What is a poem?
A breath of summer wind across a lake? The rhapsodic glint in a farmers eye as she gazes fondly upon her favorite tractor? A caveman in a caveman outfit? A Rolex at the bottom of a lobster tank? If anything, a poem is a dog on a windy night staring upward at an escaped parade blimp in wonder and silence as the green fields around him whip eternity, but even then it depends on the dog and the blimp.
At this point in all the previous editor’s introductions, everyone has acknowledged their own subjectivity. Well, fine. I can be subjective too. In fact, judging something called Best New Zealand Poems has brought me out in so much subjectivity induced paranoia, I’ve abandoned the masthead entirely and will henceforth refer to this edition as Now That’s What I Call Poetry! Volume 19; Aotearoa edition. Now that we’ve left the realms of good taste behind, I can relax a little. I’ve always been a bad reader of poetry, mistaking elegies for odes, misinterpreting the symbolism of whichever wild animal inevitably comes wandering through the final stanza. Thankfully, the author is dead, and Barthes is in the conservatory with the lead piping. But I’m not going to tell you what these poems mean to me, because I think the reader should have their own opportunity to misinterpret things. That’s one of the great joys of poetry, and I won’t take it away from you.
I tried to come to this process with a closed mind and a suspicious heart. Not out of antipathy, but because there’s nothing better than the feeling of being won over by a piece of writing. Of being dragged, kicking and screaming to the riverbank by some sonnet-peddling jackass in a ruffled blouse. Of being moved, against all will and reason, by a description of someone eating twisties in the bath. The moments during the day when a particular line will float to the surface of your consciousness and repeat on you. During this process I found myself often standing in the washing powder section of the supermarket, or walking to work thinking;
‘anyone on their hands and knees is essentially a praying animal’
or
‘me, who is a normal person’
or
‘he’s just showing off because he got electrocuted’
or
‘for those of us who drowned and continue living underwater’
or
‘bag of dissolving hope’
or
‘my body is a car in the sea with a drowned thing inside’
or
‘because of all the ways I don’t and can’t seem to’
or
‘one’s duty in the end is’
or
‘in their own weird language’
or
‘jenny’
or
‘jenny your beauty like a stolen watch’
or
‘jenny you FASTIDIOUS BITCH’
or
‘jenny if the most effective political message takes place in the forum of jokes, maybe the hideous confections of the heart do too.’
Each of these poems I chose for the best reason possible; I loved them and wanted to. I initially selected Lisa Samuel’s untitled sequence of train poems from ‘Symphony for Human Transport (Shearsman Books) for this edition, before realizing I was two years too late. There were other poems on my long-list that weren’t eligible because I discovered they’d already been scooped for the previous year’s Best New Zealand Poems by Fiona Farrell (Jenny Bornholdt, Emma Neale, Lynley Edmeades, Sophie Van Waardenberg.) Maybe my taste isn’t so subjective after all. In fact, I know it’s not, because all of the poems I chose had already been selected for publication by someone else first. I was immensely grateful to the editors and publishers in this country, particularly Louise Wallace and Francis Cooke who edit Starling (a publication for writers under 25 that consistently produces incredible work), Ashleigh Young who runs the Friday Poem on The Spinoff, and Tayi Tibble’s brilliant Sport 47 (Victoria University Press). I also loved anthologies such as Landing Press' More of Us (edited by Adrienne Jansen with Clare Arnot, Danushka Devinda and Wesley Hollis), which I found myself bookmarking almost every second page of. For these editors and others, part of their work is not just reading through submissions, but actively seeking out and encouraging new voices, and it was obvious to me during this process what a profound and cheering effect they’ve had on local literature.
Thank you to everyone who wrote and published something in 2019, whether or not it was chosen. You can always rest easy in the knowledge I flunked my English degree. Thank you to Clare and Katie, twin pillars of the IIML, for all their hard work and guidance. Thanks to all the publishers and self publishers. Thanks to Chris Price. And thanks to you, the reader, for reading them.
Hera Lindsay Bird