ROMY ASH
“I keep a list of poem titles which are really quite specific. If I still find them funny six months later – I found one in my phone last night which is – it goes something like: ‘Each Night I Wonder When The Last Time I’ll
See Jim Carrey’s Face Is’. They’re just like these really improbable things, and if I still think they have a weird energy to me after a couple of months I’ll use them,” says Hera Lindsay Bird, speaking over the sound of gulls screeching. We’re by the waterfront in Wellington, New Zealand, drinking coffee, in the kind of place where the waiters never let your water glass empty. The day is bright and the wind pulls at strands of Bird’s dark hair. She’s talking about poetry and process and her first book, Hera Lindsay Bird. She has a habit of not finishing her sentences, jumping from thought to thought. She pauses to see if I’ve caught up.
“With poetry,” she says, “I just think, if you’re one of those people that has to turn everything in their life into a joke and then you start writing poetry and you don’t leave any of that in, it’s just a bit disingenuous.
Like, you know, I want to write poetry that has honesty about love and relationships and all of that kind of stuff, but I also want it to have that kind of levity to it, because that’s just what I feel it’s like to live in the world. So for me to have honesty in poems…”
She leaves off. Pauses again, to see if I’ve caught up. Bird grew up in Thames, a town on the
Coromandel Peninsula, on the North Island, but she has