Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three November-December 2024
Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition
The Energy Connection, Guest Editorial by Lincoln Jaques.
It’s around 11am on a bright Saturday morning and I’m strolling down Pollen Street in the enclave of Grahamstown, the beating heart of Thames. The markets are buzzing with booksellers, herb growers, astrologers, palm readers, aging hippie tie-dyers, second-hand vinyl dealers, speciality bread-makers, coffee roasters, organic fruit stalls, spirit-conjurers.
Thames is the gateway to the wild Coromandel and was once a gold mining town that bulged at the seams with prospectors who gravitated here from all over Aotearoa and the world. Many of the colonial buildings from that time still exist, crumbling in a stalwart sort of way which gives the impression of permanence in a town which was never really built to last. In those prospector days the area was a scatter of sod-built whare filled with cholera and dysentery and syphilis mixed with normalised daily violence which echoes still through the many potholed mining shafts that litter the surrounding mountains.
We often take the trip down from Tamaki Auckland to visit an artist friend who has a studio in a collective workshop out the back of the Thames Organic Shop. But I also love coming here for the book stalls. I once picked up a first edition of Allen Curnow’s Trees, Effigies, Moving Objects, one of only 500 copies in existence. An early well-thumbed paperback copy of Leonard Cohen’s The Energy of Slaves (yes, I did steal the idea for the editorial).
On this particular Saturday morning book-hunting, I stumble across a trestle table filled with ‘poetry bricks’. The stall is owned by the well-known and much-loved David Merritt, and these aren’t bricks in the traditional sense, but individual poems printed on A3 sheets and folded with the eye of an origami artist. These are then inserted into a bespoke cover. The covers are meticulously upcycled from old Chiquita banana boxes or discarded hardbacks (like that set of Encyclopaedia Britannica from your childhood). The words are produced on preloved inkjet printers resuscitated from the junkyard. Better still, all the poems are written by David himself.
A vintage 1970s Land Rover sits angle parked in the bay behind him. In fact, he runs ‘Landrover Farm Press’, his homebase for his operation. As I browse through the wonderful assortment on offer, we strike up some small talk (neither of us are good at it). Pretty soon my artist friend loudly announces to David that “Lincoln’s a bit of a poet himself” and in my textbook introverted way I shrink back in horror. David is an unassuming character. A full grey beard hides a weatherbeaten but wise face. He wears a woolly beanie, almost his signature look, and behind his spectacles his eyes light up when I’m announced as a fellow bard.
“Ah! Our paths will cross again, you can bet on it,” he says. I laugh and pick up one of his volumes. It’s called Hiatus, and unfolding it was like opening a scroll from the lost Atlantis. Here’s a stanza that captivated me:
I saw people as stick insects through the
Windows of a Newmarket commuter bus,
I conceived a child called Lola and became
The second owner of a dog called Jessie,
Who tonight, I can hear breathing in the
Heater glow distance.
I instantly purchased it, for a cool six bucks. He date-stamped (with an archaic spring-loaded stamper similar to those once used in libraries to indicate the return date) and signed the back. “Remember, I’ll see you again,” he said as he handed it to me. David travels the country in his Land Rover in what’s known as ‘The David Merritt Poetry Experience’. He chats to people, generates a connection all the while handmaking a poetry brick as he’s drawing you in. He’s one of those rare poets you can see regularly, get to talk to about writing with no judgement involved. In his own unique style he works diligently every day to bring poetry to the streets, to the people.
I know quite a few poets personally, some now close friends, but it’s taken me many years to build these relationships. We’re a funny, private, guarded lot. Perhaps it’s a mortal fear of rejection (rejection being at the core of our everyday reality). Edith Sitwell said that ‘All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.’ Perhaps we all write too close to our own hearts…or each other’s. There are numerous poets that I feel connected to, despite never meeting face-to-face. This is the beauty of poetry. It has the power to draw us together through the toughest of times, simply because we instinctively know we hold that deep connection.
Poetry helps us make sense of a senseless world. And we are certainly living through troubling times, where we need poetry to take our hand more than ever. When we read and are moved by a poem, it’s usually because we can say “We’re not alone”. We don’t feel the need to explain any further. The words and experience have talked for themselves. Knowing you’re not the only one that sees the world in a particular way gives a sense of comfort, of belonging. I’ve looked at the state of the world and I see things in this way or that way, and I can share that experience. Poets find connections through their sense of justice, however fragile that justice is becoming.
Reading poems to a crowd also gives an exhilarating sense of connection. I’ve had the privilege of being asked twice as guest poet at Auckland’s legendary Poetry Live! held at The Thirsty Dog in Karangahape Road (recently shifted to Bamboo Tiger, more recently to Café 39 – we poets also need to be adaptive, going with whoever will take us in). Both times were a truly frightening experience, but I discovered the amazing support shown to all of us brave enough to take the mic. You are up there baring your soul, and the audience is just as frightened as you, for you, and because of this there’s an instant connection and understanding between us. The room buzzes an electric warmth. We’re a strange bunch, yes, but we’re a nurturing bunch.
In this 2024 edition of Live Encounters Aotearoa Poets and Writers I’ve included work from those seasoned and emerging, previously published and those appearing for the first time, toe-dippers and those who fearlessly butterfly and backstroke out into the great floodwaters of words. There’s Kate Mahony, author of Secrets of the Land, recently appearing on the Whitcoulls Top 100 list (not a small feat, seeing only a handful
of New Zealand authors are on this list). There’s Isla Huia’s in the blood, a devastatingly haunting spiral towards our own mortality, where:
when i meet the great beyond
i’m gonna give it a whole pōwhiri
i’m gonna make sure it mihis to the ringawera
Our societal problems thread through this collection also, especially in Daren Kamali’s Blue-Tooth thing, where he exposes the crisis of crystal meth in his homeland:
Methamphetamine pandemic –
On the rise –
In the Isles of Smiles
Now Isles of crime and sickness.
Our island faces –
A rapid spread of HIV and AIDS –
Highest in Asia-Pacific.
Syringes and needles –
Found on streets –
In community centres and village gardens.
Our island faces –
A rapid spread of HIV and AIDS –
Highest in Asia-Pacific.
Syringes and needles –
Found on streets –
In community centres and village gardens.
And in Kate Kelly’s People like me we witness the loss of identity and the prevalence of suicide, especially in our youth, as she chants ‘Continuing to pretend that nothing has happened’, as if we can push it from our minds.
Included are some translations too—one from Alexander Balm who writes in both English and her native Romanian—and some offerings in Te Reo Māori from Trevor Landers and Pasha Mahuto’a Clothier.
Despite his humble bio, I’ve included the powerhouse poet Michael Steven, previous winner of the Kathleen Grattan prize and author of the breathtaking Night School collection; and Michael Giacon, also a winner of the Kathleen Grattan who has recently published his first collection undressing in slow motion, which on its release zoomed to number one on the New Zealand bestseller list. Honoured, also, to be able to include new work from Khadro Mohamed, winner of the 2023 Ockham Book Awards for a debut poetry collection, not to mention a piece by photographer and visual artist Raymond Sagapolutele.
I hope you enjoy this year’s Aotearoa Poets and Writers Special Edition. I also hope it helps to connect us all, to bring us out of our darkened midnight spaces, at least to give us a glimpse at the light, at hope.
Oh! and Mr Merritt – you were right, our paths did indeed cross again.
Nāku iti nei, nā
Lincoln
© Lincoln Jaques
Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki makaurau based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in Aotearoa and internationally, including Landfall, takahē, Live Encounters, Tough, Noir Nation, Burrow, Book of Matches, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Blackmail Press, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem. He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards, and was the Runner-Up in the 2022 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems.