poets-from-new-zealand

"Walking helps me to write. I’m pretty sure Fiona Farrell has written about how how walking helps her to write."

"If you want to write in a particular genre it’s likely you’ll read that genre. At the same time I sometimes find that the books that really get me writing are a surprise. It’s not necessarily books of modern poetry that make me want to write poems."

"What I read is often helpful. Sometimes first lines of very good writers make me want to write my own poem almost as a response to theirs. Janet Frame and Anne Carson have done that for me."

"Sometimes being under a particular pressure makes me write easily. Which seems strange. Pressure might be a time constraint, like to write something in 20 minutes. Or it might be a set of ‘rules’, like ‘Write a poem that consists entirely of untrue statements’. I think the hardest thing to do is probably to be told to take as long as you need to write the best poem you possibly can about whatever you think is important. If there are constraints you can always blame them if your poem isn’t as terrific as you would have liked it to be."

"I’m reading a novel too – it’s called Concluding by Henry Green. It first came out when I was 6 years old but of course I didn’t know anything about him then. He was talked about a bit when I was at university but was never in any of the English papers I did."

"Things that make me want to write vary."

"Nobody has to be a writer. But when it’s going well it’s good fun and satisfying."

"Sometimes writing can seem a bit lonely. But having a group of people you trust and with whom you can share your writing helps."

"Michael Harlow once said at a workshop that if you write a word another flies to it. That’s mostly true for me. So if I can find a word or a phrase from anywhere and write it down then there is a chance some writing will happen. It may not be very good, but at least its writing."

"Yes, I almost always do this."

"I don’t have a favourite genre. I try to ready widely."

"My poems don't start from ideas, but from bits of language, maybe a turn of phrase that's like a tune that plays over and over in my mind. A poem can often be like a game in my head where I want to think about something I don't fully understand. Recently a child said to me, 'I'm not me. I'm someone else. I'm very strong. I'm Richie McCaw.' It's easy when you're four years old to play this sort of game. Writing is one way that as an adult I can take on a different persona. Some of these poems may suggest I live in rest home and that I have won the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and lived in Menton. I did once spend a happy weekend in Paris, but I've never been to Menton and I have never won the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. That doesn't stop me wondering what it would be like to be selected for a magnificent prize and live in a remote city. I also wonder what it may be like one day to live in a rest home.'"

"There’s almost always a book of poems that I’m reading and I keep it by my bed or in my handbag if the book is skinny enough. At present I am still reading Essential New Zealand Poems and I am also reading Horse with Hat by Marty Smith. I’ve also read some of Milton’s poetry, particular a verse drama called Samson Agonistes that for some reason I never got round to reading when I studied Milton as a university student. (Paula — these books aren’t children’s books in case you think they are."

"I don’t often feel inspired. I try to keep writing and sometimes something unexpected happens and I find I’m writing more easily and confidently than usual. It’s wonderful when that happens."

"Yes, I suppose sometimes I do feel the opposite from inspired and can’t think how to begin or continue anything."

"After a gap of time, I can often look at a poem a bit more objectively and see what needs doing to it. I would hardly ever send a poem I’ve just written away to a literary magazine because I am so likely to see things I want to change if I look at it after a few weeks"

"If I was feeling flat about my writing, I used to return to a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and it helped me to forgive myself for often writing rubbishy, dull stuff. (And it also has some really good suggestions, about daily writing practice that I found useful.)"

"Just keeping going, I guess, is hard. There are lots of other wonderful things to do. How do you balance these different aspects of your life? I’m busy, as most people are busy. I don’t write as much as I would like to write. I also need to work on regularly finishing poems and sending them away to literary magazines."

"I have learned to accept that alternating between thinking I have just written a Truly Terrific Poem and thinking that I am an Embarrassing Disaster of a Writer who will never manage an even halfway decent poem doesn’t help me at all. I’m gradually realising that nothing I write will change the world and knock its little cotton socks off, but also I’ve come to realise that there’s no need to be ashamed of what I write."

"I don’t think I can answer this very well. There’s no single thing that is particularly hard for me."

"Sometimes I find that to think of it as being like having a bit of a headache is useful. Okay, it’s there, and I can either retire to bed feeling sorry for myself or just go on doing what I do as best I can. But if I decide I am suffering from Writer’s Block and stop writing then there is no chance of my writing well."

"I mentioned earlier that I always have a notebook. Usually this is where I draft poems and then maybe weeks later I read back over this notebook. Some things I’ve written look a bit feeble but often there’s something I can use and develop further."

"this is the one I love.he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been"

"how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words"

"I enjoy words that sparkle, whether they be in Māori, my mother tongue, or English. What a privilege it is to inherit and to appreciate a language, and to enjoy another equally."

"we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces"

"Often I look at the world"

"The past is a bad invention that keeps on happening:"

"So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be"

"when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof."

"Those that come after me will gather these roses, And watch, as I do *now, the white wistaria Burst, in the sunshine, from its pale green sheath."

"Planned. Planted. Established. Then neglected, Till at last the loiterer by the gate will wonder At the old, old cottage, the old wooden cottage,And say ‘One might build here, the view is glorious;This must have been a pretty garden once.’"

"Books are escape hatches from conventional temporality. They are portals. Flight co-ordinates to elsewhere. The best thing about reading is turning pages to unlock minds and worlds. Reading takes me on journeys where I encounter the familiar and the unimaginable. It transports me beyond my geographical location, but can also ground me in my neighbourhood"

"‘The plant, when established’ . . Oh, become established quickly, *quickly, garden For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive – – –"

"Keats is dead so fuck me from behind"

"Established’ is a good word, much used in garden books,"

"I’m not a proponent of the Dewey Classification system. It was created in the 1870s and is based on a system that classifies knowledge according to Western perspectives and cultural bias. It doesn’t accommodate interdisciplinary subjects or emerging fields. What I consider nonfiction might be shelved in the fiction section of a library. I just enjoy books"

"There is such a narrow window"

"“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own significance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you."

"I want to take you to the river that runs behind my house"

"It’s like falling in love for the first time for the last time"

"Sorry guys, the thing is, when I write a poem I become a werewolf."

"There is truly nothing more to think about."

"No colonisation. No genocide. No intergenerational trauma. No two centuries of white privilege."

"Damn this poem! It is making my jaw grow long and shaggy, fangs grow from my mouth and my eyes turn red. Here I go, on all fours now, with a tail growing out from under my skirt like a wild dog. Here I go, writing a “racist rant about one of history’s greatest explorers”."

"That’s honestly how simple it is."

"My views become exactly the same as “those expressed in Germany”. What I mean is, I’m the whole of Nazism and the entire Second World War."

"It is not complex."

"My poem is no accident. My poem does all these things on purpose. My poem has a plan to take over everyone and everything."

"In the space of a few generations, my poem has traumatised the people who originally owned this land and their language almost disappears."