Auckland you are really shaping up for Poetry Day!
Minarets on National Poetry Day
Leave a reply
Tag Archives: National Poetry Day
2017 National Poetry Day calendar launched
2017 CALENDAR OF EVENTS IS LAUNCHED!
To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day offers its most ambitious and wide-ranging programme of events yet.
This year’s packed programme features more than 100 dynamic and accessible events, workshops and competitions, featuring acclaimed poets, new voices, young writers, and poetry enthusiasts. From Slam Poetry to sonnets, from stages to pavements, poetry will be created and enjoyed in a myriad of venues around the country: cafes, bars, schools, university campuses, community centres, retirement villages, marae, libraries and theatres – as well as on buses, trains and ferries.
For full information about all events, including places, venues, times, tickets and more, go to the Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day 2017 Calendar of Events.
My National Poetry Day Suite of Poems: Magnolia Wilson’s ‘Dear Sister’
Dear Sister,
I write to you this morning from my desk overlooking the garden. I can see Toby clearing grass from beside the path where I walked this morning. The way my shoes crunch upon the white pebbles on the path, I find it pleases me. There is something about our clothes, the taffeta, silks, stitched leather of our shoes, the sounds they make against the world, brushing upon things, rustling, that satisfies me so much and I do not know why. I wonder if any person from the past of the future has thought or will think the same. Oh, I like the way this stiff linen cuff feels brushing against this paper as I write, or, I love the sound of mother’s shoes clicking deeply on the cool marble of the passageway.
This morning the sun rose like jewellery, only, so much more than jewellery and less of that lonely feeling that gifts of precious stones and metals gives me. What is it with men and things. Here is this little transparent chunk of earth, stick it to your finger and now give me your person, your selfhood, your body, all the hours of the rest of your days. My heart belongs to mornings like this one. It was my own. The world was still and alive and I could hear men in the distance beginning to husband their animals. A far away dog was barking, someone calling out to her children.
©Magnolia Wilson
National Poetry Day in Dunedin
From Diane Brown:
In Dunedin the main event was held on Thursday 25th. Titled Decadence, 1 Otago poet and 9 Dunedin poets, Michael Harlow, Vincent O’Sullivan, David Eggleton, Allan Roddick, Richard Reeve, Emma Neale, Diane Brown, Carolyn McCurdie, Lynley Edmeades and Robyn Maree Pickens entertained an audience of over 100. Posters were made of their poems and gifted to the audience. Jazz was played in the interval and in the mix and mingling. This from someone in the audience Decadence-10 Dunedin Poets this evening was a wonderful Dunedin experience. I ‘d committed to be somewhere else by 7.30 but could not tear myself away. A heart-warming, magic event.
Visitors to the library collaborated on a joint poem and children made a poetry tree.
Also in Dunedin was the roll-out of poems in an unexpected location – on the back of tickets from some pay and display parking meters. Starting with 8 poems written by Dunedin poets this is an ongoing project that will work like a lucky dip.
There was quite a poetry buzz in local media and a public poetry reading at Otago University.
National Poetry Day in Christchurch
Hagley Writers’ Intstitute’s National Poetry Day event at Scorpio Book shop – Bernie Hall, Teoti Jardine, Owen Marshall,Rose Collins, Frankie McMillan, Jeni Curtis, Marisa Cappetta, Christina Stachurski, James Norcliffe and the winner, Danielle O’Halloran – thanks Phantom Billstickers for sponsoring National Poetry Day and for publishing the winning poem and Sarah Jane Barnett for the photos.
James Norcliffe with Morrin Rout, and Bernadette Hall below
National Poetry Day in the Herald: some thoughts, a favourite poem and ten poems that have stuck to me
The NZ Herald invited to share some thoughts on poetry for National Poetry Day. Here is my contribution in full, including a favourite poem and a list of poems that have stuck to me.
Paula with Courtney Sina Meredith’s fabulous Tail of the Taniwha
Josephine likes lyric poetry
Josephine likes the way a poet will pull in a bird or a ladder
or an old coat and the bird and the ladder and the old coat
will tremble and shiver and ebb and flow just like the sea
so you will fall upon the fullness of each and it will make
you shift on your chair and almost stop breathing.
From New York Pocket Book Seraph Press, 2016
Poetry is a form of music. There are no rules you can’t break. Poems can tell stories, make lists, leave things out, share secrets, make things up, confess things, protest in a loud voice. A good poem can take you out in the world and turn you upside down so everything looks different. It can push you down a steep slope that is really exhilarating or put you in front of something strange or wonderful so you just have to stop and linger as though you are in a bush clearing or on an unfamiliar street or peeking through a door ajar. Sometime the hairs on the back of your arm might stand on end, especially when you hear a good poem read out loud (Bill Manhire, Michele Leggott, David Eggleton). Good poems can sometimes misbehave (Hera Lindsay Bird) or make you suck your cheeks in because they tang with life (Emma Neale) or make you swop shoes (Sarah Jane Barnett, Anna Jackson, Helen Rickerby). We don’t have to get everything in a poem. A good poem is where a poet takes shoes and socks off and stands in a southern stream in the middle of winter. Anything is possible. Some poems don’t suit us and some poems are a match made in heaven (Tusiata Avia, Bernadette Hall, Joan Fleming, Ian Wedde, Chris Price, Gregory O’Brien, Murray Edmond, Elizabeth Smither, Steven Toussaint).
A favourite poem
I love Rachel Bush’s ‘Sing Them’ because she is singing out of near death, unfolding lines until they ‘float,’ and there is love and memory, even at ‘the cold leftover end/ of the rind of winter,’ and I feel sad as I read but she lets the world shine and each phrase is extraordinary.
Ten New Zealand poems that have stuck to me (sticky poems)
Jenny Bornholdt ‘The Rocky Shore’
James Brown ‘The Bicycle’
Anne Kennedy ‘Sing-Song’
Michele Leggott ‘Blue Irises’
Margaret Mahy ‘Down the Back of the Chair’
Bill Manhire ‘Hotel Emergencies’
Selina Tusitala Marsh ‘Fast Talking PI’
Cilla McQueen ‘Being Here’
CK Stead ‘Auckland’
Hone Tuwhare ‘Rain’
Wanaka Library is popping for Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day
… love all the creative energy libraries are putting into our national poetry celebrations
Book Spine Poetry Display at Wanaka Library
This fun and quirky display will have you coming back for more. Pop in each day during Wanaka Library’s week of National Poetry Day celebrations and see what the Wanaka library staff, have put together. The idea is simple and fun, it involves stacking books in a particular order so the titles on the book spines create a poem. A display for all to enjoy! This is a great chance to come in to Wanaka Library and get some inspiration for your own poetry writing. See if you would have arranged the titles in a different way, and what other poems you would make out of the spine poetry on display.
Entry Details: Free. Open to all ages. This is a free to view on going display for the week of National Poetry Day.
Date/Times: Monday 22nd August – Friday 26th August. Open during regular library opening hours: Mon-Wed 9:00am – 5:30pm; Thurs 9:00am – 7:00pm; Fri 9:00am – 5:30pm; Sat 10:00am – 5:00pm
Location: Wanaka Library, 1 Bullock Creek Lane, Wanaka
Contact: Eve Marshall-Lea / eve.marshhall-lea@qldc.govt.nz
Further Info or here
Great news: New partnership powers up National Poetry Day
National Poetry Day always demonstrates the wide reach of poetry in New Zealand. All manner of events and poets tumble into vision and hearing. Phantom Billstickers is a tireless promoter of NZ poetry. This partnership has to be good. Bravo NZ Book Awards Trust for this grand idea!
This terrific news is just out:
In its 19th year, National Poetry Day — the biggest nationwide poetry event of the year —will be boosted by the partnership between the New Zealand Book Awards Trust and Phantom Billstickers, with a sponsorship agreement announced today.
The highly popular and eclectic National Poetry Day will now be known as Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day and will continue to bring poetry to the people, with over 80 events held nationwide, involving everyone from seasoned award winners to aspiring poets facing the microphone for the first time. Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day will be held on Friday August 26 this year and continue the day’s legacy of taking poetry to the people from Kerikeri to Southland, across the streets of small towns and major cities.
“It’s an opportunity to hear more poetry. There’s the possibility to take it back to the regions that built us,” says Jim Wilson, owner of Phantom, “We’ve been putting the New Zealand voice out there for some time. Now with this exciting partnership that voice will become louder.”
Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day is about discovery, diversity, community and pushing boundaries. Poetry enthusiasts generate events such as slams, poetry-music jams, poetry art exhibitions, performance poetry, poetry and dance, poetry street chalking, bookshop and library readings, open mic events and poetry writing competitions.
Nicola Legat, chair of the New Zealand Book Awards Trust says “We have long admired Phantom’s commitment to putting poems on posters and in cafes via their Café Reader. They are a natural partner given that Phantom’s business is taking messages to the streets and that’s what the New Zealand Book Awards Trust aspires to do with poetry.”
Phantom Billstickers http://0800phantom.co.nz/ is a street poster company which since 1982 has consistently helped Kiwis express themselves. Recognising and supporting home grown talent has always sat comfortably alongside its commercial campaign work. Phantom actively promotes New Zealand music, art, poetry and culture around the country and across the world, putting poetry on posters and a literary mix of work into cafes via its quarterly magazine the Phantom Billstickers Café Reader. Phantom makes New Zealand’s streets livelier by taking the creative arts into public spaces.
The New Zealand Book Awards Trust www.nzbookawards.nz was established as a charitable trust in 2014 to govern and manage the country’s two major literary awards and National Poetry Day, and to ensure their longevity and credibility. New sponsorship agreements have now been secured for all three properties with Ockham supporting the Book Awards, Hell Pizza backing the Children’s and Young Adult awards via its support of the Reading Challenge and Children’s Choice programmes and Phantom National Poetry Day. Additional funders include The Acorn Foundation, Book Tokens Ltd, Creative NZ, Copyright Licensing Ltd NZ , the Fernyhough Education Foundation, Nielsen and Wellington City Council, supporting specific aspects of the properties.
NZ Poetry Shelf 