Provocative poet heading to Invercargill
Poet Tusiata Avia says she’s forgotten all about the Invercargill mayor’s controversial use of racial slurs in response to her work ahead of a visit to the city. “I did know that he’d said what he said, but so many people said things,” she said, pragmatically. Referring to both Nobby Clark and ACT leader David Seymour’s response to her poem, 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand, Avia said those who usually held power were typically “shocked to their core” when it was held by someone else. So she won’t be expecting a mayoral welcome when she arrives in Invercargill in June for the Dan Davin Literary Foundation Poetry Festival. This year, the foundation will be adding a spoken word category to its poetry competition and the festival encouraged Southland poets to send in recordings of themselves reading their own work. Hearing poets read their own work was a very different experience to reading it, Avia said. “The relationship that the poet who wrote the work has with it is very different from someone who’s reading it.” There were as many different interpretations or reactions to work as there were people who read it, she said. The festival will include readings, panel discussions and workshops, including one presented by Southland poet Ingrid Campbell, who won a recent poetry slam held as part of Shakespeare in the City. Avia will present a master class. Avia was excited about the inclusion of slam poetry, which she said tended to be more theatrical and drew a younger crowd. “It livens things up a bit.” Other than writing poetry, Avia is in the early stages of writing a television series based on an abandoned novel. “It’s a modern take on an old Samoan story,” she revealed cryptically. She had also started a Substack page where she had been writing in a range of formats – from creative non-fiction to opinion pieces and essays. Avia liked the fact that the platform gave her a space to respond to events immediately, unlike books. Like when the ACT party released a press statement in December opposing a grant she had received from Creative NZ for the 2023 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, calling the poetry in her book The Savage Coloniser “racist rants”. Invercargill mayor Nobby Clark unleashed at an Art Foundation event in March, using the N-word, queer, and “f... the bitch’’ while questioning whether the work, which left him feeling angry, counted as hate speech. And while Avia may have forgotten it, others haven’t. The rant was the subject of a bizarre interview with Guy Williams on New Zealand Today, which aired just last month. Described as a “train wreck”, the interview has led to a code of conduct investigation. What men like Clark and Seymour failed to understand was that women were used to feeling uncomfortable because they were made to feel like that all the time, Avia said. “They think we’re on equal footing, but we’re not. They live in a world where they only see things through their own lens. “It’s like a small privileged boy having a tantrum. Not only do they have a tantrum, they weaponise it. “I don’t think they give a stuff about poetry.” But those who do will have a chance to celebrate the artform during the poetry festival, from June 6 to 8. Other notable poets heading to Murihiku for the event are Auckland-based poetry slam champion and educator Sara Hirsch and Dunedin based poets Kay McKenzie Cooke, Jenny Powell and David Eggleton.