What to Wear, Jenny Bornholdt Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
A woman stilled by light then folded into darkness. Still, though, she’s there by the window, still there in the room.
Jenny Bornholdt from ‘Ada in the Room’
What an absolute treat to lose and find myself within the paths and slipstreams of Jenny Bornholdt’s new writing. This book is a visual haunting, a soundtrack of grief, loss, illness, love, wonder. Enter this collection, and enter a poetic terrain that is both gloriously spare and captivatingly rich.
Poetry can do this. Poetry can offer subtlety within richness, and then in a sweet poetry swivel, offer richness within subtlety.
I found myself musing on the art of dressmaking – an irony when the cover and the title of the book signal clothing (more on this later). I got musing on the way slivers of life are hiding within the seams of the poems, in the nuance of a line, in the folds of a metaphor. Musing on the way tiny arrivals are signposts in the wide expanse of daily living, whether a word mantra repeated during an MRI, or how a mountain’s death zone brushes against the death zone in a cancer ward, or the throwing away of a mother’s maps, or the wearing of socks when days are numbered, or the drawing-breath sound of trees after rain.
‘What to wear’ is the final line in the final poem, ‘Illness’. Not a question, but a member of the checklist of daily choices. The poem — so heart-affecting when the woman we read of is “up, but just, just / hanging on” — returns me to the terrific cover image (photograph by Deborah Smith). The hanging shirt. Hanging in space. Hanging in the great unknown. And in my madcap musings, I am wondering if, in one or more senses, I am wearing the poems, these poems so exquisitely crafted, with piquant detail, with an under-and-overlay of personal experience, with a shimmering bridge between what is and what is not, between what is spoken and what is framed in silence. What is fascinating fable and surprising fiction. Ah. What to read in the seams? I am losing and finding the way a poem hangs in both the dark and light.
Sometimes I muse that what we bring to a poetry collection makes an electric and eclectic difference. Maybe that is why the book has sparked for me on many levels. Both personally and on how we might write a poem.
I read and love ‘Ada in the Room’. It’s an exquisite visual haunting, a poem that catches you as a sublime painting might, and then I discover the poem is a response to an actual painting, ‘Interior, Sunlight on the Floor’ in the Tate Gallery in London. Plus it has a fascinating anecdote. An owner had folded the painting so the artist’s wife Ada was no longer visible! But it is the poem that holds me. I am transported to the moment on the kitchen chair when I too watch the light streak the floor, and knowing I get folded into light and dark across the course of every single day.
Oh the joy of poems as miniatures to fold and unfold.
When I slow down to an extended reading pause, I am reminded of reading Bill Manhire’s new collection, Lyrical Ballads THWUP, 2026). How poetry can hint and whisper, sing and imagine, find humour and enigma, whether in everyday starting points or imagined flight, in both the strange and the unexpected. How the everyday prompts vital rewards for mind heart imagination senses. I loved the idea of listening to Bill read Lyrical Ballads from start to finish, and now I want Jenny to do the same.
Poetry, as my personalised review underlines, can offer delight along with self-nourishment. In What to Wear, the amalgam of reading delight and nourishment is there in broken things, sitting on the phone, the poem with the hole in it (ah what poem doesn’t have a hole in it), and the members of an extended family ‘declining like nouns’. I have had startle jabs of feeling, points of recognition, prolonged engagements with the chemistry of words. Take ‘Poem with a hole in it’. It juxtaposes word lists with stanzas. The laying of a path overlays/underlays the laying of a poem. The word lists epitomise how Jenny’s poems open out wider from their immediately visible pavings.
What to Wear is still on the table and I want to prolong my day in its nooks and crannies and spaces, in this magical poetry collection that folds and gently moves me to wonder and ache and absorb.
Plum
Why wear socks when your days are numbered.
Like plums falling from trees, frequent as minutes
Jenny Bornoldt
Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, including Lost and Somewhere Else (2019), Selected Poems (2016) and The Rocky Shore (winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Annemarie Hope-Cross, Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago. She was New Zealand’s poet laureate in 2005–2007, and in the 2014 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet.
Ah. Love is my final theme. My seventeenth gathering. I chose love because love is the ink in my pen, it drives the pencil filling my notebooks. It’s the reason I keep two blogs running when, at times, it seems impossible. There is the love of reading and writing stretching back to childhood. Love poetry can embrace many subjects, moods, objects, experiences, relationships. So many poetry books in Aotearoa are steeped in love. In what is written and, just as importantly, in the infectious love poets feel for the power of words. For the possibility of the line, silence, music, physical detail. As readers, writers, publishers, reviewers, booksellers of poetry, we are connected through a shared and invigorating love of poetry. Ah.
To celebrate the end of my theme season I have ten copies of Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry to give away. I will sign one for you or for a friend. You can leave a comment on the blog, on FB or Twitter: Which theme resonated for you? What theme do you suggest if I should ever do this again? Or just email me if you have my address.
Grateful thanks and aroha to all the poets, publishers and readers who have supported my season of themes. I so loved doing this!
The poems
Poem
So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be
*
this is the one I love. he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been
*
we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces
*
how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words
*
when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof
Jenny Bornholdt
from Selected Poems, Victoria University Press, 2016
Catch
Two sitting at a table two at a table sitting two and two a table in the grass in the grass a table and on the table empty almost with a little a little empty almost but with a little water there sits a jar for love on the table a jar for love not a fresh jar every day fresh every day nothing in the jar that lasts always fresh they are sitting sitting at the table looking they are looking at the jar at the table at each other they are sitting looking sitting at the table at the jar looking looking sitting now is nearly the day the day is nearly now now go to sleep go to love go to jar go to look look looking look sit sitting catch that catch two sitting at a table two at table sitting two and two and two a table in the grass
Murray Edmond
from Fool Moon, Auckland University Press, 2004
Because of you
(for Darae)
My Son,
in you I see the shape of the heart all poets try to explain
you, the greatest poem I could never pen
how blessed I am to mother a son to exercise hope and love when everything else is absent
Son, your are a gift to men because of you I pray for men still love men hold hope for me, for you.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor
from Full Broken Bloom, Ala Press, 2017
The wind has shaken everything out of the quince tree. Behold the bony gullets of fledglings as yellow as the towers of rock that arise in Wyoming. ‘Stop blocking the gangway,’ the old woman used to say, cutting away long roils of yellow clay with her spade, hell bent on re-configuring a brand new version of genetically modified melancholy. ‘Never forget how the old ones arrived from Dubh Linn, the Place of the Dark Pool, formed from the union of the River Liffey and the River Poddle. Never forget that we are arisen from a line of proud people.’ And here I am, holding onto my end of the string and I know, my love, that you are holding onto the other.
Bernadette Hall
Aroha Mai
Aroha mai I was trying to get to you but the wind kept changing direction
Aroha atu she hates it when institutions use Te Reo in their signatures she hates it when my wet hair drips all over the bedsheets
Aroha mai I couldn’t see you this time I was down a rabbit hole along the coast beside the point
Aroha atu love given love received there isn’t enough room in this house to house our love the brick square flat beneath a rectangle sky
Aroha mai your baby finally came the angels found your address submerged in yesterday’s current and she’s clapping in every photo
Aroha atu my feet don’t touch the ground these days take the stairs to stay fit I keep my car full of gas it is easy to recycle the past
Aroha mai my ghost is in town and I don’t know if I should email her back
Aroha atu already the skeleton wings of this year are casting long shadows we don’t know what’s for dinner but next door’s Tui keeps singing all the buried bones to life
and you’re opening every can of beans in the cupboard to feed the tired warrior in my arms
Courtney Sina Meredith
from Burnt Kisses on the Actual Wind, Beatnik Publishing, 2021
Helping my father remember
My father is in the business of transmissions. A radio technician, the basic premise being that a message is sent out, then received. Except something’s gone wrong with the wiring, and he didn’t teach me how to fix it. I see him, standing at the kitchen bench, his hand hovering over an orange and paring knife; trying to think what he had planned.
*
There is evidence that sound helps restore memory: the sound of a cricket ball colliding with tin fence; lemonade meeting beer in a shandy; sticks smouldering in the air, when pulled from a camp fire. The doctor says depression, my sister says stress, my father says stop being so bloody dramatic.
*
They say I am the most like you, and that we are like your mother. I am following you through tall grasses, as high as my head. You’re in your angling gear. It’s summer, I can hear the cicadas. There’s a wind up, but its warm. We’re heading to the river. You find Nana, and I’ll find you. We won’t be lost if we’re together.
I haven’t read a single new book since I’ve been with you. I’ve been so busy peering into your eyes where I can see dark passages & feinting canaries & gold & mine mine mine mine
Plus I’ve been preoccupied with the joy of sex the science of living the interpretation of dreams & my undiscovered self.
So today I read a love poem.
But when I looked at it, it just said your name.
It was very repetitive. It just kept skipping over itself. Skipping to the important bits. Slipping into something more comfortable.
I looked away for a second & when I looked back the love poem had filled the whole room. It was thrusting against the ceiling & had burst through the open window pushing the vase of sunflowers right out.
I tried to call to you to come & look but the love poem was so big that it caught in my throat. There were fainting canaries everywhere like the fallen petals of sunflowers gasping yours yours yours yours
Hannah Mettner
from Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, Victoria University Press, 2017
Strummer Summer
All that summer we kissed outside because we had nowhere inside to be alone. We had matching Clash t-shirts and black outlooks. After my shifts at Seafood Sam’s I would pick you up in my Dad’s ute and we’d drive to the river
so I could swim off the chip grease. I’d light a fire while you showed me the riffs you’d learned that day on your unplugged Fender. /I’ve been beat up, I’ve been thrown out,/ /But I’m not down, No I’m not down./ I requested Blondie but you said it was chick-music.
Poking the fire with a stick, the tinny twang of your dead strings. We thought we had it pretty bad. Your Dad didn’t like me because I was “the wrong flavour”. I craved city life. Packed my army bag and left home, but not before I withdrew half my chip money and bought you an amp.
Helen Lehndorf
from The Comforter, Seraph Press, 2011
The library
The library is full of people looking for love. At the sound of footsteps approaching, a boy turns around with a meaningful glance, and casually slips a pencil behind his ear. Girls pause on the landings, clutching armfuls of books to their breasts. Sometimes, you feel sorry for these people. You wish this wasn’t happening. All you want is a book, and all the shelves are filled with eyes of longing.
Airini Beautrais
from Secret Heart, Victoria University Press, 2006
Always on Waking
Always, on waking, I look out into treetops: I lie beside you in the shimmering room Where, whether summer morning, shell of dawn Or dazed moonlight patterns leaves on walls I wake to wide sky and the movement of treetops.
As the leaves flicker (thin scimitars of opaque Dull green the eucalyptus bundles over her bark strips) They become lucent; leaves lined with sunlight With moonlight are no longer drab But seem scimitars shining, are not now opaque.
While you are there I am nested among leaves; As sparrows come each morning for breadcrumbs So I look for your still face beside me; Without your calm in the face of what wild storm I am no longer nested, but desolate among these leaves.
Ruth France
from No Traveller Returns: The poems of Ruth France, Cold Hub Press, 2020
Honey
It was manuka honey, the best kind, in a big, white plastic bucket, given to you by someone with bees, because you’d been helpful, so much honey, it looked like it might last a lifetime and you being you, and maybe why I love you, you spooned it out into carefully washed jars and gave it to your uncle, your mother, your brothers, our friend with the little boy, your mother’s neighbour who had the birthday, so much honey, and after all that you gave away, there was still so much left for us.
Janis Freegard
from Meowing Part 1 (the Meow Gurrrls zine).
Is It Hard to Follow Your Heart When You Have Three?
(on the story of the giant octopus from Aelian’s De Natura Animalium)
is it hard to follow your heart when you have three?
one for circulation two for breathing
i am the stone jar of pickled fish you are the giant octopus
i wait in the dark for you you crawl up the sewer for me
we cast our votes two are for breathing
Claudia Jardine
from The Starling 9
Toikupu aroha 1
I waited all night for you to come home to plant kihikihi into your cupped palms
now as you sleep I glide my fingers memorising the tracks that led me here
to this chest – arms – manawa with such vastness and proximity
I lean down taking in the entirety of your pulse and there my hā quickens
above lifelines grooved with spacious and honest certainty.
Iona Winter
from Gaps in the Light, Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021
For Baukis
There are four extant poems written by the ancient Greek poet Erinna. Three of these concern the death of her childhood friend, Baukis.
you lost her, didn’t you? the one that made it worthwhile to be underneath the sun and breathing
you remembered her, didn’t you? the days you played chasing the tortoise topsy turvy, falling from all the white horses
you missed her, didn’t you? when marriage came like a thief and snatched her away the ribbon of your world
you mourned her, didn’t you? when the ribbon was torn the bright eyes empty, the breath stilled
you cried for her, didn’t you? raw, with it heaving out the wet thick language of snot and tears
you loved her, didn’t you? even more than a friend, the closest companion the only one
you wrote for her, didn’t you? wove her memory through hexameters to stave off oblivion
and, now, for her we read.
Hebe Kearney
When the Person You Love Leaves You in the Night
When the person you love leaves you in the night, it is only natural to get out of bed and follow them. It is also only natural for your pyjamas to be all crumpled and your hair sticking up at the back. It is only natural to feel confused, and alone.
Nine times out of ten, a light will be on and you will walk into the living room, squinting. The person you love will probably be making human body parts out of plasticine, or playing video games. They will look up and say ‘Hello’ and smile at you like you’re some kind of lost baby animal. You will feel a little bit found.
If there is no light on in the house, it is important that you check the garden. If there is no garden, check the balcony. The person you love will be out there, staring at the moon and not crying. You are the one who cries. Except that one time… and the other. Don’t ask them if they’re okay because they will just say ‘Yeah’. Besides, you are the one who was left alone in the night.
Just look at them in the moonlight, and let them look at you. Stay very still. Then take their hand in slow motion and walk to the kitchen. The person you love will follow you, and so will the moon. Pour some milk into a pan and simmer gently. You will see a quivering white circle. The moon will be in there somewhere. Slice cheese onto bread and turn on the grill.
When you have two pieces of cheese-on-toast, put them on a plate. Pour half the milk into the mug with Peter Rabbit on it and half into the souvenir mug from Sweden. There will be sugar on the floor and it will stick to your feet. Swing yourself up onto the kitchen bench. You and the person you love will sit with your feet dangling side by side. The sugar will fall without a sound. You will drink your milk. The person you love will eat their grilled cheese, with sips of milk in-between. Peter Rabbit will eat his radishes.
Congratulate yourselves for drinking calcium. Sit at opposite ends of the couch with your legs tossed over their legs. Talk until you wake up the birds.
It is important that at some point during the night the person you love reminds you that you are the person they love. It is also important that they thank you for the grilled cheese. If they don’t, give them a pen and a piece of cardboard. Drop them on the side of the road. Tell them, ‘You can hitchhike from here.’
Joy Holley
from Starling 4
Love Poem with Seagull
I wish I’d seen it from your side of the table when the horrid gull attacked my fish and chips, the springy baton of haddock in my hand a signal for the post-saurian psycho to swoop at my talon-less fingers as they moved toward my mouth in their classically dithering mammalian way, because if I’d had the privilege to see the stress-warped, flexuous face behind my bat-like ultrasonic shrieks of shock as I fought off the bird unsuccessfully then I’d have some idea of what it means for you to love me, the sort of person who manages to always look like this or feel like this regardless of how much easier being normal is.
Erik Kennedy
from There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, Victoria University Press, 2018
Found Again
our love is a tracking device more sure than any global positioning system
just carve us into wooden tablets then imprint us on opposite corners of a mighty length of siapo and watch tusili’i spring forth
making bridges to connect us over rock-bound starfish scampering centipedes and the footprints of bemused birds
we have many stories of losing and finding each orther
of getting lost and losing others
but today all is well
I lie beneath the old mango tree smothered with coconut oil embellished with wild flowers and droplets of your sweat
your aging shoulders still fling back proud
and I still arch towards you like a young sweetheart
you have whispered in my hair
found again
and we both know this is our final harbour
Serie Barford
from Tapa Talk, Huia Press, 2007
Everything
This morning when I looked out my window they were the first thing I noticed. I saw them flocking outside my house. I like to look at them from my window. I get the sun there. I’ll go out and stroke them. I wonder what they think of me. Some people don’t have anything much but if you put a hen on their knee they start looking. I’m not fast on my feet. I have bother with my eyes. I’ve got friends that can’t get out. Everything goes downhill. I would go back to when I was younger. I love the first things. When you’re young you’ve only a future. I’ve made no plans for dying. I haven’t paid for anything. I’d be terrified if they made a mistake. I do love everything about living though. I love being able to see. I like to look out my windows and see the leaves like a blanket on the ground. I love the autumn. I love the hens in the autumn. They’re beautiful. I couldn’t imagine my life without them. They’re everything to me.
Ashleigh Young
from How I get Ready, Victoria University Press, 2019
The poets
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. She collaborated with filmmaker Anna Marbrook to produce a short film, Te Ara Kanohi, for Going West 2021. Her latest poetry collection, Sleeping With Stones, will be launched during Matariki 2021.
Airini Beautrais lives in Whanganui and is the author of four poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. Her most recent poetry collection is Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP 2017). Bug Week and Other Stories recently won the Ockham NZ Book Fiction Award 2021.
Jenny Bornholdt is the author of many celebrated collections of poems, including The Rocky Shore (Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009) and Selected Poems (2016), and editor of several notable anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018). In 2005 she became the fifth Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, during which time she wrote Mrs Winter’s Jump (2007). In 2010 she was the Creative New Zealand Victoria University Writer in Residence. In 2013 she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature. In 2016 she edited the online anthology Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems. Jenny’s most recent collection is Lost and Somewhere Else (2019).
Murray Edmond, b. Kirikiriroa 1949, lives in Glen Eden. 14 books of poetry (Shaggy Magpie Songs, 2015, and Back Before You Know, 2019 most recent); book of novellas (Strait Men and Other Tales, 2015); Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); editor, Ka Mate Ka Ora (http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/); dramaturge for Indian Ink Theatre. Forthcoming: Time to Make a Song and Dance: Cultural Revolt in Auckland in the 1960s, from Atuanui Press in May, 2021.
Ruth France (1913–68) published two novels: The Race (1958), which won the New Zealand Literary Fund’s Award for Achievement, and Ice Cold River (1961); and two volumes of poetry: Unwilling Pilgrim (1955) and The Halting Place (1961), under the pseudonym Paul Henderson. Poems from a third collection, which remained in manuscript at the time of her death, are published as No Traveller Returns: The Selected poems of Ruth France (Cold Hub Press, 2020).
Janis Freegard is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Reading the Signs (The Cuba Press), and a novel, The Year of Falling. She lives in Wellington. website
Bernadette Hall lives in the Hurunui, North Canterbury. She retired from high-school teaching in 2005 in order to embrace a writing life. Fancy Dancing is her eleventh collection of poetry (VUP, 2020). In 2015 she was awarded the Prime Minister’s Award for literary achievement in poetry and in 2017 she was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Joy Holley lives in Wellington and has recently completed her Masters in fiction at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her writing has been published in Starling, Sport,Stasis and other journals.
Claudia Jardine (she/her) is a poet and musician based in Ōtautahi/Christchurch. In 2020 she published her first chapbook, The Temple of Your Girl, with Auckland University Press in AUPNew Poets 7 alongside Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae. For the winter of 2021 Jardine will be one of the Arts Four Creative Residents in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, where she will be working on a collection of poems.
Hebe Kearney is a queer poet who lives in Tāmaki Makaurau. Their work has appeared in The Three Lamps, Starling, Oscen, Forest and Bird, a fine line, and Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021.
Erik Kennedy is the author of There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (Victoria University Press, 2018), and he is co-editing a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific forthcoming from Auckland University Press later in 2021. His second book of poems is due out in 2022. His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like FENCE, Hobart, Maudlin House, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Helen Lehndorf’s book, The Comforter, made the New Zealand Listener’s ‘Best 100 Books of 2012′ list. Her second book, Write to the Centre, is a nonfiction book about the practice of keeping a journal. She writes poetry and non-fiction, and has been published in Sport, Landfall, JAAM, and many other publications and anthologies. Recently, she co-created an performance piece The 4410 to the 4412 for the Papaoiea Festival of the Arts with fellow Manawatū writers Maroly Krasner and Charlie Pearson. A conversation between the artists and Pip Adam can be heard on the Better Off Read podcast here
Courtney Sina Meredith is a distinguished poet, playwright, fiction writer, performer, children’s author and essayist, with her works being translated and published around the world. A leading figure in the New Zealand arts sector, Courtney is the Director of Tautai Contemporary Pacific Arts Trust, an organisation committed to championing Oceanic arts and artists. Courtney’s award-winning works include her play Rushing Dolls, poetry Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, short stories Tail of the Taniwha and children’s book The Adventures of Tupaia. Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind is Courtney’s new collection of poetry, the book was released just this month.
Hannah Mettner (she/her) is a Wellington writer who still calls Tairāwhiti home. Her first collection of poetry, Fully Clothed and So Forgetful, was published by Victoria University Press in 2017, and won the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She is one of the founding editors of the online journal Sweet Mammalian, with Sugar Magnolia Wilson and Morgan Bach.
Grace Iwashita-Taylor, breathing bloodlines of Samoa, England and Japan. An artist of upu/words led her to the world of performing arts. Dedicated to carving, elevating and holding spaces for storytellers of Te Moana nui a Kiwa. Recipient of the CNZ Emerging Pacific Artist 2014 and the Auckland Mayoral Writers Grant 2016. Highlights include holding the visiting international writer in residence at the University of Hawaii 2018, Co-Founder of the first youth poetry slam in Aoteroa, Rising Voices (2011 – 2016) and the South Auckland Poets Collective and published collections Afakasi Speaks (2013) & Full Broken Bloom (2017) with ala press. Writer of MY OWN DARLING commissioned by Auckland Theatre Company (2015, 2017, 2019) and Curator of UPU (Auckland Arts Festival 2020 & Kia Mau Festival 2021). Currently working on next body of work WATER MEMORIES.
Louise Wallace is the author of three collections of poetry published by Victoria University Press, most recently Bad Things. She is the founder and editor of Starling, and is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Otago.
Iona Winter (Waitaha/Kāi Tahu) lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her hybrid work is widely published and anthologised in literary journals internationally. Iona creates work to be performed, relishing cross-modality collaboration, and holds a Master of Creative Writing. She has authored three collections, Gaps in the Light (2021), Te Hau Kāika (2019), and then the wind came (2018). Skilled at giving voice to difficult topics, she often draws on her deep connection to land, place and whenua.
Ashleigh Young is the author of Magnificent Moon, Can You Tolerate This?, and How I Get Ready (Victoria University Press). She works as an editor at VUP.
Each month I gather and invite poems on a particular theme. End of February I was musing on the idea of furniture. On Tuesday night (March 24th) I woke at 12.30 am and was awake until dawn. At one point I was thinking about how most of us are now living in domestic bubbles and how some of us might be developing new relationships with the furniture. We might sit at the table longer and talk after dinner. We might choose a chair on the deck to read a novel until we get to the last page. We might heap all the furniture in the lounge like a miraculous Quentin Blake hut for our children to play in. But then I began thinking about the beauty, the craft and the comfort a chair might offer. The way our minds might sometimes be full of chairs and tables.
Thank you for all those who contributed.
for Felix
a black shawl over a chair
& the corner
composed itself.
the light came from outside
& delayed/on the
delphinium
& behind the oak trees
1 2 3
a grey stripe
is a tennis court
& men have
white shirts only
& sometimes
arms
while the ball
flying/occasionally
thru trees
keeps the moon
in motion.
Joanna Margaret Paul Like Love Poems (Victoria University Press, 2006)
Summer
New white sheets
on the line.
Even the pegs
are warm.
Our youngest son
leaks sand.
Iris the dog snores
on the green sofa.
Cat!
Out! we cry.
My husband glows
in the dark.
Jenny Bornholdt Selected Poems (Victoria University Press, 2016)
The Camphorwood Chest
my husband dreams of a Japanese garden
a room with nothing but a chair
a vase of white lilies
a view of water
but my home is like a camphorwood chest
that Chinese mothers give to their daughters
it is carved with the detail of living
a phoenix with wings raised for flight
a pine tree leaning forever in the wind
lotus flowers and chrysanthemums
clouds that could be leaves that could be clouds
from here I look out over water
Alison Wong from Cup (Steele Roberts, 2005)
tastes like wine (dawn sonnet)
after Catullus 48
tastes like wine, this boy sitting across from me, his
honey eyes looking like yours as he implores
me to join him on the floor
the table a low ceiling swirling
like a chandelier
in the earthquake of these kisses
table legs circling
like the blades of a combine harvester
every kiss is a near miss
my heart escaping like a mouse
into the corn
the summer’s sun all rolled into one
ripeness I can
never get enough of
Anna Jackson
Late bloomers
It is still warm enough to sit outside. Einstein sits at the end of the table
to light the citronella candle. He is not sure how effective it will be, but
mosquitoes tend to gravitate towards him. He is full of enthusiasm about
taking the opposite direction.
Paula Green The Baker’s Thumbprint (Seraph Press, 2013)
Reading room
Up in the great reading-room in the sky,
the writers twitch, deep in leather armchairs,
dreaming about all those they are read by
or what rival’s work is ignored for theirs.
Ping. Someone’s begun Catcher in the Rye.
Salinger grins: still ringing down the years.
Austen rolls her eyes; Fowles lets out a sigh.
Ping. Ping. Ping. No ping-a-ling like Shakespeare’s.
Jenny Bornholdt, from Lost and Somewhere Else, Victoria University Press, 2019
Jenny Bornholdt is the author of many poetry collections, including The Rocky Shore (Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry winner, 2009) and Selected Poems (2016). She has edited several notable anthologies including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018).
From the Henderson House: eight poems is an exquisite chapbook penned by Jenny Bornholdt and Gregory O’Brien. The first 18 copies feature a cover design lovingly handprinted by Brendan O’Brien on an Merlarue etching press at the Henderson House in Alexandria. The remaining 40 copies feature covers designed and printed by Brendan at Fernbank Studios in Wellington.
The eight poems were written while Jenny and Gregory enjoyed a year-long artists’ residency thanks to the Henderson House Trust. Each double page is like a set of open palms – with Jenny’s poem on one side and Gregory’s poem on the other. A loving couple. Here are the titles:
Old Prayer
On drinking water
About
Autumn, Alexandria
Fog
Styx Crossing, Upper Taieri
En plein air
Two burning cars, one afternoon
The poems rise from contemplation, from lengthy time in a place of beauty, from the small but fascinating detail. To read the poems is to absorb place; to delight in the ability of poetry to transport you physically to the uplift of elsewhere. Yet the poems also transport you along rebounding ideas, particularly along the verb ‘to be’. These are poems that speak of existence.
As I read I am thinking of a slow poetry movement (in keeping with the slow food movement) and that slowness extends to reader as well as writer. I travel from hawk to water to trees to autumn to fog to river to horse to burning car. I am taking my time and it is so very nourishing.
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’sHe’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’sPasture 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 lovedHannah Mettner’sFully 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’sThis Thin Now, Elizabeth Welsh’sOver There a Mountain and Reihana Robinson’sHer 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
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
1
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.
2
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.
Short Poems of New Zealand, edited by Jenny Bornholdt, Victoria University Press 2018
Jenny Bornholdt has edited an anthology of short poems illustrated by Gregory O’Brien. She began collecting short poems eight years ago and rediscovered her folder last year. In her introduction she likens short poems to the ‘small house movement’.
‘I’ve begun to think of short poems as being the literary equivalent of the small house movement. Small houses contain the same essential spaces as large houses do. Both have places in which to eat, sleep, bathe and sit; they’re the same, except small houses are, well, smaller.’
She gave herself a line limit (nine lines) because ten lines seemed to be that much roomier.
She favoured magnetic attractions in her arrangements.
I emailed Jenny and asked what had drawn her to the short poem.
‘They tend to offer one strong, memorable image or thought – it’s this concentration of language that appeals, I think. Short poems often work as the commas in a collection, so it’s interesting to pay them close attention and see what happens when you put a selection of such intense ‘pauses’ together.’
Why do I like short poems and consider this beautifully produced collection an exquisite object? Because I love poetry that has room to breathe – where white space is the silent beat, the clean sheet, the place to meditate. A short poem is like a complex note. It vibrates. Like a guitar string. Or wine. Or the ocean in the heat.
One of my favourite poems in the collection, ‘Night’ by Albert Wendt, epitomises the way a short poem becomes large. The image is strange and captivating. I never tire of reading this poem. You can hear Albert read it here. You will never tire of listening.
Some poems, like Hone Tuwhare’s ‘Haiku 1’, Bill Manhire’s ‘My World War I Poem’ or Angela Andrews ‘Grandparents‘ have been in a room in my head for ages. These tiny poems are perfect to savour when you have waiting moments. Again you will never tire of listening.
I recommend placing the book beside the bed and reading one poem before you go to sleep as a keepsake for the night – or one poem before you rise as a keepsake for the day.
Jenny Bornholdt is the author of many poetry collections, including The Rocky Shore (Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009) and Selected Poems (2016), and many chapbooks. She has co-edited several notable anthologies, including My Heart Goes Swimming: New Zealand Love Poems. Her most recent book is The Longest Breakfast (illustrated by Sarah Wilkins, Gecko Press, 2017). She was the Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate from 2005–6.
Back home after a head-and-mind-rich time at Writers and Readers Week in Wellington. I loved the change of venue to the waterfront cluster: Circa Theatre, the Festival Club tent, Te Wharewaka o Pōneke, the Michael Fowler Centre and Renouf Foyer along with a few outlying places such as The National Library. The diversity of the programme, as it moved across genre and person, was terrific. With four sessions in each slot, like the Auckland Writers Festival, it was impossible to get to everything you ticked. And that is what festivals are about: an explosion of taste and flavour.
At festivals, I love supporting my friends, going to local writers (especially poets), much loved international writers, but I also like stepping out of my comfort zone and trying things that are completely unfamiliar. You could say that opting for discomfort along with comfort – because you never know what gold nuggets will gleam – is a festival must.
Things didn’t quite run to plan and I came home with a fragmentary notebook and novels unread as you will see.
But warmest congratulations to Mark Cubey and his team, because this was an excellent occasion that had audiences, including me, buzzing with delight. Thanks for the invite!
My fits and starts diary
Thursday
I have my checked-in bag with books for every mood because I am off to Wellington’s Writers and Readers Week to mc and read poems at Call Me Royal and chair Capital Poets, Bill Manhire and Mike Ladd. Having sent off my ms on reading New Zealand women’s poetry, this is my poetry treat. I want to go to every poetry event and read novels in the gaps.
I leave the heat and humidity of Auckland’s West Coast and step out into the wet and cold of Wellington. It is a sweet relief to feel like moving and thinking again.
First up is a bus ride to Rimutaka Prison to participate in a writing workshop with some prisoners thanks to Write Where You Are Collective. On the bus are a mix of organisers, festival people, balloted public and a handful of writers. Waiting for the bus, I am asked to speak at the end – what I thought of the event and about writing poetry – and I am really nervous! I have run countless workshops but have rarely if ever been a participant. I summon Hone Tuwhare’s ‘Rain’ and Y12-me to find courage. I say that while we are not allowed to take the writing out, I am also not going to share the details of the experience in public. And I am not. However the general mood I carry back into the city is absolute enthusiasm for what has taken place. This is special and I would do it again at the drop of a hat.
Next up my hotel room – the chemical cleaners are so strong it triggers an allergic reaction that just grew worse over the five days. I know not to stay in this hotel again – luckily the hyperactive Wellington wind is able to blast through the window each day. My post-writing treat suddenly becomes a matter of survival and definitely not luxuriating in a hotel room reading novels or writing lucid accounts of the sessions for my blog. (I had to flee several sessions with a coughing fit fighting for breath and attendees were wondering whether to call an ambulance.)
I arrive at the VUP book launch late but love the tail end of Damien Wilkin‘s launch speech celebrating new books by Vincent O’Sullivan, Therese Lloyd and Gigi Fenster). I am sitting here in a toxic chemical haze and the little readings flick about like little hallucinogenic butterflies. I buy the two books, that I don’t have, to read at home.
The Gala Night, Women Changing the World – is kaleidoscopic in range and impact and I am still on planet hallucinogenic butterfly. Renée gets an almost-standing ovation. Selina Tusitala Marsh shares a poem for Teresia Teaiwa (1968 – 2017) to whom she dedicated Tightrope, her most recent book. I am reminded how important Oceanic foremothers are for Selina, not just as a poet but as a woman forging her way in the world. This is breath-catching (dangerous in my state!). Along with Selina the highlight for me is hearing Harry Josephine Giles read their body twisting, word slipping, gorgeous glorious evocation of life and living. Check out graphic artist Tara Black‘s take.
I am at Loretta eating snapper pie with freekeh topping and it is comfort food cutting through the toxins. I am wondering if poetry is comfort food as much as it is discomfort food and that we need both and everything in between. At the moment I crave comfort.
Friday
I have coffee with Jane Parkin who is going to edit my book. We have never met before but it is such a pleasure to talk about the pleasures of punctuation. I didn’t tell her I used to read grammar books and dictionaries in bed at night when I was primary school. I am thinking grammar and punctuation is always on the move – I am so excited she is going to go through my writing with a fine-tooth comb spotting all the infelicities. As a poet I often use a punctuation mark as a guide to breathing and pause. How will this change in prose?
Next up Sarah Laing talks with two American comic artists, Sarah Glidden and Mimi Pond. The conversation flows between the personal and the political with revelation and reflection and I buy both books risking an overweight bag. Tara Black is in the front row drawing her fabulous renditions of a session.
This festival puts comic and graphic novelists centre stage, both local and international. I like that. Check out Tara’s review and images.
This is where my good plans go awry and I have to opt out of a few things. Sadly.
I am lying on the bed with the wind gusting in. I feel like I am in the cleaning cupboard.
I make it to Tusiata Avia in conversation with her cousin Victor Rodger (and an excellent chair not named in the programme). This is mesmerising stuff. I instantly connect with their need for some kind of truth. Truth got a bad rap when I was at university because it is mobile, unreliable and hard to pin down. Yet when I hear or read a writer working from the truth of their experience, (however you see that) it just gets me. Check out Tara‘s review and images.
Tusiata talks about her epileptic history, perhaps for the first time in public, and how she might have an aura on stage. She reads her epileptic poem and it feels tough and vulnerable and full of music that replays a fractured inner state. I want more poems but I am loving the talk. She reads a poem that responds to an ongoing painful knotty experience of Unity Books wanting to check her bags fifteen years ago, on two occasions, because they suspected her of shoplifting. She has mashed up an email from them to show her point of view, to show how racism is embedded in the unconscious way we speak and communicate. She puts pronouns on alert. My heart is breaking because I don’t know how to fix this rift knot. I love Tusiata. I have family connections that link me and Tilly back to my daughter’s parents. I love Marion, bookseller extraordinaire. I don’t know what to do to help.
I have to stand on stage and mc tonight and celebrate poetry and I can’t breathe.
My first book, Cookhouse has a poem, ‘Listing the breathless women’, that I wrote in hospital when I couldn’t breathe.
who will live in this place of white sheets
when the stories built to terrifying pitches?
I have missed The Lauris Edmond Memorial Award. I have missed the Bloody Difficult Women and I loved Kirsten McDougall‘s Tess so much.
I put on a blue dress and a Parisienne necklace Sue gave me, and Tusiata’s pounamu bracelet. I told a prisoner that when I get nervous, I picture something in my head that I love, or wear something someone has given me (usually a gift from Michael). Then I am fortified to go on. When you lose your breath you lose your voice and I am wondering if I will be a ghost on stage even with the necklace and the bracelet.
Photograph credit: Mark Beatty, photographer, The National Library
To be in the Alexander Turnbull Library, at Call Me Royal, with a fine showing of the librarians who helped me find my way through the archives is restoring; to catch sight of dear Elizabeth Jones for a second is restoring. And Peter Ireland the Laureate guardian, ever helpful, ever supportive of poetry. I lay my stones for Selina Tusitala Marsh as a gift for her mana, and then let her do the talking and the poems. We write and speak from an embrace of women. The ‘Unity’ poem for the Queen, the way it came into elusive being, always captivates. Again the pronoun strikes: the ‘i’ and the ‘u’ in ‘unity’ is genius.
I am wondering what the audience makes of us. The way we hug and perform because this is a poetry whanau. We have many connections and we are all driven to write and stand on stage and open up poetry for the ear, heart and mind. The space between is alive with what we think and feel. Check out my photo gallery and intros here.
Photograph credit: Mark Beatty, photographer, The National Library
I am back at Loretta having another snapper pie and talking about poetry with Helen. All I need is comfort food in this state of discomfort. Maybe that includes poetry.
Saturday
I am eating poached eggs with Bill and Marion and the conversation sets me up for the day like a good slow release protein. I miss Charlie Jane Anders and Samin Nosrat. I miss fun and games with Harry Josephine Giles. I miss the amazing Charlotte Wood because I am about to go on stage with Mike Ladd and Bill Manhire, the Capital Poets. First I need to lie down with the window wide open.
I have an early lunch with Selina and Serie, and we bump into Rachel McAlpine, whose poetry I write about in my book. Four poets, by chance, in Cuba Street,
When I agreed to chair the Capital Poets session a month ago, I thought these poets were chalk and cheese, and I wasn’t quite sure how Bill was a capital poet bar the fact he was a good one, and he lived in Wellington. But as I ran on the beach each morning, I began to find connections. I decided they both write with an economy that is paradoxically rich and they both write from attention to humanity, not necessarily blazing on the line, but as a vital core. MIke’s poetry often takes me to a sharply rendered scene that is so bright (or dark) I get goosebumps. Bill can transport a reader into a more mysterious interplay of dark and light, full of glorious movement, offbeat or sideways, so you find and lose and find your bearings. Another kind of goosebump. Goosebumps are an excellent, but not the only poetry barometer.
Being a chair, in a space that feels like a lounge, means it is like you get to talk poetry at home with quite a lot of strangers listening. I find it fun. You set up a conversational field and go exploring. I cheekily got Bill to pitch Wellington to a stranger in 60 seconds which he did with good grace. I really liked the idea of a city where you constantly bump into things around corners. But as always it is the poetry readings that get me – and I can now play Mike’s poems in my head in his voice and that makes a difference. I can hear his fascination with sound and the way politics always find a way in. Bill read a brand new short poem with Colin Meads and some good rural vocabulary before turning a corner and letting us laugh-bump into the ending.
I spent two and half years writing my book, and when I sent it off a few weeks ago, I felt there was so much more I could explore and write. Same with a festival session; the time goes by in a whizz and we barely scratch the surface of conversation.
Paula Morris gets to talk to Teju Cole and it feels like balm and challenge as we see his photographs and hear the story behind them. I could have listened for hours. I reviewed his tremendously good essays for The NZ Herald ages ago – so it was a treat to listen to that mind roving. Paula is just the right mix of adding comments and getting the speaker talking.
Next up Blazing Stars: Hera Lindsay Bird and Patricia Lockwood with Charlotte Graham. I miss most of this session. I sit down in the front row with a bunch of writers but have a coughing fit to the point I can’t breathe and have to walk out. Embarrassing! The festival people are so kind bringing me things. I sat on a chair outside and then at the back. I am back with the hallucinogenic butterflies. Charlotte is wearing a butterfly dress and Hera and Patricia seem to be in some kind of butterfly bitch challenge. Hera reads a poem with psychedelic metaphors. I desperately need a stunt stand-in to pay attention and write things down for me.
I eat roasted fish and fig pie at Floridita before going to bed. I am thinking about my new poetry collection and how I need to blast it to smithereens. Then I might see what to do with it. This happens at festivals. It gets you thinking about your own work and all its failings and possibilities.
I miss Outer Space Saloon. I really want to go.
Sunday
Fruit at Loretta and a coffee to pull the bits of me together. If I wasn’t making this my Poetry Day, I would be off to hear the fabulous Ursula Dubosarsky.
Essa and Tayi
First up The Starlings – a festival highlight for me. Chris Tse is also in the audience supporting these young writers. The session features 9 writers aged under 25 who have been published in Starling (now up to 5 Issues). The journal is edited by Francis Cooke and Louise Wallace. They mc the session with Sharon Lam, Rebecca Hawkes, Claudia Jardine, Tayi Tibble, Emma Shi, Joy Holley, Henrietta Bollinger, Sophie van Waardenberg and Essa Ranapiri. The poetry resists homogenisation as it travels across distinctive and diverse moods and revelations, challenges and connections. I love it – and will be posting poems from this across the next month or so when I reignite Poetry Shelf next week. See my photo gallery here.
Apologies to David Larsen because I don’t know how to mute my camera – just took photos at start and end.
Second up, my other festival highlight: Harry Josephine Giles in conversation with Chris Tse. The poetry – with its meshing up of Scots and English, its filthy patches and rollercoaster rhythms, its musical effervescence and its little heart taps – is astonishing! No other word for it. Great chair, fluid talk, happy audience. I go out and buy all their books so I can do a feature on the blog if I dare. This session was like a dose of breathing medication and was the only time I wrote screeds in my journal.
One sample: ‘When your body is at odds with what is normal – not that anyone is normal – I can play with this. I can muck around with it.’
I like the idea of mucking around much better than blasting to smithereens. At breakfast when I asked Bill if he was writing he said he was mucking around. I thought of Tom and the Hired Sportsmen who were expert at mucking around before they ate greasy bloaters. Poets like mucking about.
One other thing. Harry Josephine was at pretty much every NZ poetry event I went to. I loved that. There was a handful of Wellington poets at the Laureate event – but mostly it was poetry readers not poetry writers. I wondered why this was. Harry Josephine was there talking to the locals.
Next up Patricia Lockwood is talking with Kim Hill and I get another coughing fit – the breathing medication has worn off so I have to walk out several times. It is like they are talking on another planet and I can’t make head nor tail of anything. I decide you need oxygen to listen.
I am sitting outside in the wind sun wondering what makes writing matter. What makes a poem matter when this one over here doesn’t. I can’t think of a single thing. It seems to depend upon the individual. Some kind of mysterious alchemy. I told the prisoners music is always the first port of call for me. Actually I told Bill that on stage when he said music mattered. The first hit from a Manhire poem is music.
Marae and Vana
I am off to Helen Rickerby’s Seraph Press launch of TātaiWhetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation. We are welcomed on with a little powhiri and a big mihi. Editors Vana Manasiadis and Maraea Rakuraku acted as mcs. This is my third festival highlight. An utterly special occasion, uplifting and challenging, as I listen to Te Reo and English versions of each poem (Anahera Gildea, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Tru Parahaa, Michelle Ngamoki, Dayle Takitimu, and Maraea). I will be posting a poem from Maraea on the blog.
I am reminded, how on so many occasions at this festival, I witness the creative strength of women (wahine mana), not just in the poetry families/whanau, but across genres. Maybe because poetry is such a poor cousin in the book world, the bonds are forged tighter.
Helen Rickerby from Seraph Press
I miss the editing session with my new editor, because I just can’t duck out of this one. Like I said, when you are on the verge of breathing collapse you crave comfort. That doesn’t mean poetry without edges, because this poetry has raw cutting edges, sharp spikes, but it also feeds upon humaneness, writing with heart, hankering after truth. In a lopsided endangered world that can be a vital tonic.
I bump into Elizabeth Knox and her fabulous skirt. She is long overdue for a Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction, just saying.
I made the Poetry International event where post accident, highly medicated Chris Price does a stellar job as mc/chair. This feels like a risky format combining reading and questions with nine poets, both local and international. As you would expect, several resist the brief in their 6 minute slots. But you end up with a glorious explosion of words and thoughts and poems. I jot this down from Bill after saying he had read a lot of American poetry: ‘I feel uneasy about my enthusiasms. I feel I’ve reverted to the local.’
The final thing and I am at Anna Jackson and Chris Tse’s AUP book launches in the crowded Circa foyer. I did an email interview with Chris over the past weeks so I know his book well and love it to bits. His speech moves the socks off us when he says he wanted his friends and family to be proud of him and that he hopes the book will fall into the hands of those who will see themselves in it. I am equally in love with Anna’s book, a Selected Poems, that travels through decades of writing with new writing at the end. Anna and I are in the middle, or near the end, of an unfolding email interview that I will post soon.
This was my experience, slightly skewed by being on the edge of a breathing precipice. Elizabeth Heritage wrote up the Harry Josephine session like I wish I could have done!
There is always a bridge between ourselves and the page, between ourselves and the reader and speaker. Sometimes we skim across it with ease, with all kinds of sparking connections. Other times the bridge falters and it is hard to find a way. Then there are the occasions where crossing is like an impossibility and the page, the reader and the speaker are utterly out of reach. It happens to me. I wait. It may mean I need to retune the way I walk.
Wednesday
I am back home grateful for the invitation to participate. Happy to be back to the quiet and the wild and the chance to write new things.
There is a strong chance this blog is riddled with mistakes – let me know so I can correct. Meanwhile I am off to sleep.
NZ Poetry Shelf 