Live Encounters Aotearoa New Zealand Poets & Writers March 2026
The poem that finds you, guest editorial and poems by Gillian Roach.
I’ve been trying to ‘listen differently’ over the past few months, prompted by a chance remark on Instagram – getting my news from poems today. An idea magpied, like a shiny leaf, from the torrent of news, memes, jokes, and opinions that surges through my awareness daily. Some quick digging led me to the William Carlos Williams poem the comment referenced, it is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there. A well-known and often quoted poem, which like so many, I hadn’t come across before.
I’ve always been an avid news consumer, but my sources have changed lately. I’m less likely to pick up a physical newspaper or listen to traditional radio. I read a lot online and enjoy greater access to international news and podcasts. But traditional news, with its fast turn-around and repetitive cycles can feel unsatisfying and voyeuristic. The tyranny of the algorithm means stories (and advertising) are pushed on us, based on what we reveal by our preferences. Slowly our worlds shrink as we receive more of the same.
So, what might change if I turned to my ‘poetry feed’ as an alternative news source, and looked to ‘get the news’ from poems? What might I find in poems, that I could conceivably die miserably without?
The lines flow from the hand unbidden / and the hidden source is the watchful heart
Derek Mahon, Everything is going to be alright
I recently travelled the new Te Ahu a Turanga – Manawatu Highway between Woodville and Palmerston North with my husband and his parents. It’s a trip we’ve all made many times, on the journey between Napier and Wellington, although never quite in this configuration. My husband drove, where once he might have wrestled in the back seat with his brother, or day-dreamed about being singled out from the crowd to sub on for Manchester United. The Glums, as they are known in our family lexicon, counted off familiar landmarks and passed around the fruit jubes. It was the first time they had been on the new road, and they were keen to see where it connected with the existing highway, and how much time it knocked off the trip.
The narrow Manawatu River gorge route was closed permanently in 2017 after a bad slip made the road impassable and, for eight years, drivers used the Saddle Road, a winding route across the Tararua ranges and through a wind farm with splendid views of the region. The new highway, completed in 2025, also takes you over the Tararuas via a more direct route, up close and personal with the graceful, monumental windmills, and flanked by walkers and cyclists using the purpose-built lanes either side. Faster, but less picture-skew, as we all agreed.
A bee zooms, deep amid the warm young grasses. / Startled, the rose / Laughs
Robin Hyde, Embrace
In a recent email newsletter from US poet and writer Devin Kelly, he explored Jonathan Aprea’s poem Dial. The first line of Dial reads, Most people make the same piece of art, over / and over, which Kelly says might seem like a rather limiting proposition, but after that the poem ‘takes every turn towards surprise’.
Kelly believes artists revisit the same kind of work, because we are essentially our lives and nothing more. “…we return, again and again, to our obsessions and our wonderings and our feelings and our lives, and we filter our attempt at creation through those lenses.” However, “even in the midst of that sameness, we have the opportunity to approach and wander and stumble and move through the dark in order to revisit that sameness with a bit of difference.”
This might involve offering our attention to different things. Choosing to listen differently. Not to mention the element of surprise in what we encounter. “We cannot predict what will emerge out of the darkness,” he writes.
my sorrowful ones / twice we were told / final boarding call
Sophia Wilson, Every Last Drop
“Road trip with the Glums,” someone posted on our family group chat with an eye-raise emoji. “Safe travels and enjoy the charcuterie in the back seat.”
To pass the time on our roadie, we listened to a couple of episodes of Desert Island Discs, a BBC radio programme the 80-year-olds in our car have been tuning in to for more than fifty years. First up was Michael Sheen, whose Welsh lilt and stories of growing up in Port Talbot were particularly relateable to my Welsh father-in-law. We were entertained by Sheen’s father’s late-life career as a Jack Nicholson impersonator. And his grandmother had been a lion-tamer! From a craft perspective, I enjoyed Sheen’s description of the way he steps into character for a role as being akin to a human mixing deck, dialling up and down aspects of his personality and attributes to reflect the person he is playing, recognising always that he himself forms the base material.
The second episode featured Kate Winslet, who holds a special place in New Zealanders’ hearts for her role in the Peter Jackson movie Heavenly Creatures. Winslet came across as forthright and reflective, particularly about her brutal treatment by the British press over her appearance. One of her song choices was Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, which set The Glums singing along, although my husband and I had never heard it before. I loved Winslet’s comment that the children singing on Matchstalk Men had somehow given her permission to sing and dance along too.
When the episode ended, I played the song in full and was delighted to find it is about the Manchester artist Lowry, who stayed committed to his unique style despite a poor reception from the critics at the start of his career. Winslet’s refusal to conform to the artificial beauty standards which are held up as the standard for women in the film industry showed a similar commitment to her values.
If for us she arose, / Somewhere, in the pitched deep of our grief, /Crouches our power
Amanda Gorman, For Renee Nicole Good
As I helped Mark Ulyseas gather poets together for this special New Zealand edition of Live Encounters, I wondered what news would emerge from our poems. Would any local headlines from the New Zealand summer feature? Destructive storms, the tragic loss of life in a landslide at Mount Maunganui, health portal data breaches? Or would someone have picked up on the international headlines, such as the killing of young poet and mother of three, Renee Good, on the 7th January by an ICE agent in Minnesota, USA? Good was part of our wider creative community and the rapid poetic response after her death reached me almost instantly, half a world away.
The impulse to react to current events in the moment is understandable, that white-hot response to shock and disbelief. In 2023, I took part in a reading for National Poetry Day and when selecting the work to read, I realised all my recent poems were, in fact, pandemic poems. Yet I had texted my daughter when Auckland was locked down due to Covid 19, that I was ‘over’ all the Covid poems. There were so many and, read in the moment, it felt like they simply added to the overwhelming media noise. I had added to the noise. While my poems were not consciously written as a response to immediate current events, they couldn’t help but be steeped in the atmosphere of that time.
Language must choose its moment to be in the world
Mike Oliver Johnson, the right moment
It is far easier to access poetry now than it has ever been. I’m connected to poems in a myriad of ways – through social media, blogs, podcasts, radio programmes and, of course, traditional journals, books and live events. In the current media environment, it’s simple and almost instantaneous to share poetry and the actual news informs many poems, whether the immediate flash-fried response or a more slow-cooked version.
However, the poem that finds you on any given day will more than likely be unrelated to current events. The poem that finds you might show or tell, zoom in or out. It could be from 200 or 2000 years ago and still shed light or colour or nuance for the reader. Modern or ancient, a poem can encompass universal fears or joys.
I have been getting my news from poems these past few weeks and my news has been richer, funnier, quirkier and more human as a result. Poems are agile and democratic. They slip through in many guises. In songs or on peanut butter labels. In bathroom stalls and on bedroom walls. They laugh in the face of algorithms and filters, vigorously sharing voices and ideas others might silence.
“He painted Salford’s smokey tops / On cardboard boxes from the shops”
Brian and Michael, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs
As we listened to Desert Island Discs on our road trip with the Glums, the poems sneaked in. The earworm of the Matchstalk Men. Michael Sheen’s lilting description of his father turning down a gig to impersonate Jack Nicholson, because Jack would be there. “It’s his night, Michael.”
What ‘news’ were they bringing? Small hugs of familiarity and connection. A little girl and her sister, entranced by the children singing on a record, and set free to dance up a storm. A middle-aged man affectionately skewering his Dad’s glorious pomposity, in what was clearly a well-rehearsed family anecdote. These two acclaimed actors were firmly planted in the base material of their own lives. It was just the dials and faders of the human mixing desk they pushed up and down.
You work with what you have, was my news for that day, while staying open to any new magic. While the direction of travel may be the same, there are always new roads. In my own work, road trips, family dynamics, and transitions are subjects I return to often. Fair territory for poetry and, in combination, a chowder the consistency of emulsion paint, as thick as they serve at Café 88 in Woodville.
Black Ice, Napier-Taupo Rd
1.
These bags of blood these blisters my cargo
talking of love and its opposite indifference
I’d explore this further but I’m alert for ice
laid down in transparent sheets
almost undetectable
interleaved with wet road
Cars and trucks ahead behind coordinate
in neutral tones hushed by snow —
follow the line of the car in front will the tyres to stick
maintain the delusion of safety
the heated car
our cotton clothes
2.
My kid plays metal an instrumental
jazz-like intense with rapid time shifts
— no demon-screaming at my request —
seeks comment on its virtuosity as grey rain
congeals and jerks in syncopated frenzy
off the windscreen
How apt Norwegian Metal for an arctic scene
Te Pohue iced like an errant Nordic village
yet I long for something sly
deadpan an antidote
3.
I’ve never liked the Mohaka bridge
the detachment required
suspension of doubt
for a successful transition
4.
Does it matter the song played was Brazilian?
My original connection propels this poem
a minute’s research shows Norwegian Black metal
shunned as Satanic misanthropic a dark currency marbled within
the story of good children
fluffy snow
A familiar bond on hitting
the salted tarmac
slides to a fine edge
susceptible to ice as bridges
and doubly so
Energy Thief
The act of getting on a bus breaks you down, the girl says. We’ve all
contorted, squeezing down the aisle and into our seats. Now we reassemble.
I know from her pale, quarter-moon face, she’ll elicit my sad rejection tale
somewhere before Palmerston North. She’s that hungry. I tug my frayed skirt
over my thighs, jam my formerly desired shiny knees hard against the woven
magazine pocket.
Student? She picks up my notebook, flips through. Angles towards me,
borrowing my light. Writer?
Sure. Every assumption, I will say yes. Let her feast on imagination. I am not
together right now.
Drive to the conditions
Your folks bounce up and down
in the back seat of the Hyundai
as you hit the uneven surface of Aokautere Rd
and your mum says, Ouf,
he always wanted to be a rally driver.
I don’t think you hear,
or what you hear is
That’s my boy.
You drive fast when they’re in the car too,
something I’ve only discovered
now we drive your parents.
I used to think you were in such a hurry.
Remember how you skimmed the curves
of the Manawatu river
on the old route through the gorge?
On a clear day
we could see the architecture
holding up the next bit of road,
or I could
from out over the side
above the water.
© Gillian Roach
Gillian Roach is a Ahuriri Napier poet who won the New Voices — Emerging Poets Competition in 2018 and was runner-up in the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems in 2018 and 2019. Her poetry has been widely published, including in Landfall, takahē and Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook. Gillian is a founding member of the Isthmus poets, and has published three collaborative poetry collections with them over the past 9 years. She completed a Master of Creative Writing degree at AUT in 2016, and has also written novels and short stories.