Tag Archives: Tusiata Avia

Tastes of Ika 3 – Ika 4, a few days left for submissions

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Ika 3 looks cool. It is the literature and arts journal from Manukau Institute of Technology and is edited by Anne Kennedy. Anne is a poet and novelist and she is about to head to Victoria University where she will be the 2016 Writer in Residence.

The internal design is fresh. The issue looks like it is wrapped in brown paper. It feels slightly rough to the hand. It features prose, poetry and art from students and staff, and stretches out to include work by well known writers from both here and overseas.

The mix is eclectic. There are appealing grades/gradients of lyricism and subject matter, but what makes this issue pop out from others is the political elbow that juts out, the raw angles, the Pacific Island presence. Compared with this journal, others seemed saturated in white. To have such diverse reading lines in to brown skinned voices makes this newish journal a vital presence within our writing/reading options.

A bundle of poets made me snap to attention. I love the playfulness of Tusiata Avia’s ‘We are the diaspora of us all’ where play becomes play with a potent bite. I love the way Chris Tse’s ‘This house’ is inventive, detail rich, personal, kinetic and catches both heart and mind. Faith Wilson’s ‘Echo (bootleg remix)’ is a poem bisected in two and the interplay of dual voices is sharp, hard, heart hitting. You need to read again to find different paths. Donovan Kūhiō Colleps wraps place and moment so acutely in ‘Muscular Dreams,’ and I love the way lines coil and repeat. J A Vili’s ‘Mother’s Rope’ is spare, just a handful of words on the page, but it is the white hot core of the issue. Sophie Van Waarden’s ‘Water Girl’ confirms that this young poet writes with linguistic grace, verve and surprise and is an emerging poet to watch.

There is much more. See some treats below in the photos, including Anna Jackson’s surprising ‘Leaving the hotel room.’ This journal is worth a subscription! The art is mind catching as well as eye-catching. Again I come back to the words fresh and vital.

 

Work is about to start on the next issue. Submissions for Ika 4 are due by February 1st.

Submit here.

Submission details:

We invite submissions across Moananui for Ika 4 from emerging to established practitioners in the fields of writing (poetry, prose fiction, non-fiction), performance, and visual art.

Ika 4 will be published in print and accompanied by a website for moving image and performance, to be launched as part of the Auckland Writers Festival in May 2016.

Electronic documents are preferred, but printouts together with a self-addressed envelope may be mailed to: Ika Journal, Faculty of Creative Arts, Manukau Institute of Technology, Private Bag, 9400, South Auckland Mail Centre 224, New Zealand.

Video works must be in the form of mp4 files and can be submitted via private Vimeo / Youtube links.

The submission limits are: eight poems, eight images, three video/performances, 7,000 words of prose.

Inquiries to: ikajournal@gmail.com

Editor: Anne Kennedy
Arts Editor: Richard Orjis

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Poem Friday: Tusiata Avia’s ‘Wairua Road’ — makes the idea of home sharp and vital

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Performance photo Tusiata Avia[1]

 

Wairua Road

The Spirits love me so much they sent all the people in Aranui to be my friends or my parents.

We all walk the Big Path from Cashmere to the sea.

We run like lawnmowers on each others feet.

The Spirits rise up out of the footpath outside the Hampshire St pub. The space that a bomb took out of the ground walks about on a pair of legs with a ghost looking out.

The Spirits love me so much they turn me into a plastic bag.

I will live in a whale or a shrimp and kill it.

My mother rises up out of the lino wringing and wringing the blood from her hands.

The Spirits love me so much we all sit round to watch the sparklers in my brain, the beautiful sunset, the campfire burning, the jerking of my body.

My father rises up out of the carpet and down I go, like knees, like beetroot juice in the whitest of frigidaires.

The Spirits of the Big Path love me so much they have driven me back up to this house.

If the Spirits didn’t love me, I could live in a dog, in a wife, in a house, in a merivale or on some other shining path, far away from the hungry road.

 

Tusiata Avia has published two books of poetry, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt and Bloodclot and two children’s books. Known for her dynamic performance style she has also written and performed a one-woman poetry show, also called Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, which toured internationally. Tusiata has held a number of writers’ residencies and is regularly published in international literary journals and invited to appear at writers’ festivals around the globe. In 2013 Tusiata was the recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. In October 2014 she will perform as part of ‘New Zealand in Edinburgh’.

Author Notes: Aranui: great path.
Aranui is one of the most deprived suburbs of Christchurch, Hampshire St is one of its most troubled areas.  Merivale is one of the wealthiest suburbs in Christchurch. This poem is published in Takahe 72.

Paula’s Notes: Tusiata’s poem reads like a chant and if you’ve been lucky enough to hear her perform you hear the sound of her voice as you read it. This poem takes you to a specific place — yet it takes you into the way place is a layering of physical and nonphysical things. What you see and feel and what you don’t see and feel. Layered and layering. How this specific place means different things to different people. How this is the place devastated by an earthquake and how people are connected and divided by what they have and have not, by what they have lost and lost not. What happens to love? How does love carry you on its back to the sea? Or the poet carry love? Tusiata’s is a voice on edge, edging you to see and feel the difficulty — clues are laid like tracks to the private and the public pain. It is also a poem that is tongue in cheek (‘If the Spirits didn’t love me, I could live in a dog’). It is surprising and tough and sings out with a joy of words, that makes the idea of home sharp and vital. Like much of what Tusiata writes, it affects me deeply. I am in the grip of this poem, and I adore it.

Launching Essential NZ Poems to a capacity crowd

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Good to see so many Auckland poets and fans of poetry turn up to the launch of this updated anthology. A new anthology! It was a lively reading with a mix of poetry elders and new voices. Each poet read their own poem plus one other. Some chose to read one by someone else in the anthology. Albert Wendt read Tusiata Avia’s edgy ‘Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. ‘ CK Stead read Allen Curnow’s terrific ‘You Will Know When You Get There. ‘ two highlights plus Riemke Ensing’s gorgeous love poem that I had never heard before. I picked Bill
Manhire ‘Kevin’ to read. Just love this poem and have a strange anecdote about the first time I read it.

This is a beautiful book to hold in the hand. I have loved falling upon favourite poets and favourite poems and then those I am less familiar with. This is book of myriad doors and windows. A chocolate box of reading treats.

It was a lovely occasion and it reminded me how much we continue to open arms to poetry. To a hubbub of poem talk.

Cheers Siobhan Harvey, James Norcliffe, Harry Ricketts, and Nicola Legat and her dedicated team at Penguin Random House.

Happy to post accounts of the other two events. Dunedin and Wellington.

Congratulations!

Tusiata Avia at Going West: She caught you up, spun you round, and deposited you back somewhere on earth

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Tusiata Avia was a star in her 5pm slot at the Going West Festival. The audience burst into spontaneous applause after every poem. She read some old favourites from Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. I hadn’t heard her read from Bloodclot before but it gave mesmerising new layers to the poetry  — to hear the way her voice transformed the words with added poignancy and edge. Tusiata is a poet but she is also a storyteller, and you travel as you hear each poem.Her new poems have such clarity of voice, whatever the subject matter. She took you to the day of the quake and made you a feel sliver of that tension through her evocative rendition of the day. It was personal. It was poetic. It was moving. I loved her new poem where she is in search of a manifesto for writing poems. She resists it, subverts it and the presents it. ‘I can write about poetry but I can only use ordinary words like good and fruitbats.’ [might not quite have that right, sorry Tusiata!]. ‘For me it will always be about stories.’ ‘Most of the time I just get a glimmer, a picture on the fruit bowl of my skill.’ Her last poem, a list poem, began with a Sonya Renee’s line “My body is …” It caught you up, spun you round, and deposited you back somewhere on earth. She told her story (stories), she made the words sing and shine, she gave you fleeting peeks of Tusiata; she moved, she entertained, she delighted. It was the perfect way to end a long and satisfying day.

PS I am not sure why Auckland writers don’t take that trip out west to support our taonga, our special gusts. I was disappointed.

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Wild Dogs and other animals: Tusiata Avia is performing today

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Last night it was real honour to read poems as The Curnow Reader at the Going West Literary Festival. I also got to hear Charlotte Grimshaw give her eloquent key-note address. She managed to link the sewer pipe of her childhood, the architecture and complexities of Albert Speer and her fiction. The sewer pipe was not just a physical object cutting through the bay, something to walk and even ride a bike on, it was a bridge to an imaginative and psychological elsewhere as much as it was a bridge to a physical elsewhere. She used to go for long walks in the city when she was bored (from Parnell to Avondale say) and the buildings became not-buildings, but topographical markers that prompted different, psychological meanings. What I loved about this talk, is the way it opened up the Charlotte’s fiction; it cast it in a new light. It strengthened the sense of layers in her writing. Layers that draw in politics along with narrative (a novel, she says, must be colourful, a good page turner, but also have ideas buried down the engine room. It is also clear that her fiction, and fiction in general, must have some kind of empathy, and that is exactly what Charlotte delivers.

Bob Harvey drew us in to his autobiography with the help of a slide show. It was very moving, nostalgic even, as he drew you into the heart of his life and of politics. It seems to me that we have so much to protest about at the moment, so much that seems vulnerable (The School Journal, our private lives, our heritage, the freedom for children to learn through play and take risks, those that cannot afford to feed their families, the land and the sea). Charlotte also said that it is important that fiction asks the right questions (not necessarily providing answers). After hearing Bob I drove home wondering how our politicians are serving us today.

Today, at 11.15,  Peter Bland and I are conversing and traversing our topic: Here comes that childhood pond again. We are talking about the world of childhood and poetry in general.

Then at 5pm the magnificent Tusiata Avia will perform some of her poetry. I would love to see Auckland poets show their support of this Christchurch star and come and listen. She is worth hearing.

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