poets

"A centipede was happy – quite! Until a toad in fun Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?" This raised her doubts to such a pitch, She fell exhausted in the ditch Not knowing how to run."

"Poetry is part of the struggle. You use the armed struggle; you use political methods… You recite a poem. It’s better than a three-hour speech. It gets to the heart of the matter. It moves people"

"Our nation owes her an enormous debt of gratitude and appreciation for all the sacrifices she has made throughout her life as a committed freedom fighter, a determined cultural and literary activist and a champion for women’s emancipation. She was a phenomenal woman; a woman of grace; a woman of elegance; an embodiment of humility; and courage and dedication personified. Her use of poetry and other writings as a weapon against the brutal and iniquitous system of apartheid created hope for many who could not return to the place of their birth"

"On behalf of my mother, Lindiwe Mabuza we thank Rhodes University for this prestigious award. As a family, we are both humbled and honoured at the recognition of her contribution and commitment to the struggle and her beloved country, South Africa. It is most heartening that she was aware of this accolade as she received the letter from Rhodes shortly before her death. Indeed, I am convinced she is smiling down from the heavens"

"In the stillness the voice inside is louder, much louder, and cannot be ignored"

"Then I close my eyes, and I imagine a world where I sabi and you sabi that we are okay, as we are"

"If there is a pure space inside of us that can access the eternal source, and give rise to great acts of kindness, create masterpiece artworks, inspire life changing technology, and drive a man to risk his life to save a woman and her baby in a flood, where then does that space exist inside us that gives rise to great acts of horror and pain?"

"Perhaps all South Africans need to embrace the mirror of yesteryear, and fear it not, for it holds the answers to the questions that we seek today. Questions that, if left unanswered, will still be asked by generations yet to come.”"

"There is a duality to South Africa, as in all of life itself, that is evident, and as stark as the inequality among its citizens"

"Our stories are important and need to be told"

"Molly's from his series Dance to the Music of Time, in episode ten"

"The mind of a child is a very different thing, and getting into that mind and just seeing the way the mind works...my younger daughter says 'you know if you stand on your head, you don't blink'. Now I don't know if that's true or not, but what a great line and I'm going to use that in a book that I'm writing at the moment..."

"In fact her writing reminds me of your writing actually . . . it's insightful and it's layered. And it's a bit like intellectual quicksand"

"It was just extraordinary from the moment I started reading it. It doesn't have any chapters, and you just don't want it to stop. It's like that feeling of being a child again when you're reading a book and you honestly stay up all night reading it."

"I love the title, I loved it. in the same way that the stories take on extra meaning after coming after the other stories. What I love about it is the way the title 'Opportunity' takes on so much meaning coming after the novel's provocation..."

"You can read it with a perfectly straight face but kind of chuckle inwardly; that's what I like."

"Writing didn't really get a look in until we had children. I made the decision that I was going to stay home and bring the kids up myself, and oddly enough that gave me the opportunity and the time to write finally. I say time very loosely there..."

"I have a new scarlet coat and I look like a fire engine and I don't give a damn..."

"I'm always happy because your definition of 'young" is elastic..."

"...a lot of really bad books, like just shit books, are written with really great plots that really move along, and why should the devil have all the good tunes you know? I like a good story in a book. It's not very fashionable to say that, because people associate good stories with the kind of books that are a cop-out: books that are like bad middlebrow popular fiction. But what's bad about being entertained?"

"...I wouldn't really be interested in writing a biography about someone who was obvious and straightforward. It's the enigma of a particular personality, I think, that drives your interest as a biographer. With someone like [John] Mulgan, someone like [Ralph] Hotere, there is a core there which is truly enigmatic, and which obviously fuels the work."

"Part of that shorthand is the way that she works as well. I mean she's got this very reduced, very spare kind of style, which I loved. But more than anything I found it so compelling because of this fantastic unconsummated love, that really acts as a huge narrative pull."

"...legends are not only necessary to us, but however strong the legend, even if you try to demolish it, you can't. In fact you end up reinforcing it . . . We writers are mythmakers, whether we like it or not. The moment you write a book, you are very often adding to and sometimes creating a myth, and I've done both and I'm very happy with that."

"If someone was to tell me that I'd be raving on TV about a book about Diana, that's pink, [reading on] the bus, as a straight male, I'd tell you that 'you're wrong'. Let me just tell you that it's one of the most compelling books I've read!"

"The place is the context of the poetry. It's not that I write about the place, but the poetry comes out of my life in the place. So in that way it is tremendously important To me, and I'm sure i wouldn't be writing what I'm writing if I weren't in Bluff."

"...she's not a sentimental writer. There are times when she's as referential as a nun. At times she leaps into a comic, clownish dance. And times when she thunders like an Old Testament prophet."

"...I have a problem with historic novels, I think that they tend to become history lessons and this book at times becomes a history lesson"

"The fact that he can focus so deeply on a dinner, or a conversation at a beach, or you know, the impending non-consummation of a marriage, was really wonderful. It had all the depth. But I was quite captivated by the food, the English food, and how kind of unappealing it was. It was just so banal and humdrum."

"For me, the idea that people in the past can be present, is not a very strange idea when you've had a lot of experience with people that feel that way. Being with [knowing] elders like Eruera Stirling for 20 odd years . . . he looked at the ancestors as if they were just in the next room."

"Within this poem the ghost of an accentual meter can be heard, and the metrical scheme, while loose, is something near the traditional 4, 3, 4, 3 ballad stanza. And it is off-rhymed, xaxa. Perhaps the ballad was lurking behind the scenes all along. It has been mentioned that Dear Neil Roberts is rhythmically close to prose. I think this is true (as it is for a wide range of contemporary free verse), but I also think that writing to a regular stanzaic shape can lead to some interesting effects. For instance, rhymes frequently occur at line-ends. And there are lines in the book that are straight iambic pentameter. It has to be remembered that poetry is a genre, and can be written in verse, prose, or any combination of the two. Writing Dear Neil Roberts as a poem allowed me to present, juxtapose and interpret information in a different manner, than if I had set out to write an extended essay or a work of New Zealand history."

"...all those other 'How To' books were just about people that knew about this thing. This is different, because he's not a bird-watcher; this is his journey into that world . . . I'd like it hardbacked and leather, because it's a lovely book. It's one you'd want to treasure."

"Hers was the first voice like hers that I had discovered in literature before. I was good at English . . . I had never come across a voice like hers before. She was a black woman from the States, and she just blew my mind..."

"The thing is, Neil, you are all of us’ is one of the first parts of the book I wrote, back in 2011. I had known Neil Roberts’s story for some time and it had occurred to me it would be interesting to write a long poem about the incident. One of the things that struck me early on in my research, from reading various anarchist/ libertarian communist web entries, was the sense of ownership amongst these radical left communities for the story. It was as though each person who had re-told the story, while not endorsing Neil’s act, could identify with the way he must have felt. In this poem I drew on my own experience within the Wellington anarchist scene – although not every detail is ‘true’, the characters in this poem do approximate real people, myself included."

"Oh it's terrifying, yeah: you come up to publication day and you suddenly realise 'right that's it, it's out in the world'. I remember when my publishers were telling me that it was starting to get on the bestseller list, and I was thinking 'Okay, well I've got a lot of family and a lot of friends, so okay that accounts for the first week'. And then I started realising that absolute strangers were gonna be reading it and...yeah it is quite terrifying actually."

"I never decided that I would; I was just never able to stop."

"A great deal of my fiction deals with extreme violence erupting in normal lives."

"...of course it wasn't called Lord of the Flies to begin with; it was called something awful like A Cry of Children. And it took 22 goes to get the manuscript actually on the desk at Faber and Faber for someone to accept it. All these stories come out . . . the professional book reader who looked at Lord of the Flies and said 'rubbish, dull, pointless'."

"...what I liked about it is . . . you never know if you're nuts, you know? And he had no idea, until they started finding the bodies..."

"It's typically Jamesian because in a way its an unambiguous story: you know exactly what's going on, but it creates these ambiguities of feeling in you, because you want her protected, yet you can't like the father who's protecting her..."

"Some phrases you have to say out loud. it's like someone has poured warm milk into your skull, you know? It's just beautiful — I loved it."

"The way Doyle paints it is that the brotherhood, the Sinn Féin became the home for all these poor — you know, the woebegotten souls who were like trying to find their way."

"It's not a world that I know but I came to know something about it though the book which was good, but I see...when I look at literature, when I look at books I look at the structure of them and ... I saw a fairy tale actually, when I think about it you know the traditional princess who becomes a maid who rises to become a queen and all these mad people inbetween on that journey..."

"He taught me everything. He just used to say, and I'll never forget that, he said 'it's not big words and adjectives — that's boring'. And I thought 'ah yes' . . . I learned from that. Simplicity is the art of writing."

"Perhaps relationships work more powerfully when there is absence and tension and a lot of heartache. I can't live with people."

"My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedom — as is usual with most artists learning a trade. It takes courage, however, to leave all props behind, to cast oneself, like Matisse, upon pure space. I still await that confidence."

"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen."

"But now that I am in love with a place which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,happy is how I look."

"It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse."

"I stopped writing poetry when I stopped smoking.... It was more complicated than that."

"I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure."