NZ poets on the way up
‘‘Something really interesting and fun, dazzling, sometimes powerful’’ are words Steve Braunias uses to describe the resurgence of New Zealand poetry in the introduction to his anthology The Friday Poem: 100 New Zealand Poems.
Braunias will discuss the collection on October 25, the opening day of this year’s Page & Blackmore Pukapuka Talks, alongside three poets who feature in the book: Emma Neale, Chris Tse and Tayi Tibble. Nelson poet and NMIT creative writing tutor Cliff Fell will chair the session.
Braunias, an author, columnist, journalist and editor, introduced the Friday Poem slot on the website The Spinoff in 2015. Since then, a new poem has been published every week.
The slot has provided a platform for emerging writers to showcase their voices. Braunias’s anthology, drawn from The Spinoff between 2015 to 2018, is, he says, evidence of ‘‘something quite exciting’’.
The book features well-established poets such as Sam Hunt, Bill Manhire and Fleur Adcock alongside rising stars like Tibble, Hera Lindsay Bird, Ashleigh Young and Claudia Jardine.
Fell says audiences will hear more about the shifting tides and recent surge of New Zealand poetry, the sorts of criteria poetry editors look for, as well as how the anthology came about. ‘‘Above all, though, we’re going to be hearing some of the terrific poems in the book, read by the poets themselves.’’
Neale, the author of six novels and six poetry collections and editor of Landfall, one of New Zealand’s leading literary journals, will also be discussing her latest book To The Occupant. Described as ‘‘shape-shifting’’, it engages with a full spectrum of human emotion.
Joining her on stage will be Tse, who won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book in poetry in 2016 for How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes.
His second collection, He’s So MASC, which covers issues of identity and delves into the world of hypermasculine romanticism, was named one of the New Zealand Herald’s Best Books of 2018.
The Friday Poem panel would not be complete without Tibble, who according to Braunias was essential to his decision to publish the book.
Her collection Poūkahangatus speaks about beauty, activism, power, and popular culture, and won this year’s Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book, along with the 2017 Adam Foundation Prize. Tibble read her elegy Hoki Mai at a 2018 Anzac Day dawn parade attended by 25,000 people in Wellington.
The Friday Poem – October 25, 3.30pm at the Granary Festival Cafe´. Tickets online from nelsonartsfestival.nz and TicketDirect, or in person from i-SITE, Nelson Centre for Musical Arts, Theatre Royal or Richmond Mall information desk.