from one spark: Skylla draws the planet as three lippy women
the planet as Klytaemnestra
don’t shove you everywhere the tail yours don’t sear you the fish to the lips my like the fish out of water δεν τρέμω the fish stinks from the head like the fish σαν out of water won’t cut I the throat my το ψάρι won’t lower I the tail my won’t shake like the fish I
the planet as Medea
show I the teeth my squeeze I the teeth my armed until the teeth fight I with nails and with teeth talk I inside from the teeth talk I outside from the teeth if don’t you have teeth can’t you to bite you can’t dodge this δράκου δόντι να’χεις δεν γλιτώνεις not even with a dragon’s tooth
the planet as Antigone
from one spark grows a bushfire put I the hand to the fire from one spark είμαι grows a bushfire am I lava and fire the eyes my throw sparks fall I φωτιά to the fire the eyes my throw sparks grab I the fire και put I the hand λάβρα to the fire grab I the fire am I lava lava am I and fire and fire
Vana Manasiadis
Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece. She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (Seraph Press).
Home is a state of mind, it’s where you lay your roots down, where you trace your roots, feed yourself, friends and family, bake your bread and make kombucha, where you stand and sleep and dream, it’s a physical place, a small house with wooden floors and comfortable couches, a garden with kūmara almost ready to harvest, shelves overflowing with books, my family tree, my family treasures, my thoughts of life and my thoughts of death, a series of relationships, myself as mother, partner, writer, home is my reluctance to drive beyond the rural letterbox, it’s contentment as I write the next blog, the next poem, sort the kitchen cupboards, light the fire, conserve the water, feel the preciousness of each day.
The poems I have selected are not so much about home but have a home presence that leads in multiple directions. Once again I am grateful to publishers and poets who are supporting my season of themes.
The poems
all of us
once upon a time
all of us here
were one of them there.
maybe
in another skin
in a life before.
maybe
only a few weeks ago.
land of the long white cloud,
land of no borders,
floating
adrift
near the end of the world,
near the end of the sea.
we came
and stayed
and with our accents
call
this place
home.
carina gallegos
from All of Us, Landing Press, 2018
there’s always things to come back to the kitchen for
a bowl of plain steamed rice
a piece of bitter dark chocolate
a slice of crisp peeled pear
a mother or father who understands
the kitchen is the centre of the universe
children who sail out on long elliptical orbits
and always come back, sometimes like comets, sometimes like moons
Alison Wong
from Cup, Steele Roberts, 2005, picked by Frankie McMillan
What’s the pH balance of yin + yang?
lake / river / liquid / beverage / additional charges or income / (of clothes) classifier for number of washes / hai bian / shang hai / shui guo / zhong guo / Sway by Bic Runga / three drop radicals on my guitar / liquid cement / tai chi at Buckland’s Beach / put your facemask on and listen to the rain on a UE speaker /
It’s not outlandish to say I was raised by the water. Aotearoa is a land mapped in blue pen, each land mass a riverbed. Originally swampland, the water gurgles from kitchen taps and runs silent cartographies underneath cities of concrete.
I was raised by my mama, raised with the treasures of every good cross-pollinated pantry. We have rice porridge for breakfast and mee hoon kueh when I plead. My siblings and I vie for iced jewel biscuits kept out of our reach, packed tightly into red-lidded jars on the highest shelf of our pantry. We stretch torso to tiptoe to reach them, knocking the jars off their perch with our fingertips. The dried goods we ignore on the levels below are the real jewels in the cabinet. From behind the creaky door comes the festivities of Lunar Celebrations: dried mushrooms, dried shrimp, vermicelli noodles, black fungus, herbal remedies, that good luck moss you eat on New Year’s.
Chinese cooking is a testament to soaking. Benches overflow with an array of colanders, damp towels cover small white bowls of noodles, rehydrating. We wash rice in liquid choreography: Pour. Swirl. Measure by the pinky. Drain.
My mum is from Ma Lai Xi Ya, her mum’s mum from Fujian, China. I google map the curve of a bordering coast, trace a line through the wet season pavements of Kuala Lumpur and end up with fingerprints all the way to Oceania. From my house you can see the windmills of Makara, jutting out like acupuncture needles. The sea rushes the wind like nature’s boxing lessons.
We fly back to Malaysia every couple years, past the sea-lapsed boundaries of other countries. In Singapore I am offered moist towelettes on the plane. In KL, where two rivers meet by the oil of Petronas, I shower in buckets of cold water and reunite with faulty flushing.
The first ethnic Chinese came to New Zealand during the 1850’s, following flakes of fortune. They came for the gold rush, fishing for luck on the unturned beds of rivers. Wisps of fortune lay in thousand year old rocks worn down to alluvial alchemy. Chinese last names carried through the cold water creeks. They died in sea-burials.
Tones and tombs. You made your river, now lie in it. Yǐn shuǐ sī yuán. To think of water and remember its source; to remember where one’s happiness comes from; to not forget one’s roots or heritage.
Oriental Bay is the closest beach to us in Wellington City. On weekends, we drive out for picnics, happy to migrate our schedules. The beach was named by George Dupper in the late 1840’s after the boat he arrived on. Fresh off the Bay. Oriental Parade is famous for 22,000 tonnes of imported sand. In my house we are displaced soil in torrential rain. I search ancestry on Wikipedia, then look for my own last name.
Think of water and remember its source. Where do our pipelines go? When do our bodies enter the main frame? Oriental, noun. Characteristic of Asia, particularly the East. Rugs, countries, bamboo leaves. A person of East Asian descent (offensive). A beach with fake grains. Imported goods and exported gooseberries. The fruits of our labour, measured and drained.
I think tourists find the green unsettling. It never stops pouring.
Year of the money. Year of the pig. Year of the scapegoat, the migrants, the rats on the ship. Labour. Lei. Qi Guai. Guai Lo. I google the wind howls around a shipwreck. I google microtraumas until my eyes bleed transparent. I google:
why do chinese people love hot water
can chinese people swim
why are there so many chinese in auckland
chinese people population
chinese people opinion
Ink blue motions stencil sight lines into the harbour of my eyes. I rub at ink sticks until the ocean turns to soot. The rising shadows of New World Power loom from water’s depths. We float currency back to motherlands in a trickle down economy. What’s the pH balance of yin + yang?
I was raised with the dawn promise of an unpolluted skyline, pools in cyan-printed eyes, long white dreams of the colony. My body the cycle of a washing machine, bleached into safety. I was raised in a world full of oysters, one lofty pearl held between the whiskered snout of a dragon. But you can’t feng shui the comments on Stuff articles.
Feng shui just means wind water. It’s not scary. Duān wǔ jié is the annual dragon boat festival. I throw zongzi in the river to protect Qu Yuan’s body. Remember how you moved across the world to know you had been here already? My mum says she caught sight of the harbour and it’s why she will never leave. I watch her from the doorway, her frame hunched across the sink. She belongs here. The soft light of morning streams through the window, catching glints on small rice bowls. I can hear a pot of water boiling. She soaks bones for breakfast, then asks if I’m hungry.
Vanessa Mei Crofskey
from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, eds Paula Morris and Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021
blue beat
Every morning he milked the cow.
It was the chime that woke me and my sister,
metal against metal,
the fall of the empty milk-bucket’s handle
as he put it down to open the gate
right beside our sleep-out.
At the end of the day, in socks,
the cold, clear smell of fresh air
still on him, was his way
of arriving back;
the glass of water he gulped,
the hanky dragged from his pocket,
how he leaned back with a grunt
against the nearest doorpost
to rub and scratch the itch,
or ache, between his shoulders. Once,
seeing me poring over a map of the world
trying to find Luxemburg,
he teased, saying something
about how I couldn’t wait to leave.
None of us knowing then
that he would be the first to go,
leaving us
long before we could ever leave him.
Kay McKenzie Cooke
from Born to a Red-Headed Woman, published by Otago University Press, 2014
We used some
concrete blocks
the hollow kind
that let the grass
grow through
to make a carport
then took a few
out back to
plant a herb garden
parsley thyme
used to step out
mid-dish to snip off
fronds till
it all went to seed
now my mother’s not
been out the
back door in
more than a year
they’ve grown into
massive aberrant
plants to match
the trampolines
around the flats
on either side
Jack Ross
Bliss
If I were to describe this moment
I may write
bliss
If bliss meant quiet, companionship
you in the garden, me hanging washing
the fresh scent of rain on the air
the murmur of voices inside
You and me
not far away
bliss
Rose Peoples
Reasons you should retire to the
small town the poet grew up in
Because you have a Grahame Sydney book on your coffee table. Because you are public figure reinventing yourself as a public figure – in Central Otago. Because you can buy advertising space cheap and write a column about local issues. Because you know how moorpark apricots ripen from the inside and look deceptively green. Because it’s a gold rush a boomer boom town. Because you are a big fan of Muldoon flooding the gorge for the generation of electricity – when the river rose it formed little islands possums, skinks and insects clung to power poles to escape drowning. Because you fell in love when you were sixteen with the dusty curtains in the high school hall – immense as the horizon holding the town in.
Ella Borrie
from Stasis 2020, picked by Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connnor
In my mother’s house
Everything is always evening:
curios in candlelight, blowpipes,
riding crops, cabinets of Caligari.
Children used to giggle in the rhododendrons;
dragons wander up to the door.
There were nightingales.
The ghosts hunch, passing the port,
rehash old scandals, broken trysts,
all those garden parties long ago.
Harry Ricketts
from Just Then, Victoria University Press, 2012
Hunting my father’s voice, County Down
It begins with the medieval
throat clearing of crows
high over Scrabo tower. You
were the boy your mother
forgot to drown and still
you holler for help
So here’s a bloody conundrum
shot to blazes and back
and your brother Jimmy
in a slow swim to save you
Dad, the land is full of boulders
an apron of stones
to feed a nanny goat
chalk a plenty to soften your voice
All those stories, enough
to hang a man, come Easter
All that dreaming
the time it took
to dig breath for the fire
the knot and bog
of the back parlour where Jimmy
washed roosters
and sister Maureen, her hair
lovely enough to stop your throat
Frankie McMillan
appeared on a Phantom Poetry Billsticker 2015
SH5
From Bluff Hill we can see the ships come in. Past the buoys stitched crooked like Orion’s belt. My school is art deco seashell and lavender climb. Girls press their hands to the frames and breathe on the glass. There’s this one boy who got peach fuzz before the rest of them. His voice cracks seismic and we all swarm. I practice my California accent down the landline and my mother laughs behind the door. We pass him around like chapstick. Hickies like blossoms on his neck, like rose-purple flags planted behind pine trees and beach grass. There are socials. Socials with glow sticks and apple juice in cardboard cartons. We all look at him. We look at him, through him, to see each other. A postcard is no place to be a teenager. The sea air is too thick. Rusts my bicycle in the garage. Rusts the door hinges. Stings in the back of my eyes.
Our town’s like honey. You get knee deep. Arataki. Manuka. Clover. Sweet. Council flat, Sky TV, pyramid scheme, boxed wine, sun-freckled early twenties. Ultra-scan, veganism, Mum’s club with the girls who went to your kindy. His sisters, their perfume vanilla and daisies, their babies fat and milky. We could have built a vege garden. I could have kept a shotgun under the mattress.
Most of us. Most of us leave. We carve the initials of our high school sweethearts into lumps of driftwood and throw them out to sea. To big cities where no one knows us, where the cops drive with their windows up and their sleeves rolled down. We learn to sleep through the traffic. We keep on leaving till we find a way to go. We leave so one day we can maybe come back.
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor
from Starling 6
The Shed
It was a shed before it was home to Tongan relatives. The inside smelled like Dad’s work gloves, musk and dirt. Dust caught in cobwebs draped over muddy tools. Overgrown insects nested between the spades and hoes. Wonky stacks of building stuff lay against the walls,window frames, doors, planks with flaking paint and nails poking out. Dad would be busy in the humming dark behind the shed, shovelling smelly things in the compost.
He’d reach the bottom of the pit in one spadeful, burying green- oaty food waste and feathering rich crumbly compost over the top with delicate shakes. I liked the slicing sound of the spade when he dug deep. The mouldy compost frame kept everything together for so many years. To Dad’s left there was the chicken coop, with a motley crew of chickens and a duck. He’d built a pirate-rigging treehouse in the trees above. To his right the long brown garden where everything he planted thrived, giant broccoli and gleaming silverbeet. Runner beans grew up a chicken-wire frame separating the veggie plot from the pet cemetery at the back where flowers grew amongst wooden crosses with cats’ names scrawled on them.
There was a flurry of bush between us and neighbours. One bush grew glowing green seed-capsules we wore as earrings, there was a sticky bamboo hedge and the rotten log sat solidly in a gap. The bush was thick enough for birds to nest in, dark patches in the twigs that cried in spring. Sometimes we’d hear strangled shrieks and sprint to retrieve dying bodies from cats’ mouths; saving lives for a few moments. Dad said we’re allowed to pick flowers to put on graves but otherwise it’s a waste.
Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor was awarded the 2018 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition, and the 2017 Monash Prize for Emerging Writers. Her work has appeared in Starling, Mayhem, Brief, Poetry New Zealand, Landfall, Turbine, Flash Frontier, Mimicry, Min-a-rets, Sweet Mammalian, Sport and Verge. She is Poetry New Zealand‘s 2021 Featured Poet. She writes thanks to the support of some of the best people on this great watery rock.
Ella Borrie is a Te Whanganui-a-Tara based poet from Otago. She co-edited Antics 2015 and her work appears in Mimicry, Starling and Turbine | Kapohau. The title of this poem is inspired by Louise Wallace’s poem ‘How to leave the small town you were born in’.
Kay McKenzie Cooke’s fourth poetry collection was published by The Cuba Press in June 2020 and is titled Upturned. She lives and writes in Ootepoti / Dunedin.
Vanessa Crofskey is an artist and writer currently based in Pōneke Wellington. She was a staff writer for online arts and culture journal The Pantograph Punch and has a collection of poems out in AUP New Poets Volume 6.
carina gallegos, originally from Costa Rica, has worked in journalism and development studies, and with refugee communities since 2011. She published poems in All of Us (Landing Press, 2018) with Adrienne Jansen. She lives in Wellington with her family and refers to New Zealand as ‘home’.
Simone Kaho is a digital strategist, author, performance poet and director. Her debut poetry collection Lucky Punch was published in 2016. She has a master’s degree in poetry from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). She’s the Director of the E-Tangata web series ‘Conversations’ and a journalist for Tagata Pasifika. In 2021 Simone was awarded the Emerging Pasifika Writer residency at the IIML.
Vana Manasiadis is Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece. She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel.
Frankie McMillan is a poet and short story writer who spends her time between Ōtautahi/ Christchurch and Golden Bay. Her poetry collection, There are no horses in heaven was published by Canterbury University Press. Recent work appears in Best Microfictions 2021 (Pelekinesis) Best Small Fictions 2021 ( Sonder Press), the New Zealand Year Book of Poetry ( Massey University) New World Writing and Atticus Review.
Emma Neale is a writer and editor. Her most recent collection is To the Occupant. In 2020 she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry.
Rose Peoples is from Te Awakairangi/Lower Hutt. She is a student at Victoria University and, having finished her law degree last year, decided that the logical next step was to embark upon a Masters in Literature. She is a bookseller at Good Books. Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, Mimicry and Starling.
Harry Ricketts teaches English Literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. His latest collection Selected Poems was published by Victoria University Press, 2021.
Jack Ross‘s most recent poetry collection, The Oceanic Feeling, was published by Salt & Greyboy Press in early 2021. He blogs on the imaginary museum, here[http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/].
Alison Wong is the coeditor of A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (AUP, 2021), the first anthology of creative writing by Asian New Zealanders. Alison’s novel, As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin/Picador, 2009) won the NZ Post Book Award for fiction and her poetry collection Cup (Steele Roberts, 2006) was shortlisted for the Jessie Mackay Award for best first book of poetry. She was a poetry judge at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Open late next Wednesday evening, The Physics Room is excited to host readings from Claudia Jardine (current artist in residence at The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora) and Vana Manasiadis (2021 Ursula Bethell Residency in Creative Writing at University of Canterbury). We’ll be serving mulled wine, pumpkin soup, and toast to stay warm as you listen.
Hosted within the exhibition Light enough to read by, Jardine and Manasiadis’ readings hinge on ideas of shift and sequence, returns and remembrance, terrain and syntax: changes which we register physically, textually, seasonally. Alongside the exhibition, which includes works by artists Fiona Connor, Lucy Skaer, Rachel Shearer and Cathy Livermore, these readings honour the space for listening, speaking, and non-visual aspects of communication.
Manasiadis will read from her publication The Grief Almanac: the Sequel (Seraph Press, 2019) and recent unpublished writing, and Jardine from The Temple of Your Girl (AUP, 2020), alongside other of their works.
There will also be an opportunity to view the exhibition, with the gallery remaining open until 8pm.
Born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Vana Manasiadis has been moving between Aotearoa and Kirihi Greece the last 20 years. Her most recent book The Grief Almanac: A Sequel, followed her earlier Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima in experimenting with hybridity and code-switching, and as editor and translator she has edited or co-edited bilingual poetry selections including Tātai Whetū: Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation with Maraea Rakuraku of Tūhoe and Ngāti Kahungunu. In 2021 she is Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha Canterbury University with Behrouz Boochani.
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 AUP New Poets 7 alongside Rhys Feeney and Ria Masae. For the winter of 2021 Jardine is one of the Arts Four Creative Residents in The Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, where she is working on a collection of poems. She likes velour, animals and going to the backcountry.–
Image: Lucy Skaer, In the Shelterbelt, Arrows Rain Down, The Day is Bright and Open, Hare Darts for Cover and the Chord of C Minor Sounds (detail), 2021. Photo: Janneth Gil.
Paula Green, from Cookhouse, Auckland University Press, 1997
My theme-season introductions seem like miniature self confessions on life and poetry. Crikey! I always have much to say about food and poetry because I love cooking and I love writing. My first book Cookhouse got scathing reviews either for being too domestic or forbeing too experimental. I walked around the supermarket on a Sunday morning reading the first review of my first book saying OMG OMG OMG. It was my first lesson as a writer: leave reviews with the person who wrote them. Just get on with what you love. A few weeks later I opened the Listener and there was a photograph of Cookhouse on the recipe page with a Marcella Hazan cookbook ( I loved her recipes!). Plus one of my poems, sitting on the page like a recipe. That was my second lesson as a writer. Your books and poetry find their way into surprising places and you will never know how your poetry touches people. Although sometimes you get an inkling: a stranger might walk up to you, or send an email or a card, and surprise you (in a good way!).
I can’t keep food out of my poetry and I am equally drawn to writers with similar intent. It is one reason I am such a fan of Nina Mingya Powle’s poetry. Her poems lead in multiple directions but the sensual hooks are often sparked by food. Ian Wedde is the same. I adore The Commonplace Odes. It has always mattered what food I put in my body, and it is a bit the same with with poetry. I want to cook a meal that tastes good and I want poetry that satisfies my reading tastebuds whether I am writing or reviewing. In fact don’t call me a reviewer please. And I am not actually very kind. I simply love reading poetry and sharing my engagements. Just as I love cooking a meal every night for my family.
The poems selected are not so much about food but revel in a presence of food to varying degrees. Grateful thanks to the publishers and poets who continue to support my season of themes.
The Poems
De-stringing beans
A mountain of runner beans
to top and tail and de-string.
She decides to do it for them: her sons
so they will be eaten this evening
sliced into green splinters
with pink seeds showing through.
Easier to sit than stand. Her best profile
towards the door when her son appears.
She wants to disguise how content she is.
The stringy edges, tops and tails, in a dish
the beans growing, like a mountain of shoes
later to be wrapped in tinfoil
roughly divided into two.
No one else in the family will eat them.
In an article it says they are underrated
almost despised as a vegetable
underestimated on two counts
or three: first the vigorous way
they climb, clamber to the sun
second they are rich in iron
and last and best: this contentment
so rarely found, except in
a painting of a woman pouring from a jug
someone bathing someone in a tub
this mountainous-seeming task
calming with each stroke of the knife.
Elizabeth Smither
little walnuts
served from across the seas
in a tin or a jar, fished from suitcases
presented
with grandmotherly dimples
little walnuts – xiao he tao
proudly, good for brain.
except neurons are firing
in staccato, half-
forgotten Mandarin.
they manage xie xie and dutifully
I eat them.
I forget why I ask for these –
the carnage of shells
scraps of brown meat
and a strange invasion staged
on my tongue – slow
and clumsy muscle.
I am quick to rise – you do not get to comment on what’s in my lunch box –
but just as quick to pick
the yolks of my too-dry lotus mooncakes –
discarded suns
of a world in hieroglyphs.
and when I have counted
waves of sleep – yi, er, san –
I don’t dream in the same vowels.
what can I bring back for you?
her smile like furls of steaming jasmine tea
amidst clamouring children
hawking their wants like roadside wares
or suitcase wheels clicking on concrete
destined for smog and skyscrapers.
I always ask for my little walnuts.
*Little walnut or xiao he tao is a particular kind of Chinese walnut with a distinct sweet-salty flavour.
Joy Tong
from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, eds Paula Morris and Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021
from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand, eds Paula Morris and Alison Wong, Auckland University Press, 2021
With Nectarines
to Claire Beynon
A cob loaf rests on a surface,
perhaps a table, an altar, a jetty,
that reaches over a shoreline toward dark water
and the approaching edge of night.
Out there an indigo quiet where the sky lowers to sea,
clouds shouldering weight of storm to come;
a hint of beach, airborne flicks of white,
where seabirds swoop for fish and scraps.
On this side of a sill,
the bread, and a bowl of tawny nectarines
occupy foreground that’s human with light,
with hearth-glow in the corner,
tended against incoming cold.
The bread is warm from the oven,
the fruit ripe, and the room that extends
from the canvas edge into my lived space
where the painting hangs, included as offering
to the sombre air,
to anyone who comes to this threshold, empty.
Carolyn McCurdie
Super Wine
The news is early or his clock is slow,
so he grabs his mug of tea and pops
a biscuit in his pocket,
the top pocket of a faded old coat.
It’s a wreck of a thing, this coat of his.
a shamefully limp and grubby article,
but he wears it through the news and Campbell Live
and on into the night,
and he wears it when he leaves his little flat
and slips up the lane and out into the park
and lights a cigarette
(his skinny nine-o’clocker
and the last of the day).
And he smells the smells of mown grass and woodsmoke,
and he walks across the park towards the lights,
the lights of the houses on the hill,
secular stars of silver and orange,
and he walks beneath the frosty stars themselves,
this unmarried, unmended man,
this unmarried, not-unhappy Earthling,
A Super Wine forgotten in his pocket.
Geoff Cochrane
from Pocket Edition, Victoria University Press, 2009
If you love me you’ll buy Bluff oysters and cook asparagus. Even though I don’t like either.
for Kirsten Holst, for feeding me many good things
and for Alison and Peter, for their Bluff oysters and asparagus
When I am no longer who I was
I can only hope that I will be loved by someone
so much that every day during Bluff oyster season
they will buy me a dozen Bluff oysters.
Even though they don’t like Bluff oysters
they will buy them for me
and every day I will exclaim
“I can’t even remember the last time I had Bluff oysters!”;
they will nod at the extreme length of time it has been.
When I am no longer who I was
and when Bluff oyster season is over
I can only hope that I will be loved by someone so much
they will cook me freshly picked asparagus every day.
Even though they don’t like asparagus
they will grow it for me and pick it for me
and lightly steam it
so that I can relish it served with hollandaise sauce
(although some days more lazily served with butter and lemon).
I will eat it with my fingers
and let the sauce (or butter) dribble down my chin;
no one will mind or tell me to be less messy
it will just be moments of edible joy.
In reality I don’t like Bluff oysters (or any oysters)
and I can’t stand asparagus (the taste and texture are disturbing);
I can only hope that maybe someone will love me enough
to buy and cook me the things that I love
even though they hate them, even though I won’t remember.
Paula Harris
the great pumpkin war
standing in the kitchen crying
beaten by a vegetable
thought by now it would be easier
people have suggested this (people i trust)
the myth of progress
you do something every day it gets easier
in reality each day the dirt accrues
it multiplies between cupboard doors
i am running out of resources
i am getting further & further into
the ten-year warranty on the fridge compressor
one day soon i will have to pick up the knife
& address the pumpkin in the room
bought so cheaply from the farmers’ market
now growing larger by the day
taking up all the bench space
i fear for the fruit bowl
my mother says to drop it from a height
she throws hers down the stone garden steps
my previous attempt resulted in
20 minutes lost to searching for an unscathed pumpkin
trying to break open a pumpkin at night
is like starting a winter war in russia
i am letting everything get out of control
i sleep knowing it is getting worse
i do not think i can win at this
i do not think i can carry on in any capacity
Rhys Feeney
from AUP New Poets 7, ed Anna Jackson, Auckland University Press, 2020
The Cheese Scone Recipe as Promised
What’s the secret, people ask,
why do your students return
year after year to your class?
Cheese scones, I say, crisp
on the outside, soft inside
like all good characters. First,
turn up the heat, 200 degrees
should do it. Next, sift two cups
of self-rising flour, holding the sieve
high, letting the flour fall like snow
in the air, then add a heaped half
teaspoon each of salt, mustard powder
and a good pinch of cayenne for a lick
of fire. Stir and rub in 30 grams
of butter. If in a hurry, as I usually am,
you can grate the butter or cheat
with the food processor,
but do not go all the way, stop
at the crumbly stage, add 75 grams
of grated cheese, then beat a large egg,
with about 75 mils of buttermilk,
(if you have none, add lemon juice to milk,
rest it for ten minutes). Breaking
the drought pour into the dry ingredients,
mixing first with a knife, then lightly
with your hands to bring the soft dough
together. If it seems too dry
add more buttermilk, but like
it’s a newborn and precious, go easy
with your handling, remembering
scones and poems need a light touch.
Cool hands, my mother said,
though mine have always been hot.
Roll the dough out in a rough circle,
not too thin, about 2.5 cm thick.
With students due any minute,
I usually take the lazy way, divide
it roughly into 8 triangles but you might
be wanting to impress your mother
or daughter-in-law, and have the time
and the aesthetic sense for fluted cutters.
Appearance improves the taste
so brush the tops with milk, sprinkle
on a little grated cheese, and a dusting
of cayenne. Bake on a high shelf
for about 15 minutes till golden
and irresistible. Making scones
is not dissimilar to crafting a poem,
you need to pay attention to detail,
measuring, mixing, letting in air,
but there the recipe ends.
What I haven’t talked of can not
like metaphor, be quantified, the secret is
to bring to the process, a little of you.
Diane Brown
the children open their
lunch boxes to each other
a ham sandwich
for a Fijian fried egg and three cassava sticks
a mini feta quiche
for a South Indian roti parcel stuffed
with cumin and okra
a tub of yogurt
for a Middle Eastern pouch of semolina
sautéed in ghee and cardomens
a celery stick
for a Tongan plantation ladyfinger banana
a juice box for
fresh Kiribati island toddy
the wooden decks approve
their slats on standby to suck evidence
of sharing and spit them into the crawl space
beneath the salivating joists
it’s the allergies
the adults
the food policies
and
the way fear feeds us all
Mere Taito
P r o p e r t i e s
You’ll need oil – For your forehead on Ash Wednesday, for the insides and outsides of your palms. For sore inner ears and lifeless hair. For removing the evil eye – that’s the most important. Though not one in the family knows the ritual, better to be with, than without.
Grapes and leaves – For your rice and pinenuts, for your grape jelly.
And ash – For the grape jelly – vine cinders to be precise. For holy crosses over the front doors of your houses or workplaces. For the bottoms of incense holders – hubris to clear it out.
Rose petals – For gravestones, but mostly for the preserve that fits into a spoon followed by icy water.
Water – From the priest, for drinking in the first month of the year and sprinkling in every room. For keeping in the fridge thereafter. For putting chamomile into – tea or warm compresses.
Garlic – For everything. For mashing up and applying with honey to sores. For rubbing on styes. For wrapping in bread and swallowing whole when feverish. For shooing away evil by saying the word alone – along with a spitting sound.
Vana Mansiadis
from Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, Seraph Press, 2009
1.2 To the cookbook
Turning east, I drove towards blue grey
Mountains down which cloud crawled
From summits which were already sky. High in it
A glare like grubby porcelain told me that morning
Was advanced. The nibbled winter paddocks were over-
Written in a language no one had ever taught me:
Glottal, almost choking, wet. Lines
Of leafless shelter-belt enwrapped the shorter
Rows of berryfruit trellises in need
Of pruning. My destination: an art gallery.
My mission: to speak about art and poetry.
It was going to be all over before I got there.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, help me
In my hour of need, help me turn my back
on landscape that wants to be art, on poetry with feet
Of clay. The lovely world has everything I need,
It has my kids, my sweetheart, my friends, it has a new book
With mouth-watering risotto recipes in it,
The kind of plump rice you might have relished,
Horace, in the Sabine noon, yellowed with saffron.
‘The zen poet’ is another of you, he wrote a poem
About making stew in the desert which changed my life.
A good cookbook is as good as a book of poems
Any day, because it can’t be more pretentious
Than the produce you savour with friends as night falls.
Ian Wedde
from The Common Place Odes, Auckland University Press, 2001
Custard
When I was smaller than the family dog,
Dad would tell Mum
that he was taking me to kōhanga.
Then we’d go to the bakery
and get as many custard pies
as we could handle.
Park up by the river,
talk,
eat,
listen to the radio a while.
He’d light one up
as fat as the mighty brown trout,
captured and killed
and lull me to sleep
with a puku full of custard
in his red van
with all his windows up.
Now I am grown
and you ask me to explain something you said.
My eyes glaze
and all I can see is that
red van,
pastry flakes resting
in the corners of my sleeping mouth.
Ruby Solly
from Tōku Pāpā, Victoria University Press, 2021
The Poets
Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs Creative Writing Dunedin, teaching fiction, memoir and poetry. She is the Poetry Editor for ‘The Mix’ in the Otago Daily Times. Her latest book is a poetic novella, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, Otago University Press 2020.
Geoff Cochrane is the author of 19 collections of poetry, mostly recently Chosen (2020), two novels, and Astonished Dice: Collected Short Stories (2014). In 2009 he was awarded the Janet Frame Prize for Poetry, in 2010 the inaugural Nigel Cox Unity Books Award, and in 2014 an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate Award.
Rhys Feeney is a high school teacher in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. You can buy Rhys’ debut collection, “soyboy,” as part of AUP New Poets 7
Paula Harris lives in Palmerston North, where she writes and sleeps in a lot, because that’s what depression makes you do. She won the 2018 Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and the 2017 Lilian Ida Smith Award. Her writing has been published in various journals, including The Sun, Hobart, Passages North, New Ohio Review and Aotearotica. She is extremely fond of dark chocolate, shoes and hoarding fabric. website: www.paulaharris.co.nz | Twitter: @paulaoffkilter | Instagram: @paulaharris_poet | Facebook: @paulaharrispoet]
Vana Manasiadis is Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece. She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book was The Grief Almanac: A Sequel.
Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer, mostly of poetry and fiction. Her poetry collection ‘Bones in the Octagon’ was published by Makaro Press in 2015.
Neema Singh is a poet from Christchurch of Gujarati Indian descent. Her work appears in Ko Aotearoa Tātou: We Are New Zealand(2020) and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (2021) and she is currently working on her first collection of poetry, a series of poems unfolding the layers of culture, identity and history contained within ordinary moments. Neema is an experienced secondary school English teacher and holds a Master of Creative Writing from The University of Auckland.
Elizabeth Smither ‘s new collection of stories: ‘The Piano Girls’ will be published in May by Quentin Wilson Publishing.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Starling and Sport, among others. In 2020 she released her debut album, Pōneke, which looks at the soundscapes of Wellington’s past, present and future through the use of taonga pūoro, cello, and environmental sounds. She is currently completing a PhD in public health, focusing on the use of taonga pūoro in hauora Māori. Tōku Pāpā, published in Februrary 2021, is her first book.
Mere Taito is a poet living and working in Kirikiriroa.She is interested in the way poetry can be used to revitalise minority Indigenous languages like Fäeag Rotuạm ta.
Joy Tong picks wildflowers from neighbours’ fences, pets strangers’ dogs and chases stories in the streets. She’s a student, musician and writer from Tāmaki Makaurau and her other works can be found in Landfall, Mayhem and Starling, as well as A Clear Dawn, an anthology for NZ-Asian voices.
Ian Wedde was born in Blenheim, New Zealand, in 1946. He lives with his wife Donna Malane in Auckland. ‘To the cookbook’ is from a sequence called The Commonplace Odes, published as a book by Auckland University Press in 2001. He was New Zealand Poet Laureate in 2011.
I have always knitted but never very often and never very well. I have a winter cardigan that has been on the go for years and I need help to get it working again. When I was young I knitted a very complicated black jersey. I completed it and it felt like a work of art with its intricate and sublime stitching and hard-to-see-as-you-knit colour. But before I ever put it on, my dog Woody ripped it to shreds. I have never managed to finish anything since. Perhaps this winter I will see if I can find the bag with the grey wool and hope the moths haven’t shredded the cardigan.
I love knitting because it is soothing, because crafting things is a joy, and we can produce things that are of the greatest comfort. (Although at AWF 2021, Brian Turner talked about his grandmother knitting him childhood jerseys he never really liked!) I love the way you can lose yourself in the clicketty clack rhythm, or if you are skilled, you can read and look elsewhere as you knit. But knitting is a metaphor for so much more. Writing a poem is a form of knitting. Relationships and family life are forms of knitting. Telling a story. Living. Loving. Existing.
I am grateful to all the poets and publishers who continue to support my season of themes. These poems are not so about knitting, but have a knitting presence in varying degrees. Ha! I think reading is a form of knitting too! Happy knitting!
Twelve poems about knitting
Lockdown knitting
I hit on knitting for something to do
in the gloom, I get restless,
this end of the room is dim
and outside the window, the sun
burns down on browned-out plants
holding onto the dry clay bank,
relentless blue behind.
What Paul watches all day long.
Smoking for something to do.
He raises his eyebrows ridiculously
as I pull the thread of last year loose,
wants to know what I’m doing.
I say it stops me from chatter.
We say little bits from time to time
it’s peaceful, his coffin
on the dining room table
…32, 34, 36… I’m casting on the front
a dark ship riding into the room
light falling in behind
through the potted palms
in the little courtyard.
I’m halfway up the rib
on announcement day; it’s grim.
Paul says if no one can come
and no one can go,
just chuck him in his car
and straight in the ground.
We take the back seat out.
I knit and wait and watch
at the foot of the bed
and I’m not sure of the pattern:
a black square in the middle
that no one knows how to do.
Marty Smith
Berthe
Reflection on Berthe Morisot’s ‘Young Woman Knitting’
plumbing the marks. On my lips, your name, a manner
of holding you and what you spell. Something like
kin and kinship, something like kind; something like,
affection being the grounding stitch of love, which,
purl to plain and slip-one-pass-one-over, knits
our kith. Peculiar patterns we make
with our yarn, shaped to what blows through and what’s
prevailing. Rambunctious winds, or fretful. These times
you are bent beneath a howling. I am picking up
the string to make a steady tether for your heart.
For thy heart. Dear friend, I’m thinking of thee.
Sue Wootton
from The Yield, Otago University Press, 2017
My Mother Spinning
Sit too close
& the spinning bob cools you.
Leave the room
& the foot pedal beats
on a raw nerve.
Leave the house
& a thread of wool follows.
Peter Olds
(picked by Richard Langston)
For my parents
You were meant to die at home
suddenly, one of you stepping in from a walk
to find the other on the floor inside.
Then one of you in the garden
splayed on the earth and
the other in the earth already so
it’s like you fell to them.
That’s not how you went.
Things were more difficult than that.
We still talk, or –
to use the language of crossing over –
communicate.
Newly chaste.
Awfully polite.
Shy ministers of the invisible continent.
To cover the quiet moments
I start to knit a hat, and
in deep times,
like a Victorian daughter,
I rest my knitting on my lap.
We have about a hundred stitches to let go
of Alzheimer’s and stroke
and pick up the daily walks down the goat track
to the beach, you two
ahead of me,
towels slung around your shoulders,
your bare feet finding their own way down
the steep clay path.
Lynn Davidson
fromPoetry New Zealand Yearbook 2020, Lynn reads ‘For My Parents’ here
Purl
Side by side
we purl the fine, cream wool.
The baby pushes and glides
beneath your elbows, your fingers
tense with ribbing.
I pick up your slipped stitches,
pass the needles back and forth.
Our tiny singlets grow.
Outside it is afternoon,
the sky paling and snow
clumped on Ben Lomond.
Jillian Sullivan
from Parallel, Steele Roberts. 2014
The Pattern of Memoir
In the days before synthetics from China,
women knitted. My Brownie teacher taught me
at seven, words or wool, anyone can master it.
First, the unravelling of elusive, possibly false
strands of memory.
Next, you settle into long days, row after row,
hoping for a garment approximating truth,
knowing anything re-knitted is always a little
uneven, a compromise at best. I make no mention
of the casting off.
The way your hands finding nothing
to do now, start searching for trouble again,
unearthing that old thing in the back
of the wardrobe just itching for a make-over,
a whole new life.
In the days before synthetics from China,
women knitted. My Brownie teacher taught me
at seven, words or wool, anyone can master it.
First, the unravelling of elusive, possibly false
strands of memory.
Diane Brown
From Every Now and Then I Have Another Child, Otago University Press, 2020
KNITTING
P l e x i s P e r i p l e x i s
Stooped sore with the shells and soaps of gift-giving, the midnight-baked koulouria and sesame, the red eggs of the resurrection, a map, a compass shoulder-sloped with the southerly through the crack in the dining stained-glass, the dawn frosts on the lawn and the knitting mum prudently started:
so you’ll be able to trace your way back, my mikroula, my thesaurus, so you won’t get lost, fall, be eaten whole, wander for days in bad company, catch cold, worry; so you’ll have something to fly from Yiayia’s yard with the pots, the tiles dusted-clean, the shed with my clothes by the tree
I squeeze on and through; down the rows, losing rows; reach down from the overhead locker, pull out needles and threads and start looping.
Vana Manasiadis
from Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, Seraph Press, 2009
coming undone
lists of names unspooling, not dead
but extinct, never-coming-again
owl, quail, snipe, wren
and I’m on my knees, weeding the lettuces
a blackbird hops, watches, drawn by the freshly turned earth
he’s wary he knows what species I am –
the one whose jersey’s unravelling
leopard, rhino, wolf, ibex
and strands of blue wool
unstitch behind me,
snag on blackberry barbs
and break
penguin, dolphin, sea-lion
and above me, gulls on lifting wind
bring salt-tanged keening
shearwater, petrel, albatross
and a cuff of my jersey flops down, hobbles
my hand on the trowel; I re-roll the sleeve
and my dangling hem has gathered dried sepals dropped
by camellias, that rustle, click like a small-clawed cortege
piopio, huia, bat
and I stare at my trowel as if I don’t know
what to do with it.
Carolyn McCurdie
very fine lace knitting
this is a picture of my house
wallpaper silvery with birch trees
covering the workbook
the stories and the pictures
red and yellow blue and blue-green
the smiling suns
jack in the box on the window sill
see Sweetie run
the high shelf in the toyshop
I want to be a ship
the umbrella poem
the oak tree and its acorns
the blue eyes that wouldn’t
the bar of chocolate and our mother at a high window
angelic openings in the calendar
circus elephants on the road at Waitara
hot black sand and the donkey rides at Ngāmotu
but we came ashore after the others
Mama still pale and no baby sister
though we begged her to tell us
when we might see her again
hush darlings she said
look at the tents and the lovely black sand
we will camp out until there is a house for us
but that house burned down right away
and Papa had no watch
or any instruments to make drawings with
and all of us felt sad
because the ship had gone
perhaps with our baby sister hidden somewhere inside
crying to us but we couldn’t hear
now Papa must cut the Sugar Loaf line
now Mama must tell us a new story
and when the earth shakes and the rats run across our blankets
we will not think of her
our sister outside in the dark
beside the rivers and wells
that wait to drown children less wary than us
when my mother was a girl
she thought all grown men had to go to jail
and feared to find her father one day
among the figures working in the prison gardens across the river
under the watchful eye of Marsland Hill
how did she know
afternoon sun slanting through eucalypts
stream curving or carving the valley that divides
here from there, us from them
now from then
or not at all
how did she know
that her grandfather was locked up
for three months pending trial
for the attempted murder of his wife and child
on the farm at the top of Maude Road
and that she, our great grandmother
would drop the charges, needing him
at home and claiming he would often shoot at her
going down the road, for target practice
he was cautioned against excessive drinking and released
to lose the farm and start over
as a teacher in country schools
how did my mother know
that her father, a young man in a country town
was put in the lock-up for two weeks in the year before the war
for sending indecent literature to the girl who jilted him
two postcards and a photograph
he is named but she is not
in the police report that went to the local paper
he was in the second draft
leaving for Palmerston North
dark hair brown eyes five foot seven
oblique scar on left forearm
August 1914
We were too small to remember
the trouble that took Papa to prison
for losing all his money
were we there too we ask Mama
did you take us did we all live in prison for a while
she will tell us only
that it wasn’t so bad
that everyone helped out and soon
he was home again I cannot now recall
how long we were away
but I was glad enough to leave that place
though I was not in favour of the long voyage
to the other side of the world
and dreaded confinement at sea
Well that is another story
now your father ties off his lines
for the company and remembers Cornish hills
Somerset hills and Devon hills under his pencil
he sees the nature path in the valley of the Huatoki
and knows it will take him to slopes covered in red and white pine
rimu and kahikatea
where a house may be built or brought
on land bought with remittances from England
the small child in the big photo
dark hair dark eyes pixie face
is my mother’s sister
they share a middle name
the child in the photo could be a year old
she is holding onto a stool with baby fingers
her feet are bare and she wears a dress
of soft white wool knitted by my grandmother
in whose bedroom the photo hangs
above the treadle sewing machine we are pumping hard
for the noise it makes up and down up and down
up and down and we are never told to stop or be quiet
we know the child in the photo died long ago
before she had time to become my mother’s sister
but we never ask our grandmother
about the very fine lace knitting
of the photo that hangs in her room
when at last we go looking for
the child who would have been our aunt
the trail is cold the dates stones or tears
Date of death: 20 September 1923
Place of death: Stewart Karitane Home Wanganui
Cause or causes of death: Gastroenteritis 2 1/2 Months, Exhaustion
Age and date of birth: 19 Months, Not Recorded
Place of birth: Stratford
Date of burial or cremation: 21 September 1923
Place of burial or cremation: Kopuatama Cemetery
we see our grandfather thrashing the Dodge
between Stratford and Whanganui
and the journey home with the little daughter
he will bury next day at Kopuatama
was our grandmother there
in the car at the Karitane Home at the graveside
the two and a half months of sickness
the birth of a second child
our Uncle Jack
8 July 1923
up and down up and down up and down
noise to cover a heartbeat under soft white wool
I look upon these letters and do not like to destroy them
they are a house of memory and when I read
I am my mother on deck at last
searching for a ripple on the flat Pacific Ocean
I am my father making delicate waves
around each of the Sugar Loaves on the map going to London
I am my brother in a choir of breakers
that bring his body to the landing place
I am my sister in the boat
outside the orbit of the moon and the orbit of the sun
I am my sister a bell-shaped skirt
between ship and shore
I am my sister painting a rock arch
that became fill for the breakwater
I am my sister exhausted
by travelling and the house to clear
I am my sister writing poems
that lie between the thin pages of letters
I am my sister singing
ship to shore choir of breakers alpine meadow
I am myself on the other side of nowhere
waiting for a knock on the door
my mother is taking a photo
of herself and our baby sister
in the mirror on the wall of silvery grey birches
it’s summer and she has propped the baby
between pillows in the armchair
holds the Box Brownie still
leans over the back of the chair smiling
into the mirror
she and her baby by themselves
reflected in silvery light
not for a moment aware of the child
whose passing long ago
mirrors to the day
the arrival of our sister
whose middle name my mother took
from the light of Clair de Lune
and so the daughter library
remakes itself and is not lost
though great libraries burn and cities fall
always there is someone
making copies or packing boxes
writing on the back of a painting or a photo
always there is someone
awake in the frosty dark
hearing the trains roll through and imagining
lying under the stars at Whakaahurangi
face to the sky on the shoulder of the mountain
between worlds and mirror light
***
Michele Leggott
Tony Beyer lives and writes in Taranaki. Recent poems have appeared online in Hamilton Stone Review, Molly Bloom and Otoliths.
Diane Brown is a novelist, memoirist, and poet who runs Creative Writing Dunedin, teaching fiction, memoir and poetry. She has published eight books: two collections of poetry – Before the Divorce We Go To Disneyland, (Jessie Mackay Award Best First Book of Poetry, 1997) Tandem Press 1997 and Learning to Lie Together, Godwit, 2004; two novels, If The Tongue Fits, Tandem Press, 1999 and Eight Stages of Grace, Vintage, 2002—a verse novel which was a finalist in the Montana Book Awards, 2003. Also, a travel memoir, Liars and Lovers, Vintage, 2004; and a prose/poetic travel memoir; Here Comes Another.
Lynn Davidson’s latest poetry collection Islander is published by Shearsman Books and Victoria University Press. She had a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013 and a Bothy Project Residency at Inshriach Bothy in the Cairngorms in 2016. In 2011 she was Visiting Artist at Massey University. She won the Poetry New Zealand Poetry Award, 2020 and is the 2021 Randell Cottage Writer in Residence. Lynn has a doctorate in creative writing and teaches creative writing. She recently returned to New Zealand after four years living and writing in Edinburgh.
Michele Leggott was the first New Zealand Poet Laureate 2007–09 under the administration of the National Library. She received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry in 2013. Her collections include Mirabile Dictu (2009), Heartland (2014), and Vanishing Points (2017), all from Auckland University Press. She cofounded the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (NZEPC) with Brian Flaherty at the University of Auckland where she is Professor of English. Michele’s latest collection Mezzaluna: Selected Poems appeared in 2020 (Auckland University Press).
Vana Manasiadis is Greek-New Zealand poet and translator born in Te Whanganui-a-Tara and based in Tāmaki Makaurau after many years living in Kirihi Greece. She is 2021 Ursula Bethell Writer-in-Residence at Te Whare Wanaga o Waitaha Canterbury University. Her most recent book is The Grief Almanac: A Sequel.
Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer, mainly of poetry and fiction. Her collection, Bones in the Octagon was published by Makaro Press in 2015.
Peter Olds was born in Christchurch, 1944. His mother was a born knitter. All her life she spun and knitted. His Selected Poems was published in 2014 by Cold Hub Press.
Rose Peoples is from Te Awakairangi/Lower Hutt. She is a student at Victoria University and, having finished her law degree last year, decided that the logical next step was to embark upon a Masters in Literature. She is a bookseller at Good Books. Her work has previously appeared in Cordite, Mimicry and Starling.
Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ātiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish. Additionally, he has lived and worked for several years in the Republic of Nauru, PR China, Brunei Darussalam, and the Middle East.
Marty Smith spent 2020 writing poems and an essay for her friend Paul, who died in lockdown in April. Now she’s working on her racing project, following riders, trainers and ground staff through the seasons at the Hastings racecourse as they work with their horses.Marty spent lockdown as one of a small team given dispensation from Cranford Hospice to give end-of-life care to their friend, Paul. He does not make it to the end of the extra five days. Nearly. So close. Poem and audio, ‘My Lights for Paul’. VERB Essay: ‘I hope to make six good friends before I die’ (for Paul).
Jillian Sullivan lives in the Ida Valley, Central Otago. Her thirteen published books include creative non-fiction, novels and short stories. Once the drummer in a women’s indie pop band, she’s now grandmother, natural builder and environmentalist. Her awards include the Juncture Memoir Award in America, and the Kathleen Grattan prize for poetry. Her latest book is the collection of essays, Map for the Heart- Ida Valley Essays (Otago University Press 2020).
Sue Wootton lives in Ōtepoti-Dunedin, and works as the publisher at Otago University Press. ‘Calling’ won the 2015 takahē international poetry competition.
λυρικό ελεγείο : Vana Manasiadis in conversation with Nicholas Wright
About this Event
This is the first in our An Evening With Series, hosted at UC Arts at the Arts Centre Christchurch.
Vana Manasiadis’s The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (2019) is, as the title of this talk suggests, deeply involved with the forms of lyric and elegy. Indeed, her volume has been described as a “hybrid of poetry, memoir, letter, essay and ekphrasis” that pushes at the boundaries of poetic form “melding Greek with English, prose with poetry, and the past and present with fantasy and myth”. Do come along to hear Vana talk about the poems in this volume, her thoughts on poetic form, as well as the new work she is writing as Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence, in the University of Canterbury’s English Department.
———————-
Vana Manasiadis is a Greek-New Zealand poet and translator who has been moving between Aotearoa and Kirihi Greece the last twenty years. Her most recent book The Grief Almanac: A Sequel, followed her earlier Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima in experimenting with hybridity and pluralism and is being translated into Greek for forthcoming publication in Greece. She has also edited and translated Ναυάγια/Καταφύγια Shipwrecks/Shelters, a selection of contemporary Greek poetry, and co-edited a bilingual volume of poetry, Tatai Whetu, Seven Māori Women Poets in Translation, a Spinoff ‘20 Best Poetry Books of 2018’, with playwright Maraea Rakuraku. Her residency project will include an exploration of translanguage and poetic form, of territory and authority. She will be working on poetic texts in response to various geographies of Christchurch and Canterbury, and on a series of multilingual and multimodal dialogues between exiled speakers.
Nicholas Wright is a lecturer in the English Department, University of Canterbury. He has published on a host of New Zealand poets, and is currently working on a book of essays on the contemporary lyric in Aotearoa.
Jill Sorenson completed her undergraduate studies at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Australia (1991) and gained an MFA (1st class honours) at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (2002). She is a Fine Arts lecturer in the undergraduate program at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design in Auckland and currently undertaking a PhD at Massey University College of Creative Arts,. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally, showing regularly at Whitespace in Auckland and Kobo Chika in Tokyo, as well as regional public galleries and independent exhibition spaces throughout New Zealand. She has initiated and lead a number of collaborative group projects played out as a series of installations at Rm Gallery in Auckland and Blue Oyster in Dunedin. She is currently instigating research into ‘thinking together’ through the Conversation Pit project.
Part of my aim with Poetry Shelf is to build bridges between diverse poetry communities and in doing so create a hub for sharing poems, interviews, news, anecdotes, ideas, interviews, audio, podcasts, reviews, new books, old books and so on. I want to engage with and showcase a diversity of voices.
I live on the outskirts of Auckland on the west coast, with dodgy internet, mobile reception and power, and at the moment scarce water (!) and I don’t get into the city that often. So I am dependent on the books I am sent, and my communications with as many poets as possible. I feel both inside and outside communities, belonging not-belonging.
Researching and writing Wild Honey took me into all manner of communities – past and present. Utterly fascinating. Always surpising. I found goodwill, bitchiness, support and aroha in the archives. Connections between women poets seemed vital, especially when women were writing in the shadows. The 2019 Wild Honey events were something special – and got me thinking about connectedness and bridges and how belonging to one community is not enough. Listening hard counts. I agree with Louise Wallace – kindness, generosity and diversity – are crucial. I see this in what she is doing with The Starling.
Poetry Shelf is my made-up and constantly evolving community and includes best friends, people whose poetry I have admired for a long time, people whom I have never met, new discoveries. Why do I do this crazy thing that takes up so much time and operates outside the currency of money? Because no matter how tired or challenged or doubt-smashed I feel, in its drive to celebrate, question, and connect, Poetry Shelf is a necessary form of nourishment. It is like a huge loving poetry family with a truckload of goodwill and support. It constantly surprises and delights me. Do keep in touch. Do let me know of new discoveries.
Louise Wallace:
Poetry communities matter and have mattered to me immensely. Writing is of course a solitary act, but what’s the fun in doing the rest of it alone? A common misconception seems to be that the NZ poetry community is bitchy or competitive. I have found the opposite to be true. I am grateful for the opportunities I have received, often sent my way by other writers. Poetry communities can fulfil different needs at different times. As a young writer I really valued being surrounded by my peers who were on the same journey as me, and the help and guidance offered to me by senior writers. As a new mum last year I was physically isolated, unable to attend many literary events. Online communities filled that gap as a way to stay connected and still feel myself – I listened to poetry podcasts while out walking my son in his pram, I kept up with NZ poetry news on twitter whenever I could check my phone. Community to me means creating space for others. It means making sure there is room for as many different voices as we can imagine. It means generosity and kindness: lifting each other up. If there’s a window, fill it with someone else’s name.
Jordan Hamel:
I spent a long time figuring out how to answer this. Obviously the answer is yes, but I didn’t know how to articulate what poetry communities to me, ironically it took me to until last minute to ask other people for their opinions, my friend Sara gave me a great analogy. There’s an old classroom trust-building exercise where a bunch of kids sit in a circle and two kids in the middle are blindfolded and try to beat each other with rolled-up newspaper. They have to rely on the voices of the circle to tell them where to swing and gently push them in the right direction. What an apt metaphor, almost too on the nose. Sincerity is awful and I apologise in advance but strap yourself in because here we go.
When I first started writing, like most people I felt like the blindfolded kid swinging the newspaper, never sure if I was hitting anything. In the past couple of years I’ve found a circle, well circles plural, different, intersecting, amorphous circles, some occupy physical spaces like readings, writers groups and open mics, others digital and less tangible, all are so important to me and my poetry. I think the great thing about the metaphor is, in poetry communities you aren’t always the one in the middle wildly swinging, you’re also in the circle guiding others as they go through the same thing, sometimes you’re the one who created the circle in the first place, but as wholesome as this extended metaphor is, poetry communities in NZ aren’t perfect, we could all take a look at our circles and think how we can make them bigger, more inclusive, flexible, every so often we can turn around and try to see who’s outside the circle, blindly stumbling and swinging on their own, or who’s too nervous to even ask to join in. I’ve been lucky enough to find people who will let me play even though most of the time I still feel like a blindfolded kid swatting at darkness, but I think everyone feels that way and everyone needs those voices.
Sugar Magnolia Wilson:
This is such a good question for me right now. The answer is very much yes, poetry communities do matter to me, but also, no, not as much as they used to in the way that they used to.
Before 2012 my poetry community was just myself. I wrote and wrote, for years, in creative isolation and it was awesome, but I didn’t know any different so it wasn’t really anything. It was just the way it was. Come 2012 and I got accepted into the IIML masters course. It changed my life. My views were challenged, my writing grew, and I had such an amazing time being part of the Wellington writing community. The book launches. Amazing writer friends with the same writerly bullshit struggles. The support and lots of love and wine. So much creative generosity and oh boy is Wellington good at that. Without that kind of hothouse scenario, my book wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t have turned my writing into a craft. But … like all good things, it needed to have its own little death.
I started, last year some time, to feel a bit sad about the whole thing. The launch of Wild Honey really defined what a poetry community should look like for me; big, wise, loving, many-voiced, multi-generational. I can’t really explain it, other than I felt like my IIML year had gone on for eight years instead of one, and that I was really and truly ready to graduate and throw my cap off and leave it in the rain. I realised that in order for my writing to survive beyond one book, that I needed to go it alone, to figuratively and literally move away, to let go of all the stuff and the scene and sort of competitive element than can start to creep in. I’m not interested in that stuff and I don’t want to be defined by my success on the Unity Books Bestsellers list. No shade to Unity wot wot.
Anyway, now I live in the bush and it’s nice, and I’m eternally grateful for poetry communities. I am hoping that over time a new kind of one will grow. Something wild and sweet that lets me grown in new ways.
Eliana Gray
Yes!!!! Where would I be, where would any of us be without community? Community to me is the bedrock and the impetus for everything. Why do we write if not to communicate with others? Why do we communicate if not to build community? I feel that almost every – if not all – human action has community building at its base.
We would be very little without community, isolated ghosts. I don’t think that sounds very fun. Other humans are one of the key ways we define our existence. I just can’t imagine life without it. Communities make me a happier person, a better writer, more accountable, more empathetic, a smarter person, harder, better, faster, stronger, all of it. Thank you to everyone in my poetry communities. I am still alive because you make life very appealing.
Vana Manasiadis:
I tried to answer this question before I fell down a metaphor hole grabbing at definitions all the way. What do I think a [poetry] community is, does, has? I like these community values: respect, agency, meaningful participation, collaboration, integrity, inclusion. When I’ve had poetry community experiences that have included lots of these things – kōrero, voices, tautoko – they are like blood transfusions. Like actual substance, and substantiveness. Like: I don’t have to long-walk/talk-listen-disagree-agree-eat-drink-stay late with my poetry community every day and night (though that’s the dream) but I do need more than brief SM broadcasts. (And clearly I’m saying this as a judgmental SM recluse who has swallowed the hard self-inflicted pill of not being part of a/the poetry community online; and who spends way too much time wondering whether it’s even possible to be in the same community as folks who’ve super-active-online-selves). But. Anyway. In my wider-panning poetry community (see above) – which really, really matters to me (see blood) – aside from curation there’s also accident, mess, aporía, and slow time. And now I think of it, I’m in a small but ecstatic community of poets who write long and languorous emails to each other. I should say epistles obviously.
Emer Lyons:
I was working on Heather McPherson’s poem ‘stein song for the blue house’ this month and I was drawn back to a quote from Starhawk’s book Spiral Dance: The Rebirth of The Ancient Religion of The Great Goddess:
And Goddess religion is lived in community. Its primary focus is not individual salvation or enlightenment or enrichment but the growth and transformation that comes through intimate interactions and common struggles. Community includes not only people but also the animals, plants, soil, air and water and energy systems that support our lives. Community is personal—one’s closest friends, relatives, and lovers, those to whom we are accountable. But in a time of global communications, catastrophes, and potential violence, community must also be seen as reaching out to include all the earth (1999, 22).
Poetry communities are rife with nepotism, can become insular, and elitist, and benchmarks in people’s minds for what is deemed good or bad poetry, rather than the focus being on the sharing of “intimate interactions and common struggles.” The poet Fatimah Asghar says, “I work in the medium of community,” and I feel that, but only as far as community is a place from which I can question, include, and remain accountable.
Kiri Piahana-Wong:
Yes! Poetry communities matter, and they matter to me. I love how people who write in different styles and perform in different modes can find their poetry ‘home’ in different communities of poets. For many years my poetry community was Poetry Live. Attending the event every week somehow kept me grounded in poetry, and the friends I made there were endlessly encouraging of my poetry attempts. It made me feel strongly that poetry was not a niche hobby but rather an art form to take seriously. I’m grateful for the years that Poetry Live was my second home, and I’m also not the first person to meet their husband/future husband or wife/future wife there!
Olivia Macassey:
To begin my answer at the shallow end, writing poetry can feel like a bit of a strange compulsion, so there’s camaraderie involved in being with others who are just as crazy. I vividly remember my astonishment and joy when, as a teenager, I first encountered a bunch of poets en masse (in 90s Auckland at the Shakespeare tavern), and realized how not-alone I was. There’s a solidarity involved in this, which can be supportive and nurturing, and that matters to me. In recent years I’ve been involved in projects in the Northland community, led by Piet Nieuwland, and appreciate the wider perspective of seeing how poetry communities and other communities overlap and weave together and strengthen one another. Shared experiences, interests, kaupapa are essentially about similarity, but there’s also an important dimension that is about difference, mutual discovery and renewal: the way we encounter new ways of seeing and thinking and writing, spark off one another aesthetically, conceptually, politically, or in terms of practice.
Another important type of community is the kind of imagined communities we inhabit as writers. In a narrow sense I see this in, say, different people who may be connected through a particular publisher or publication (such as brief or this blog) – poets I may have read a lot, but not necessarily met or interacted with – but in a wider sense, it’s about ‘finding your people’ outside the constraints of time and place. An imagined community can centralize marginal poetics; social class, disability, sexuality. In my youth, I think without a sense of structures of feeling beyond the mainstream paradigms, or some connection to other poetic genealogies, I would have felt lost, and these communities continue to matter to me. At the deepest level though, for me, the act of writing always already anticipates community because a poem is a priori an act of communication, of reciprocity; its very existence implies a shared world. I write because I have found you: I write in order to find you.
James Norcliffe:
Writing poetry is a solitary act and in adolescence, when poetry began for me, it had a solitary audience as well. There was often an idealised, intended audience, but I was never brave enough to show my poems to her.
Later, though, craving a larger audience, it became apparent that other people wrote poetry too, and while the practice wasn’t as arcane as clog dancing or synchronised swimming (although it was up there) it was clearly rarefied. Still, reading and submitting to magazines and attending the odd reading, made me aware that these people had names. Moreover some of them were local and, in time, I got to know them.
I’m not entirely sure what a ‘poetry community’ is. I’m pleased the question put community in the plural as it suggests a variety of communities of different sizes, purposes and flavours.
I belong to several. Firstly there is a small core of very close friends I’ve made through poetry and whom I number among my nearest and dearest. We meet regularly, eat together, occasionally holiday together and generally have a great time. We read and support each other’s work (and often launch it), but we’ve moved beyond the shallows of writing and into the warmer, deeper sea of friendship.
Secondly, there’s a closely-knit of poets of about half a dozen poets whom I meet with monthly, a group David Gregory once laughingly called the ‘poots’ groop’ and so the name remains. The p.g. has a shifting population with a fairly stable core and we meet to share and critique each other’s poems. It has been going probably about twenty years and one or two of the first group are part of this as well. I’m off to a meeting tonight feeling a little fraught as I need to find something to take. Even, if I don’t find anything I know I’ll have a great time and that among the laughs there’ll be a lot of close reading and penetrating thought. Just lovely.
Thirdly there’s the wider group of Christchurch writers I’ve been associated with for well over thirty years: the Canterbury Poets’ Collective. This highly active group organises an annual series of readings, bringing poets from beyond the city to a relatively large Christchurch audience. There are eight readings a season – now in Spring – involving over twenty four guest readers and large numbers of b.y.o. people. The CPC also occasionally organises one off readings and events, typically National Poetry Day celebrations. I suppose it involves two communities: the organising committee who are a dedicated set who mix a common goal with fellowship, and the wider collective who come along to support the readings, a large number of whom take part.
Finally, there’s the wider national poetry community of poets I’ve got to know over the years through the magazine and book editing I’ve done. A number of these I’ve only corresponded with, but most I’ve eventually met in real life and many have become firm friends.
All of these communities are hugely important to me. Writers are assumed to have monstrous egos and are supposed to be fiercely competitive. This has not been my experience. I’ve treasured the warmth, encouragement and critical support of people within all of these groups, particularly the more intimate ones. I have never been especially confident in my person or sure of my work although I pretend otherwise. It has been so good to have been nurtured by these communities and so satisfying to have nurtured others who are part of them
Hebe Kearney:
The Titirangi Poets group meets once every month in the Titirangi library, surrounded by bush and chickens, which roam the library car park in gangs. When poetry happens, it happens in a circle. Each person reads in turn like a set of dominoes, one following the other. A ‘round robin’ format.
Just knowing that they are there, in the clean and the library quiet, taking a few hours just for the sake of words, makes me feel better about waking and walking in this world. When I had the privilege of reading there I experienced it as a circle of support, everyone had a kind word to say, a suggestion to give me about honing the sound of my voice and words.
Poetry communities like this matter because everywhere there is poetry there are words living, words breathing and growing in power. Virginia Woolf once described poetry as ‘a voice answering a voice’ – poetry is always communal in that it is always a communication, a reaching of one person towards another and back. Poetry communities not only matter, but poetry communities are themselves part of the act of poetry.
Personally, I have tended to write quietly and hold my words close to myself. It is only recently I have begun learning to let my words free, and to really acknowledge the part of poetry that is the voice listening and the voice answering back. And it is through poetry communities that this interaction of voice and voice can be facilitated.
So I am bursting with appreciation and gratitude for poetry communities. They make space in a busy world for the simple beauty of words, and remind those of us with a penchant for hiding of the reciprocity at the heart of poetry. The way that, in essence, it is all about sharing.
The contributors:
Eliana Gray is a poet from Ōtepoti. They like queer subtext in teen comedies and not much else. They have had words in: SPORT, Mimicry, Minarets, Mayhem and others. Their debut collection, Eager to Break, was published by Girls On Key Press (2019) and they are the 2020 writer in residence at Villa Sarkia, Finland. It is very very snowy and they love it.
Jordan Hamel is a Pōneke-based poet and performer. He was the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam champion and competed at the World Poetry Slam Championships in 2019. He has poems published or forthcoming in Sport, takahē, Poetry NZ Yearbook 2020, Mimicry, Mayhem, Queen Mob’s Teahouse and elsewhere.
Hebe Kearney is from Christchurch but now calls Auckland her home. She currently studying to complete her Honours in Classics at the University of Auckland. Her work has appeared in Starling, The Three Lamps and Oscen.
Emer Lyons is an Irish, lesbian writer in her final year as a creative/critical PhD candidate in the English programme at the University of Otago, Dunedin.
Olivia Macassey’s poetry has appeared in Rabbit, Poetry New Zealand, Otoliths, Takahē, Landfall and other places. She is the author of two books, edits brief and co-edits Fast Fibres.
James Norcliffe is a poet, editor and children’s author. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Deadpan (OUP, 2019). In 2010 he took part in the XX International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia and in 2011 the Trois Rivieres International Poetry Festival in Quebec. With Jo Preston he co-edited Leaving the Red Zone, a collection of poems prompted by the Canterbury earthquakes and, with Michelle Elvy and Frankie McMillan, Bonsai (CUP) New Zealand’s first major collection of flash and short fiction. A new anthology co-edited with Michelle Elvy and Paula Morris Ko Tātou Aotearoa | We Are New Zealand celebrating Aotearoa / NZ diversity is to be published this year.
Kiri Piahana-Wong is a poet and editor, and she is the publisher at Anahera Press.
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. Louise lives in Dunedin with her husband and their young son, and is currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing, focussing on contemporary long-form narrative poetry by women.
Sugar Magnolia Wilson lives in Fern Flat, a valley in the far North. In 2012 she completed her MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, both in New Zealand and overseas, and she co-founded the journal, Sweet Mammalian, with Morgan Bach and Hannah Mettner, which is now run by poet, Rebecca Hawkes. Auckland University Press launched Magnolia’s debut collection, cecause a Woman’s Heart is Like a Needle at the Bottom of the Ocean in 2019; it is longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards.
Ashleigh Young, from ‘Everything’ in How I Get Ready (VUP, 2019)
Going West 2019 is not over yet – but the weekend that brings writers and readers together in a warm bush setting is! Mark Easterbrook, the festival’s creative director, tweeted that every one was tweeting about chickens and not ideas – and here I am wondering how many chickens will make their way into poems. Co-incidentally I finished my Wild Honey session by reading Ashleigh Young’s heavenly poem where chickens are much loved.
Actually when I arrived I switched my car off and thought it must need a new engine as my car sounded like a chicken! I panicked then saw the hen under the car. We all have our hen stories.
But yes the weekend was rich in kōrero, stories, poetry, conversations, connections. Listening to Apirana Taylor perform his poetry, Elizabeth Knox’s terrific oration on Friday night (I felt I was eavesdropping on the train!) and then talk about The Absolute Book with Dylan Horrocks the next day, (oh jumped to the top of my novel pile!) and Witi Ihimaera discussing his new memoir Native Son and seeking forgiveness from his younger self – was breathtakingly good. Restorative.
I loved hearing Vana Manasiadis read from The Grief Almanac. The writers in the museum session were a fresh wild wind blasting through my body reactivating skin and bones and I just adored them: Saraid de Silva Cameron, To’asavili Tuputala, Louise Tu’u, Lucy Zee.
And it was pretty special to sit on stage with Kiri Piahana-Wong and Anne Kennedy, talk about women’s poetry in Aoteaora and hear them read poems by other women.
I missed The Bellbirds on Friday night because I was so tired and had to drive back to Te Henga in the treacherous weather and got lost in the dark driving like an accident-prone snail and found myself driving up a narrow mountainous road ( I have never got lost coming back from GW) with nowhere to turn around and my heart beating wildly. I was on Mountain Road! I took me so long to get home I should have stayed for the Bellbirds. Fergus said they were gorgeous. Everyone was singing their praises. Ah!
This is always a family-like festival – relaxed, warm, empathetic, community building. Things were a little different this year – the seats arranged differently making audience flow easier, the food breaks were different but offered equally delicious fare, and pleasingly some sessions lasted an hour – but whatever changes were made the festival essence makes it a must-attend experience for me. Maybe with a bit more poetry! I was pleased to see many of the visiting authors listen to other sessions – I was disappointed to see so few Auckland writers in the audience. I find the support of writing communities so different in other cities. Ah – but the hall was full, and readers and writers got talking.