Danny Bultitude (Pākehā) hails from Porirua, now working in Te Whanganui-a-Tara as a film archivist and general layabout. His writing has been published in several New Zealand journals and websites including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Mayhem Journal, and Newsroom. In 2018, he completed an MA in English Literature at Victoria University of Wellington, researching the representation of rivers by marginalised American writers. Danny was also a recipient of the 2019 Newsroom – Surrey Hotel Writer’s Residency and named the winner of the inaugural Bell Hill Apartments Poetry Competition in 2021. Unsure how anyone allowed him to reach this point, he is simply happy and forever thankful.
Bultitude comments: 'This poem is unashamedly autobiographical. I did dissect frozen rats with shards of Pāua shell trapped in their throats for Forensic Science class. I wish I could claim it as some grand metaphor, but this was merely a strange, real moment. I believe there is a lot of power in truth and specificity – especially when providing place names and details of the landscape. I wanted to directly name Aotea College in the title of this poem, not only because of my own experiences there, but because it has changed so much in the eight years since I graduated. Uniforms have changed, the buildings have been updated, and the zoning rules have become more firmly upheld, excluding lower-income suburbs.
'"What I Learnt…" is therefore nostalgic, hoping to capture a single moment from a school that is no longer recognisable. It is a dark poem, far from sweet and uplifting, but there is life in that memory, and I’d be lying if it wasn’t positive to me. In some ways, I view it less as a memory and more as a haunting. I think of dead rats whenever I find Pāua on the beach, its opalescent beauty forever tainted. I remember the cartilage whenever I kiss a lover’s neck, an intrusive thought, an unwelcome guest. This is what secondary school is like for many people I know. A recurrent shadow trailing behind that we cannot comfortably ignore. The shadow carries countless truths about us, in all different colours. Many of us hate to remember secondary school and the person we were then, but we can’t think of anything worse than forgetting.'
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Photographer credit: Isabella Howarth