Images from the Poetry NZ Yearbook 2017 Launch

Koha [photo: BL]

Books [photo: BL]

Rachel Cooper (Paradox Books) [photo: MUP]

Booktable [photo: BL]

Order of Service:

Introduction:
Jan Mason (Devonport Library Associates)

MC:
Jack Ross (Editor: Poetry New Zealand)

Launch speech:
Michele Leggott

Publisher (Massey University Press):
Nicola Legat

Featured Poet:
Elizabeth Morton

PNZ Poetry Prize winners:
Emma Shi (1st)
Devon Webb (2nd)

Other poets from the issue:
Stu Bagby
Johanna Emeney
Emma Harris
Kiri Piahana-Wong
Lisa Samuels

Conclusion:
Jack reads out Hayden Pyke's third prize-winning poem

Jan Mason [photo: JE]

Jack Ross [photo: MUP]

Jack Ross [photo: JE]

Jack Ross [photo: BL]

Michele Leggott [photo: MUP]

Michele Leggott [photo: JE]

Michele Leggott [photo: BL]

Nicola Legat [photo: MUP]

Nicola Legat [photo: JE]

Nicola Legat [photo: BL]

Elizabeth Morton (Featured poet, Yearbook 2017) [photo: MUP]

Elizabeth Morton [photo: BL]

Emma Shi (First prize winner, Inaugural PNZ Poetry Award) [photo: MUP]

Emma Shi [photo: BL]

Devon Webb [photo: BL]

Stu Bagby [photo: BL]

Johanna Emeney [photo: BL]

Johanna Emeney [photo: David Beaney]

Emma Harris [photo: BL]

Kiri Piahana-Wong [photo: BL]

Lisa Samuels (Featured poet, Yearbook 1) [photo: MUP]

Lisa Samuels [photo: BL]

The right wing [photo: BL]

The crowd (1) [photo: MUP]

The left wing [photo: BL]

The crowd (2) [photo: JE]

Key:

JE = Johanna Emeney
BL = Bronwyn Lloyd
MUP = Massey University Press

Upcoming events: Lauris Edmond Launch [2/4/17]

Steele Roberts Aotearoa Publishers
warmly invite you to celebrate the Auckland launch of
Night Burns with a White Fire
The Essential Lauris Edmond
edited by Frances Edmond & Sue Fitchett
3.30pm to 5pm Sunday, 2 April 2017
at
Gus Fisher Gallery, the Kenneth Myers Centre,
74 Shortland Street, Auckland Central
To be launched by Riemke Ensing with readings of Lauris’s poetry.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
RSVP: Frances Edmond – feedmond@gmail.com by 26 March 2017

10 Questions with Jack Ross [22/2/17]

photograph: Mary Paul

10 Questions with Jack Ross
Editor of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017

This interview appeared on the Massey University Press website on 22nd February 2017:

1. Now that it’s published, what pleases you most about New Zealand Poetry Yearbook 2017?

I think the thing I like best about it is the number of younger contributors we’ve managed to include. My wife Bronwyn was leafing through it the other day and suddenly burst out: ‘These kids are putting us all to shame!’ That’s about right, I think. It’s not that I’ve relaxed any of my editorial standards to ease them in over the bar — on the contrary, there seem to be a lot of younger writers out there (most of whom I’d never even heard of before), who are writing hard-hitting, honest, beautiful poems. Long may the trend continue! I think some of it may be due to the fact that we now allow — or, rather, encourage — email submissions. You have to be pretty organised (as well as pretty determined) to keep on sending out those typed submissions, complete with stamped self-addressed envelopes, week after week, month after month, the way we used to do . . .


2. It’s edition #51. That’s a lot of years. What's been the Yearbook's contribution to New Zealand poetry over that long period?

Well, it’s done a number of things over the years. First of all, under Louis Johnson’s editorship, I think it offered a funkier alternative to the rather po-faced pieties of Charles Brasch’s Landfall. That’s not to belittle Brasch’s undoubted achievements, but his single-minded pursuit of aesthetic excellence did involve a certain abridgment of the fun factor.

The magazine as I first got to know it, though, midway through Alistair Paterson’s twenty-year incumbency, had some rather different things going for it. Alistair was tireless in coaching and advising and prodding the poets who submitted work to him to think about every possible word and detail in their poems before he would print them. He’d ring you up and quiz you about your work on the phone, and woe betide you if you didn’t have a good reason for everything you’d done.

I feel that I myself owe him a considerable debt not just for those coaching sessions, but for the example he set in taking his editorship of the magazine so seriously. No one would appear in his pages on reputation only. By the same token, no one was excluded who could supply him with good work.

There’ve been many changes of personnel and approach in the seven decades Poetry New Zealand has been appearing here. I don’t think it’s ever forgotten its central goal to reflect rather than dictate the nature of New Zealand poetry, though. We’d like to be seen as more of a mirror than a poetic movement.


3. You must be very conscious of that heritage and legacy as its current editor?

Very much so. In fact, I gave a paper on that very subject, what editing a magazine called Poetry New Zealand ought to entail, at the University of Canberra late last year. After my talk a guy came up to me. He told me that the one thing I’d left out of my piece was fun. He said that the images I’d put up of the first two issues I’d edited did look like fun, but some of the covers of the earlier numbers looked anything but!






He went on to explain that his own day job was working as a clown in hospital wards — trying to cheer up people in the most extreme distress. What he said made immediate sense to me, I must say. I do have a rather peculiar sense of humour, which is constantly getting me in trouble. But I suspect that puncturing the pretensions of the great with humour is one of the things that poetry does best. If there were no laughs in an issue of Poetry New Zealand I’d put together, I think it would be time to give up the job for good.


4. Your featured poet is Elizabeth Morton. What is distinctive about her work?




Elizabeth Morton


Liz Morton’s poems have a kind of otherworldly air to them which fascinates me. I love reading them, and featuring her seemed like the best way of getting to see more of them. She’s undoubtedly a writer of great technical talent, but I guess what really attracts me to her work is its uncompromising nature. She goes places other people are afraid to go.


5. The Yearbook's reviews of other volumes of poetry are very comprehensive. Why is this important?

There’s nothing more depressing than pouring your heart and soul into a book or a work of art and then getting no response to it whatsoever. And I have to admit that there’s a strong tendency in New Zealand culture to greet anything too ambitious, or which rocks the boat too much, with dead silence. I don’t feel that’s good enough. Even if our reactions can’t always be entirely positive, I still think that the time and trouble that goes into making even the slimmest volume of poems shouldn’t be ignored. In the course of my own publishing career, I’ve received some amazingly detailed and helpful reviews, from people who’ve really gone out of their way to try to understand exactly what I thought I was up to. I feel very grateful for that. The only real response to such dedication is to try my best to return the favour to others.


6. Tell us about the poetry competition winners announced in this edition.

The three prize-winners have very different attributes, as well as a few things in common:

Hayden Pyke, the third prize-winner is, I suspect, as much at home with song lyrics as he is with poetry. The two are generally mutually exclusive, but he does seem to me to be one of those rare people who can write a poem which would work equally well on the page and as a song. There’s a mordant wit there, alongside a lot of frustrated romanticism.




Jocelen Jenon: Devon Webb


Devon Webb, who came second with her poem ‘Note to Self,’ has a lot of good advice to impart — and some not so good advice too, I fear. The fact that it’s so hard to tell where one begins and the other ends is (I guess) what appeals to me so strongly in her poem. How tongue-in-cheek is it? I guess we’ll never know, but it’s amusing to speculate about it.




Emma Shi


Emma Shi is one of those rare people who appears to have been born with a kind of poetic perfect pitch. Her work is strange, and suggestive, and disturbing. It has a lot to do with illness, and death, as well as the intricacies and perfections of nature. There’s something quite awe-inspiring about her talent.


7. What's going on in poetry in New Zealand right now, do you think?

One thing’s for certain — there’s a lot of it about. Poetry-writing, that is: not necessarily poetry-buying. We used to joke, half ruefully, that if all the people who write poetry in New Zealand bought just one book of it every year, then it would become a growth industry. Seriously, though, I think that some combination of the ease of digital distribution with a general sense of despair about the state of the world has made it seem, all of a sudden, more relevant to people than ever. If you want to attract the attention of the mighty, it’s probably more effective to write a poem than an editorial nowadays.


8. What’s the best time of day for you for editing?

Well, I write first thing in the morning, so I guess that I do most of my editing in the late morning / early afternoon. I have to feel fresh to look at people’s work with attention, but I’m also one of those strange people who quite likes arranging things tidily on a page, and making sure all the commas are in the right place, so that’s something I can happily spend hours on at any time of day.


9. What strategies do you deploy when the going gets tough?

A friend of mine, Grant Duncan, once gave me an excellent piece of advice about editing in general. He said always to be very polite, and to treat people with the utmost respect. Every time I’ve ignored that advice, for whatever reason, I’ve regretted it. It’s good counsel in a worldly sense, but also on a moral level: potential contributors to a publication deserve consideration, not disdain, and I try hard to give that to them. My other strategy is never to send off an important letter or email without sleeping on it. Nine times out of ten a tersely worded missive can be simply deleted next morning with no harm done.


10. What are you reading at the moment?

I’m reading The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins, which T. S. Eliot called the first, the longest and the best detective novel in English. I’ve always had a taste for Dickens’s novels, but I hadn’t previously read much by his long-time friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins. Now I’ve read four of them in a row, and they really are among the strangest and maddest books I’ve ever read: Armadale in particular, but also No Name and The Woman in White.

I’m also reading the new Norton Critical edition of the Arabian Nights, which is a set text for my new Massey Advanced Fiction Writing course. I have a real passion for the 1001 Nights, and have been collecting as many as possible of its different versions and translations in various languages for more than twenty-five years now.

Yearbook 2017 Launch Details!

Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017

The poets are descending on Devonport Library to celebrate the publication of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook 2017, edited by Jack Ross and published by Massey University Press.

Michele Leggott & Olive (photograph: Tim Page)

The book is being launched by Devonport’s own Michele Leggott, and the evening will include readings by ten poets, including Yearbook 2017’s featured poet Elizabeth Morton.

Elizabeth Morton (photograph: EM)

Words, wine, smiles .... It will be a night to remember!

Where:Devonport Library, 2 Victoria Road, Devonport
When:Tuesday 14 March, 7.30pm till late
Cost:Koha appreciated

A Devonport Library Associates Event

•

And here's the media press release, courtesy of MUP's dynamic press officer, Sarah Thornton:

More free PNZ downloads for Christmas

Nicholas Reid, ed: Poetry NZ 46 (2013)

Alistair Paterson, ed: Poetry NZ 47 (2013)

Nicholas Reid, ed: Poetry NZ 48 (2014)

Jack Ross, ed: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)

As a special Christmas treat, and also by way of an apology for letting a whole year go by without an issue of Poetry New Zealand, we've decided to make the complete pdf files of issues 46, 47, 48, and 49 available as free downloads from the Poetry NZ website.

We'd been selling them previously for $NZ 10 each, but from now on all four of them (as well as issue 50) will be free to a good home. Look near the top of the left margin of the each issue's webpage. You'll see, in little red letters: "Free PDF download." Click there.

As part of the changes necessitated by the shift to our new publisher, Massey University Press, we will be selling each annual issue separately in future, and no longer as part of a one or two-year subscription. Our existing obligations under the old subscriptions policy will, of course, be fulfilled, but Poetry New Zealand Yearbook will henceforth be sold through the MUP website, as well (of course) as in good bookshops everywhere. You can still buy copies of the current issue through the Poetry NZ website, but from now on the payments will go through MUP.

This offer of the free downloads is also meant as a thank you to all those valiant subscribers who’ve kept the magazine afloat for so many years. It goes without saying that we’re still going to need your support to continue, but it now seems more practical to market each issue as a discrete item, rather than as part of a package.

Jack Ross, ed: Poetry NZ Yearbook 1 (2014)

Interview on The Review Review [13/12/16]

"I Take Poetry Pretty Seriously."
A Chat With Jack Ross, Editor of Poetry New Zealand

This interview, by contributing editor Sanjeev Sethi, appeared in the The Review Review on 13th December 2016:

From the bowels of New Zealand breezes in Poetry New Zealand, each issue fragrant with literary flowers in the shape of poems, stories, reviews encapsulating rich and rewarding fare. Curating this creative smorgasbord is Dr. Jack Ross, the accomplished and erudite poet-writer-academician. A PhD in English from Edinburgh University, Ross is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University's Albany campus.

Briefly tell our readers about yourself?

I work at Massey University, where I’ve been teaching various types of writing for the past twenty years. The principal focus of my own writing has, however, always been poetry, even though I’ve also published a number of novels, essays and other works of fiction and criticism.

As well as that, I run a blog, The Imaginary Museum [http://mairangibay.blogspot.co.nz], devoted to bookish matters generally.


Poetry New Zealand, “devoted exclusively to poetry and poetics,” started in 1951. Over the years, how do you see its evolution?

Poetry NZ began as an alternative to the centralising trends in New Zealand writing at that time, after the war, when New Zealand had just completed its first century of colonial occupation. The democratic and open-minded approach of its first editor, Louis Johnson, has (I hope) continued to inspire it in each of its various incarnations.

The longest-serving editor has been Alistair Paterson, who presided over the magazine for twenty years–from 1993 until I took over in 2014. He introduced a strong focus on poetics and experimental writing, as well as trying to forge stronger links internationally: with the UK, the USA, and also non-English-speaking writers, such as the French poets of New Caledonia.


A basic question: what is a good poem? Do you think this definition is culture-specific?

For me, a good poem is a piece of writing which is lively and provocative enough to force me ask myself if it really is a poem. In that sense, yes, it’s a personal as well as a culture-specific definition, since my own boredom with what I see as tired and conventional solutions to the problem of (as Kafka put it) “breaking the frozen sea within you” may not apply directly to other readers. They might see a book of neo-Shakespearean sonnets as enchanting, while I might see them as pointless and hackneyed. That’s not to say that I think it impossible to write a good poem in conventional metrical forms nowadays: just that I feel some significant re-imagining has to have taken place to make it really qualify as what I would call a poem.


While reading a submission can you gauge which part of the world the contribution is from?

Sometimes. Not always. One advantage of electronic submission methods is that I often have no idea where an author is from. It is, in any case, very secondary to me in comparison to the question of whether or not I like their work.


According to you, which part of globe is creating the best contemporary poetry?

New Zealand. No, seriously, I think in an age of mass communications it’s impossible to see any regions as particularly privileged creatively. I do think our poets write as well as anyone, though. There’s always been a do-it-yourself, anything-goes mentality here that encourages our writers to try crazy and offbeat things. I like that a lot. We haven’t been trained to avoid the usual mistakes, and the results can often be quite spectacular.


What must a submission have not to get a No from you?

Statistically, a massive number of submissions to the magazine will receive a “No:” at least two thirds of the work that’s been sent in, in fact. I regret that, but it does mean that I can let through only the pieces I’m really certain of.

Sending just one poem rather than our recommended selection of five is a good way to get rejected. Often it’s the last poem, the afterthought, in a group of submissions that really grabs me.

Another way to get rejected is to write so carelessly, with so many typos and grammatical errors, that it’s clear that your work has scarcely been edited. At times one wonders if it’s even been reread by its author! If you take no pride in the exactness and precision of your words, you can hardly expect me to supply that for you.

A naïve, direct poem by a first time author can often be very good. I’m sure I include some such poems in every issue. In general, though, just as with any other art, if you don’t know anything about poetry: hardly read it, are ignorant of technique, have never studied its history, that’s not really a great start.

I take poetry pretty seriously: it fascinates me, in fact. But it’s just like learning a foreign language: you can pick up a few phrases on the street, and eventually learn to get by in conversation, but you’ll never be really fluent unless you devote time and energy to it.


Any favourite themes?

I do try to be pretty eclectic in my tastes. I must confess to a bit of prejudice in favour of poems with a narrative dimension, though. If your poem tells a story, it’ll probably get my attention more quickly than if it indulges in complicated wordplay or lengthy landscape evocation.


Do you think a vibrant critical climate helps in nurturing poetry?

Absolutely. Very much so. At present Poetry NZ maintains a ratio of roughly one third critical writing (essays, interviews and reviews) to two thirds poetry. I’d like–if possible–to increase that over time. I’d be quite happy to see the ratio running half and half.

There really is no point in a cacophony of voices all shouting as loud as they can–many of them, alas, more interested in promoting their own careers than improving the quality and appeal of their work–if there’s no strong structure of critical writing and thought behind it.

I try to commission reviews of as many as possible of the poetry books that appear in New Zealand, as well as a number of international ones. As I’m sure you know yourself, though, reviewing is a difficult and thankless task, and it does require a certain subordination of the ego which not everyone is willing to make.


Any last words?

Yes, I’d like to conclude by saying that while the main focus of Poetry NZ must remain an anatomy of the nature of the poetry produced in this country – in itself a massive task – the last thing I think we should be doing is cutting ourselves off from international trends in poetry. Poets from elsewhere will always be welcome to submit to us, and there’s absolutely no requirement for them to address – or even think about – specifically “New Zealand” issues when they do so.

If you send us your best work, we’ll be happy to include it. And that goes for work in translation and dual-text, too. New Zealand is both a multicultural and a multi-lingual society now, and a true reflection of its poetic identity involves vital questions of language as well as culture.

As a postcolonial state, New Zealand (like many other countries) is only now beginning to come to terms with the theft of land and sovereignty from its indigenous inhabitants, the Maori. That’s as much of a poetic as a political issue for us. We have to try to imagine our way out of these blank walls of hatred and suspicion, try to create a harmony based on mutual respect and justice.


Sanjeev Sethi has published three books of poetry. This Summer and That Summer (Bloomsbury, 2015) is his latest. His poems have found a home in Solstice Literary Magazine, Off the Coast Literary Journal, Hamilton Stone Review, Literary Orphans, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Pyrokinection, Café Dissensus Everyday, Section 8 Magazine, The Jawline Review, The Helios Mss, Right Hand Pointing, Revolution John, Futures Trading, The Aerogram, The Mind[less] Muse, Creative Talents Unleashed, Chronogram, Duane’s Poe Tree, The London Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Allegro Poetry Magazine, Amaryllis Poetry, New English Review, The Galway Review, A New Ulster, In Between Hangovers,  The Open Mouse, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India