly thing,’ I say. ‘It was a ghastly mistake.’ In the dark the woman’s voice touches a sweet, high place. It’s a small cupboard where her children once hid when she’d tried to explain ­­– which you never really can – why the animals must paw in the cold, brown slush. Where are the young? Who hears their low, fallow voices?

Sarah Jane  Barnett 

from Bonsai – Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe, Canterbury University Press, 2018

Song

i

The song feels like singing,

looks out the window:

clouds glued to the sky,

harbour slate-grey,

hills like collapsed elephants.

There’s food stuck to the highchair,

a plastic spoon on the floor.

The cat stares up in awe at the fridge.

The song opens its mouth,

but seems to have forgotten the words.

ii

The song wakes up.

It’s dark.

Someone is crying.

The morepork in the ngaio

shakes out its slow spondee:

more pork more pork more pork.

Back in the dream a line

of faces passes the window.

Each face smiles, lifts

its lips to show large teeth.

iii

The song sits at the window, humming

ever so softly, tapping

a rhythm on the table-edge, watching

the harbour slowly losing

colour. At the very far end

of the harbour slightly up to the right,

a zip of lights marks the hill

over to Wainuiomata. If that zip

could be unzipped, thinks the song,

the whole world might change.

iv

The song strokes the past

like a boa, like some fur muff

or woollen shawl,

but the past is not soft at all;

it’s rough to the touch,

sharp as broken glass.

v

The song longs to sing in tune.

The song longs to be in tune.

The black dog comes whenever

the song whistles, wagging its tail.

The black dog waits for the song’s whistle.

The black dog wants a long walk.

vi

The song croons “Here Comes the Night”

very quietly. Meanwhile the baby

spoons its porridge into a moon.

The black dog leads the song

down long, unlovely streets.

The night is slowly eating the moon.

Harry Ricketts

from Winter Eyes, Victoria University Press, 2018

The Crowd

The crowd is seaweed and there’s always one man too tall at least or one man dancing too much or one woman touching too much. We form short bonds with each other. The man next to me we briefly worry is a fascist. But him and I set a rhythm of touches with each other as we’re together and apart from the music and the bodies. When the bassline and the drums are inside my entire body they always shake up grief like sediment in water so that I am the sediment and my tears become water. And I am the water and the seaweed at the same time and I hover in the thick of the sound experiencing myself experiencing sound and feeling and my body as one piece of a larger thing. I want to be part of a larger thing as often as I can. So many days there isn’t enough music to pull us together. We shred each other, other days. A little rip. A tiny tear. A deep cut. We curl backwards into ourselves to do the damage. I follow the line. I rise into it because it is the sea and the only thing to do is to rise. I am bread and I am fire. I am the line of the horizon as it is reflected back to you. We make our own beds and lie in them. You will have said something. To me. Later, as I think it through I remember us neck to neck, clutching.

Emma Barnes

from Sweet Mammalian 7

singing in the wire

The song is a clutch of mailboxes

at the end of an undulating road,

an unsteady stack of bee-hives

beside poplars.

The song is the whine from a transformer,

crickets, waist-high roadside grass,

a summer that just will not let up.

The song is a power pole’s pale-brown

ceramic cup receiving a direct hit

from a clod flung by my brother.

It is looped bars laid

against the white paper of a gravel road.

Released the year and month my father died,

‘Wichita Lineman’ can still bring me the valley

where we lived,

still bring me grief, the sound

of wind through wire, the loneliness

of country verges; but does not bring

my father back. You can ask

too much of a song.

Kay McKenzie Cooke

from Born To A Red-Headed Woman, Otago University Press 2014

thursday quartet 9:15

The stairwell grew and rolled

with slackened half-night. Quite clearly

she saw how her words had become her.

When she sang she remembered; her breath was deep

letters unnudged. The stairwell hummed. Everything

smelt of other people’s hands.

One, two, three. Another life had trained her ready.

She knew these breaths. It had been a day

of near misses, daredevil secret creatures

who followed her home, a line of sight

and the road, misadventured art deco.

Had she been good enough?  

At night her window smithied day.

She could see the boats as they came.

The stairwell rose and then uprising

the first notes.

Pippi Jean

Trigger

When Johnny Cash
was sad he’d call
Willie Nelson and
ask for a joke.

Willie knew a
dirty joke – good
or bad – was the
secret to happiness.

Some people haven’t
yet realised that Willie
Nelson is one of the
greatest singers, guitarists

and songwriters. But
there’s time. There’s always
time. Despite it being
funny how it always seems

to just slip away. Still,
to add to the legends of
Willie smoking pot
on the roof of the White House

and blowing out interviewers
so that they couldn’t remember
where they parked their car or
where they lived or worked,

we can now thank Willie not
only for his 70 albums and for
writing the greatest jukebox
weepie of all time…

But, also, on some level, he
helped keep Johnny Cash alive
for as long as he lasted. Johnny
battled his depression

with a dirty joke from Willie
Nelson. I’m not saying it works
for everyone but it served
The Man in Black.

Simon Sweetman

from off the tracks website

Sunday’s Song

A tin kettle whistles to the ranges;

dry stalks rustle in quiet field prayer;

bracken spores seed dusk’s brown study;

the river pinwheels over its boulders;

stove twigs crackle and race to blaze;

the flame of leaves curls up trembling.

Church bells clang, and sea foam frays;

there’s distant stammers of revving engines,

a procession of cars throaty in a cutting,

melody soughing in the windbreak trees,

sheep wandering tracks, bleating alone.

Sunday sings for the soft summer tar;

sings for camellias, fullness of grapes;

sings for geometries of farming fence lines;

sings for the dead in monumental stone;

sings for cloud kites reddened by dusk —

and evening’s a hymn, sweet as, sweet as,

carrying its song to streets and to suburbs,

carrying its song to pebbles and hay bales,

carrying its song to crushed metal, smashed glass,

and fading in echoes of the old folks’ choir.

David Eggleton

from The Conch Trumpet, Otago University Press, 2015

Ephemera

My brother says that he doesn’t

understand poetry. He hears the words

but they all intersperse into a polyphonic

whirl of voices; no meaning to them

​

beyond the formation and execution

of sounds upon lips, pressing together

and coming apart. I cannot touch or feel

words, but I see them ‒ the word ‘simile’

​

is a grimacing man, poised on the edge

of polite discomfort and anguish. ‘Dazzled’ is

a 1920s flapper with broad, black eyes

and lank black hair around the edges of

​

her face. A boy in my music class hears

colours ‒ well, not hearing as such, he says,

but images in his mind’s eye. People play

tunes and ask him what colour it is, but

​

they play all at once, and he says that it is

the indistinguishable brown of all colours

combined. I think of a boy I used to know

called Orlando, and how this word conjures

​

the sight of a weathered advert for a tropical holiday

in my mind ‒ a forgotten promise, just ephemera

and not to be mentioned. The History room at school smells

like strange, zesty lemons, like the smell when you

​

peel a mandarin and its pores disperse their

sebum into the air, or when you squeeze the juice

from a lemon into your hands, and feel it dissolve

the soapy first layer of skin. I always think of

​

a certain someone when I smell this, even though

they wear a different perfume, and when I listen

to soft guitar ballads I think of them too, even though

I know they wouldn’t have heard them. All

​

of the sounds and smells and thoughts blend

into ephemera, scorched postcards of violets and

swallows, etched with the perfect handwriting of

old, consigned to antique stores that smell of

​

smoke. Things of the past with no value, no

substance, just air filled with citrus mist. I collect

each word and strain of what was once fresh in

my mind, in a forgotten jacket pocket, to be discovered

​

on some rainy day, years later. I’ll pull out the

postcard and think of the way I always look twice

when I see someone with curly hair; the word ‘longing’

is a blue wisp that creeps between the cracks

​

in my fingers. That wisp hides in these things,

tucked away, like the 1930s train tickets I found

in an old book. I wonder if their owner ever made it

to their destination. I wonder who they were.

Cadence Chung

first appeared in Milly’s Magazine

Love songs we haven’t written

Within the warm wreckage of me,

I’d never dare to ask you, but

in that moment when pain finds it plowing rhythm,

would you want me dead?

It’s a startling thought.

So round and whole and ordinary.

But you can’t know these things until

you’re sunk deep in the geometry of them. Of course,

the bed I lie on would be lily white and threatening levitation.

I would imagine the emptiness I leave and

you would think of all the ways to fill it.

That is the grotesque version.

It should of course be the other way around.

I don’t need misery to write poetry.

For me words come only after precarity passes

and there is safety in sitting still for long stretches.

Words, eventually, have the thickness of matter

left out too long in the sun. My love,

If we had a daughter, I’d be more dangerous.

She’d lick words whole     out of the air.

I would recognize her tiny anthem.

Like you, she’d need two anchors, and only one mast.

Like me, she’d be immovable, a miniature old woman

by seven years old.

Catherine Trundle

thursday’s choir

my singing teacher says yawning during lessons is good

it means the soft palate is raised and air circulates the bulb of your skull

to be pulled out between front teeth like a strand of taut hair 

gum skin or yesterday’s nectarine fibre

in empty classrooms my body is a pear, grounded but reaching

the piano is out of tune, its chords now elevator doors

a shrieking melody that says: relish the peeling off

floss til you bleed and watch through the bannisters

voices merge like a zip ripped over fingers

reeling backwards and thrown to the wall

are all the arcades, rubber children

midnight sirens and birds sounding off one by one

the sopranos cry out offering forged banknotes

while the altos bring the alleyways

you crash through the windscreen, thumbs deep in pie

laundromat coins with that rhythm

Lily Holloway

Emma Barnes lives and writes in Te Whanganui-ā-Tara. She’s working on an anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writing with co-conspirator Chris Tse. It’s to be published by AUP in 2021. In her spare time she lifts heavy things up and puts them back down again.

Sarah Jane Barnett is a writer and editor from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her poetry, essays and reviews have been published widely in Aotearoa. Her debut poetry collection A Man Runs into a Woman (Hue + Cry Press) was a finalist in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. Her secondcollection Work (Hue + Cry Press) was published in 2015. Sarah is currently writing a book on womanhood and midlife.

Kay McKenzie Cooke’s fourth poetry collection was published by The Cuba Press in June 2020 and is titled Upturned. She lives and writes in Ootepoti / Dunedin.

Cadence Chung is a student from Wellington High School. She started writing poetry during a particularly boring maths lesson when she was nine. Outside of poetry, she enjoys singing, reading old books, and perusing antique stores.

Lynley Edmeades is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Listening In (Otago Uni Press, 2019). She lives in Dunedin and teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Otago.

David Eggleton is the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate 2019 – 2022. His most recent book is The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, published by Otago University Press.

Rata Gordon is a poet, embodiment teacher and arts therapist. Her first book of poetry Second Person was published in 2020 by Victoria University Press. Through her kitchen window, she sees Mount Karioi. www.ratagordon.com 

Lily Holloway is a queer nacho-enthusiast. She is forthcoming in AUP New Poets 8 and you can find her work on lilyholloway.co.nz.

Pippi Jean is eighteen and just moved to Wellington for her first year at Victoria University. Her most recent works can be found in Landfall, Starling, Takahe, Mayhem, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook among others.

Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. His Selected Poems appeared in June, Victoria University Press.

Simon Sweetman is a writer and broadcaster. His debut book of poems, “The Death of Music Journalism” was published last year via The Cuba Press. He is the host of the weekly Sweetman Podcast and he writes about movies, books and music for a Substack newsletter called “Sounds Good!” (simonsweetman.substack.com to sign up). He blogs at Off The Tracks and sometimes has a wee chat about music on RNZ. He lives in Wellington with Katy and Oscar, the loves of his life. They share their house with Sylvie the cat and Bowie the dog. 

Apirana Taylor, Ngati Porou, Te Whanau a Apanui, Ngati Ruanui, Te Ati Awa, is a nationally and internationally published poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, actor, painter and musician. He has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury and Massey Universities. He frequently tours nationally and internationally visiting schools, tertiary institutions and prisons reading his poetry, storytelling and taking creative writing workshops. He has written six collections of poetry, a book of plays, three collections of short stories, and two novels. His work has been included in many national and international anthologies.

Catherine Trundle is a poet and anthropologist, with recent works published in Landfall, Takahē, Poetry New Zealand Yearbook, Not Very Quiet, and Plumwood Mountain.

Ten poems about clouds

Twelve poems about ice

Ten poems about dreaming

Eleven poems about the moon

Twelve poems about knitting

Ten poems about water

Twelve poems about faraway

Fourteen poems about walking

Twelve poems about food

Thirteen poems about home

Ten poems about edge

Eleven poems about breakfast

Twelve poems about kindness

Thirteen poems about light