Interview: Anna Jackson talks about Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa

Anna Jackson is the author of seven collections of poetry as well as Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers’ Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (Auckland University Press, 2022). She lives in Island Bay, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, and is associate professor in English literature at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington. Anna talks to NZ Booklovers.

Tell us a little about Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa.

This is a book which celebrates the swerve poetry has taken towards exuberance, intimacy, eroticism, artistry and a gaudy beauty with essays offering an in-depth consideration of ten of the most exciting poets writing today, and an introduction and two prefatory essays offering more of an overview of the contemporary moment in New Zealand poetry.  The book also includes poems from each of the poets featured, and their own statements about their works, so it is a little bit of an anthology as well as a book of essays.

Who are some of the poets who are featured?

Sam Duckor-Jones, Tayi Tibble, Claudia Jardine, essa may ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes, Chris Tse, Oscar Upperton, Joanna Cho, Ruby Solly and Nafanua Purcell Kersel.

Who is this book for?

It would be exciting and inspiring for younger poets beginning to put together a collection of poetry, and a useful resource for teachers of poetry in schools and universities, as well as being, I hope, of interest to anyone wanting an introduction to a range of poets writing today.  Readers who liked my introduction to poetry, Actions and Travels: How Poetry Works, could consider this a kind of sequel. 

What will readers take away from reading this book?

I hope lines from some of the poems will run randomly through their heads when they least expect them, and images from the poems will appear in their dreams.  I hope they will be excited to try out some of the strategies poets when writing poetry of their own, and that they will be inspired by the poet’s statements.  I love Oscar Upperton’s idea that a rhyme is a way of getting an exclamation mark into a poem by stealth, or Chris Tse’s intention of creating trapdoors and hidden pathways in his poetry.  Other readers of the book will find themselves looking forward to picking up full collections by the poets they encounter in this book, and will read their poetry with a deeper understanding, or new insight. 

What excites you the most about the new pathways that poets are taking?

I am excited by the excitement young poets themselves bring to their own work and also the work of other poets they are reading.  I love how passionately they write about politics, how generously they share stories of their lives and interior landscapes.  I love the complexity and inventiveness of so much of this poetry, the sprawling shapes poems can take on the page, the rapid dissemination of new forms of layout and punctuation, the willingness to take up difficult formal constraints.  Rebecca Hawkes writes of reaching for “a sense beyond sense that reaches parts of us beyond syntax” and that is exactly what I look for in poetry! 

What was it like working as an editor on the book, and how did you work with the other editors, Dougal McNeill and Robert Sullivan?

Working on the book felt like one of those pot-luck dinners that Amy Marguerite writes about in her essay on the new literary journals.  We threw out a series of invitations and conversation starters and were given back riches - the brilliant, insightful essays that came in one by one over the course of a year, and the poet statements, some coming in within minutes of my asking, others considered carefully for weeks, or put off till the third reminder, and all of them surprising, funny, and thought provoking.  Working alongside Dougal and Robert was terrific - they are both so well informed about New Zealand poetry.  Dougal and I went down to Oamaru to write the introduction over a weekend with Robert in his Oamaru cottage.  We sat at the kitchen table and wrote every sentence together, deciding what each paragraph needed to include then trying out the wording for each line, suggesting a different word here, a shift in syntax there, adding in more names, looking up examples on-line, Robert occasionally running to the sunroom for more books.  Their stamina was incredible.  I was always the one leaping up to make tea or suggest a lunch break or dinner break or a walk to the Moeraki boulders, now, straight away, come on, let's go.  

What is the favourite book you have read so far this year and why? 

Maybe Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, a novel about a hospitalisation for a ruptured aorta, caught up in the strange time-warp of intense pain.  One of the loveliest parts of the book is a five page meditation on a poem about a sparrow - I just love essays on poetry, and this one was so unexpected! 

What’s next on the agenda for you?

I'm writing my own poetry.  But also contemplating a book on scenes of reading, dreaming and daydreaming in novels - maybe it could include the sparrow poem reading in Small Rain. 

Auckland University Press