‘Summer at the beach is in my bones’

Wellington poet Adrienne Jansen has launched Roll & Break (Landing Press, RRP $22), celebrating NZ beaches.

Why beaches in particular?

I live at T¯ıtahi Bay, a small beach north of Wellington, and Roll & Break is a collection of poems about that beach. But they’re not your usual beach poems. A refugee is washed ashore, Van Gogh is painting the boat sheds, a violinist is playing in a dinghy. They’re what happens when you walk on a beach and let your imagination rummage around inside your head. I walk there often, but also, like many New Zealanders, the sea is part of my family history, and summer at the beach is in my bones. It was probably inevitable that I would eventually decide to write about this small wild bay that I love, and during the first lockdown I started to do just that.

There’s a WWII gun emplacement on T¯ıtahi Bay beach (and the remnants of another two). I began to think about how ridiculous it was to defend this little bay and beachside settlement with three guns. What was the point? So I wrote a poem about T¯ıtahi Bay being invaded by the Japanese or the Germans, and it’s a kind of simple domestic view, because I didn’t take it seriously. Then I discovered that the machine guns were really heavy duty, could inflict a lot of damage, and were there to protect crucial radio communications. So I should have eaten my words! But I didn’t. I left the poem in the collection instead.

You teach creative writing and mentor others – what’s the most common challenge emerging writers have and your advice for them?

Self-belief, the confidence to keep going – those are big challenges for a lot of writers, and I’ve been there myself. But over the past few years I’ve been writing poetry with ESOL students, men in transitional housing – people who have never written before – and you just need to set them up well, give them some belief in themselves, and they write amazing stuff. You learn to write by writing – not thinking about it, not putting it off, just doing it. And it’s always good to remember you have to write a lot of rubbish to get to the gold.

Tell us how you write.

I don’t have a very orderly life so routine doesn’t come easily. I prefer to work in large chunks but that’s partly because I like large writing projects which require those chunks. Poems are different. I just chip away at them at odd hours, looking to solve a word here, or a line there. But finding the discipline/time to write has never been a problem to me, because I love it.