NATIONAL POETRY DAY: A TRIP DOWN INSTAGRAM MEMORY LANE

One day late to the poetry party

I’m a little late to National Poetry Day (which my social media feed informed me was yesterday), but in honour of the occasion I ended up going back through my Instagram page @maorilitblog – which, for newer followers, is where I started this whole thing! – and reading through some of my old write-ups of poetry collections from 2021-2022.

For today’s post I thought I’d just share some of those older posts! Here’s what I was thinking/writing about some of my favourite Māori poets two-or-three years ago.

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OPENING DOORS [1979] BY EVELYN PATUAWA-NATHAN

OPENING DOORS (1979) by Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan is the second single-author publication of Māori women’s poetry, arriving just a year after Vernice Wineera’s MAHANGA – curiously enough, neither were published in Aotearoa. As Alice Te Punga Somerville states in ONCE WERE PACIFIC, ‘[these] collections place Wineera and Patuawa-Nathan in the rather small group of non-white women poets anywhere who enjoyed single-author publication before the 1980s.’

Judging by the fact that every shred of information I can find about her is just a reworded version of this book’s opening bio, Patuawa-Nathan seems fairly mysterious and overlooked in comparison to many of her contemporaries. This collection is, however, worth seeking out if you’re curious about Māori poetry of the era.

The most striking poem here is ‘In the Beginning’, a stark tale of a Māori trans woman who is disconnected from her culture and dies of a heroin overdose in Sydney’s King’s Cross – the narrator is revealed to be a mourning member of her iwi. I don’t think the poem’s handling of the subject matter entirely stands up to modern scrutiny, but it demonstrates a harder edge than many of Patuawa-Nathan’s contemporaries – Māori stories set outside of Aotearoa are also hard to find in this era, as are explicit explorations of gender and sexuality.

Maybe even more interesting than OPENING DOORS itself is its opening bio's suggestion that Patuawa-Nathan had written a historical novel that was destined for publication, only for it to be lost in the mail – this would have been over a decade prior to the publication of TANGI. Te Punga Somerville writes:

‘A collection of poetry in 1979 is a very impressive thing; an historical novel in 1959 – the year after Achebe’s THINGS FALL APART and five years before Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s WEEP NOT CHILD – would have been extraordinary. (The first novel to make it to publication in the Pacific was Papua New Guinea writer Vincent Eri’s THE CROCODILE [1970].)’

These early decades are full of what Te Punga Somerville calls ‘the spectral presences of unpublished Māori writing in English’.

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TĀTAI WHETŪ: SEVEN MĀORI WOMEN POETS IN TRANSLATION [2018] ED. MARAEA RAKURAKU & VANA MANASIADIS

TĀTAI WHETŪ: SEVEN MĀORI WOMEN POETS IN TRANSLATION – edited by Maraea Rakuraku and Vana Manasiadis - was one of my favourite reads of last year, and I recently reread it in preparation for some teaching I hope to do around contemporary Māori poetry.

Every poem in this book – a small, string-bound publication from Seraph Press that presents poetry in English alongside te reo translations – is a standout, but I’ll pull out a few personal favourites. ‘Darknyss’, by Tru Paraha, is pure language play and invention. Alice Te Punga Somerville’s ‘Rākau’ is a delicately crafted metaphor that connects ‘[the] language waiting inside [the speaker’s] tongue’ to the carving of wood. In ‘Day by Day’, Kiri Piahana-Wong writes of literature and the natural world in a series of three vignettes – I love the blunt, tangible descriptions of the speaker’s cooking and gardening.

The notes and acknowledgements are also interesting, particularly Vaughan Rapatahana’s short piece on translating Tru Paraha’s ‘elliptical and discursive and playful and anarchic’ ‘Darknyss’:

‘Wittgenstein wrote about linguistic incommensurability, whereby no translation can ever do justice to the translated language and vice versa […] I did not want to bastardise te reo, so also left a few italicised ‘words’ and letters and symbols as originally found. Are they words? Does it matter? I also entered the (language) game in places.’

Unfortunately, I only (currently) have the skills and knowledge to approach this as an English text, but I imagine that speakers of both English and te reo will get even more out of TĀTAI WHETŪ’s bilingual presentation.

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ECHIDNA [2022] BY ESSA MAY RANAPIRI

I generally enjoy writing reviews here, because the strict character limit challenges me to be as concise as possible – essa may ranapiri’s ECHIDNA, however, really needs more words written about it than what will fit here. Their second collection of poetry is a vibrant combination of Greek, Christian and Māori mythological tradition, and in the vein of J.C. Sturm, many of the poems here are dedications – what ranapiri calls intertextual ‘conversations’ with a broad spectrum of literary figures.

If this all sounds a little intimidating, my first point is to make clear that no actually, it really isn’t. While ECHIDNA constantly delves into the mythological, the otherworldly, the referential, it also grounds itself with tangible, sensual details; this is, after all, the poet who gifted ‘Us As Meat Hitting Meat’ to the world. ranapiri moves fluidly between worlds - from ‘Echidna & Rona Fucking in the Back Seat of a Car While the Moon Watches’:

Echidna and Rona are pressed against

seatbelt buckles the cool of the metal torn seat

covers foam showing through

. . .

Rona becomes an arc of electricity hand in Echidna’s curls

everything is fogging up in the Moon’s light

obscuring his vision Rona free of that

alabaster pervert at last

I also really appreciate the care that goes into the overall structure of ranapiri’s collections, building a sense of repetition and familiarity throughout. Here, a recurring narrative strand depicts a ‘very hot’ relationship between Māui and Prometheus – a structural evolution of RANSACK’s series of letters to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. This sub-narrative (running alongside that of Echidna) adds another layer of complexity to the collection, culminating in the spiralling (literally) ‘Māui Becomes Who S/He Was Meant To Be’.

With all that said, I’m definitely not ‘done’ with ECHIDNA; I look forward to exploring its intertextual connections and finding new things to appreciate about it.

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STAR WAKA [1999] BY ROBERT SULLIVAN

I'm always keen to check out more examples of indigenous futurism, and Robert Sullivan’s 1999 poetry collection STAR WAKA is still arguably the preeminent literary work of Māori-futurism. Sullivan guides his central motif – the waka as ‘a knife through time’ – through myth, history, contemporary ‘Y2K’ politics and, maybe most memorably, into a future among the stars.

There’s a playful complexity to Sullivan’s vision of the future: depending on where you look, it can be deeply cynical or genuinely awe-inspiring. The darkly funny ‘iv 2140AD’ tells of a Māori mission to the stars ‘to consult with the top boss / to ask for sovereignty and how to get this / from policy into action back home’ – but they run out of fuel, have to be towed back by space-police, and get fined ‘the equivalent of the fiscal envelope’:

‘They confiscate the rocket ship, the only thing

all the iwi agreed to purchase with their last down payment.’

Poem ‘46’ returns to the idea of space travel, but this time as a means to imagine a sort of dream-like post-colonial utopia. Whereas ‘iv 2140AD’ is a pointed take on contemporary injustices, ‘46’ offers something of equal value – the chance to dream of our potential when released (‘like the release from gravity’) from such injustice:

‘no longer subject to peculiarities

of climate the political economies

of powers and powerless

a space waka

rocketing to another orb

singing waiata to the spheres’

And yet in an earlier poem, the ‘waka’ is the speaker’s Honda City, though there’s a similar sense of wonder – ‘That car took me to Uncle Pat’s tangi in Bluff. We stopped and gazed at Moeraki, the dream sky, on the way.’ STAR WAKA, through its central recurring elements (waka, oceans, stars), is constantly connecting the speaker’s personal experiences with our shared past and possible futures.

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ALWAYS ITALICISE: HOW TO WRITE WHILE COLONISED [2022] BY ALICE TE PUNGA SOMERVILLE

Despite being known primarily as an academic writer, it was poetry that lead me to Alice Te Punga Somerville’s work: firstly through the excellent ‘Rākau’ from TĀTAI WHETŪ, and then her work on seminal Māori poets Vernice Wineera and Evelyn Patuawa-Nathan in her debut ONCE WERE PACIFIC. So naturally I was pretty excited to check out her first collection of poetry, ALWAYS ITALICISE: HOW TO WRITE WHILE COLONISED.

Something I love about this collection is something I also loved about TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY WAYS TO START AN ESSAY ABOUT CAPTAIN COOK: approaching ‘academic’ forms and concerns with a creative bent. ‘An Indigenous scholar’s request to other scholars’ is presented as a simple list of three items, followed by a sprawling series of footnotes (which includes a note clarifying that ‘Te Punga’ is not a middle name and that Te Punga Somerville ‘[is] happy to clarify that [her] last name starts with a ‘T’’). There’s no shortage of contemporary literature that aims to blur the line between creative and academic writing, but Te Punga Somerville does it in a uniquely funny and engaging way – largely because she gets how bizarrely complex (and tedious, and funny) the academic world can be to navigate as an Indigenous scholar.

Another highlight is the final poem, ‘An Indigenous woman scholar’s prayer’, which asks to ‘grow old enough to be forgotten’ and ‘live long enough to be part of an old guard / who younger scholars wish would retire’. The poem is perhaps the starkest example of an attitude that always stands out to me about Māori literature: an understanding that one is always writing within a larger shared tradition, towards goals that will outlive any one writer. And this collection is rich in aroha for those who have come before, with tender dedications to literary figures like Alistair Te Ariki Campbell - in ‘te ariki’ – and J.C. Sturm – in ‘Sphere’.

Oh, and the main ‘always italicise’ premise is clever, and I regret not being able to ‘always italicise’ these quotes on Instagram.

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STRANDS [1992] BY KERI HULME

STRANDS (1992) is Keri Hulme’s second collection of poetry and her first work that feels – at times – like a reflection on the literary fame gained from THE BONE PEOPLE; in one moment, Hulme writes of a woman who ‘had travelled twenty thousand miles / to hear an answer to the question / ‘Was the child real?’

The standout here is ‘Fishing the Olearia Tree’, an expansive, fragmentary poem that spans about half this collection. I also love ‘Pauashell Gods’, a narrative-heavy ‘coming of age’ poem about a group of kids creating their own deities from paua shells. It’s dark and nostalgic, particularly in the opening lines (that remind me of THE BELL JAR of all things):

‘It was the year of omens

dead dolphin on the Watercup Beach

oil slick flexing with each wave

by Fisherman’s Reef’

Both ‘Olearia Tree’ and ‘Pauashell Gods’ reflect a feeling that Hana Pera Aoake would capture years later in their writing: ‘As a Maaori I feel death all around’. Hulme’s world here is steeped in images of death - ‘a tired ghost under the gorse hedge’, ‘the corpse of a shining cuckoo’, a visiting friend who ‘[talks] of death’ and then ‘takes his cancer home’ – and the coastal setting is all blacks, greys, clouds and mists.

The collection’s third section, ‘Some Winesongs’, lives up to its name: the poems here are both largely to do with wine and more song-like. The ‘Winesongs’ feel like experimentations with traditional poetic forms, as in the opening poem’s ballad quatrains (four lines, ABCB rhyme scheme, ala ‘Ancient Mariner’).

STRANDS feels like a few different projects thrown together, but everything here is connected by the sheer craft and love of language that runs through all Hulme’s work.