Personal Poetry: how much information is too much?
Events for The Next Word: Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, an exhibition showcasing the many-faceted voices of New Zealand poets, encompassing the oral tradition of Māori as well as the poetic traditions of Pākehā and Tauiwi.
- Date: Friday, 16 February, 2018
- Time:
5:30-7, doors open from 5
- Cost:
Free. Booking is not required
- Location:
Programme Rooms, Te Ahumairangi (ground floor), National Library, corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Thorndon
- Contact Details:
Personal poetry
Why is poetry about the real details of a woman’s life seen as outrageous? Are there lines that shouldn’t be crossed? Pip Adam talks to Tayi Tibble, Freya Daly Sadgrove and Hera Lindsay Bird about making poetry out of the intimate details of their lives, and the lives of those around them. This event will be podcast live as part of Pip Adam’s Better off Read series.
Refreshments will be available.
About the speakers
Pip Adam is a novelist, short story writer, reviewer and low-key genius. In 2012 Pip completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Victoria, and received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand New Generation Award. Her most recent novel, The New Animals, was longlisted for the 2018 Ockham Book Awards. Pip convenes an undergraduate short story workshop at the IIML at Victoria University and also works with creative writing students from Whitireia Community Polytechnic. She is one of the founders of Write Where You Are, a registered charity which offers the teaching of creative writing in communities and locations that have limited access to such opportunities, including drug rehabilitation centres, prisons, women’s refuges and organisations for at-risk youth. Pip began producing her popular Better Off Read podcasts in 2013 as a means of teasing out the ways in which certain books affect us as humans.
Hera Lindsay Bird’s debut self-titled book of verse was published in 2016 to immediate and vast acclaim, and won best first book of poetry at the 2017 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her poems have been referred to as nihilistic, provocative, offensive, fearless, flamboyant. Naturally, much of the discussion has centred around her free disclosures around sex. “I think people more than ever now are interested in hearing other people talk really candidly about their lives,” she says. She has a new chapbookm, Pamper me to Hell & back, due out February 2018.
Freya Daly Sadgrove is a writer and performer in Wellington. She is co-founder of punk band-cum-performance collective The Great Danger. Her poems have been described as “eclectic and lively”, dealing honestly with chaotic relationships and mental health. She works at The Children’s Bookshop.
Tayi Tibble is a Wellington based poet of Maori descent (Te Whānau-ā-Apanui/Ngāti Porou). She was awarded the 2017 Adam Prize for her work In a Fish Tank Filled with Pink Light, a collection which explores the lives of four generations of Māori women, written as part of her 2017 Master of Arts at the IIML. Her writing has been called “powerful, restrained but unafraid”.
