Friday, 22 July 2011

A second poem for National Poetry Day

It's National Poetry Day today and I'd also like to share a poem that I like from the NZETC Collections.

It's called Love poem for a Geek on Dixon Steps by Airini Beautrais, from Sport 35: Winter 2007.

The poem's title caught my eye mostly because I walk up and down Dixon Steps everyday. The poem is short and sweet, and it enticed me to read more of Airini's poems. It is the first poem in Twenty-three Love Poems, all of which I enjoyed and I hope you enjoy too.

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day so I thought I'd share my favourite poem from the NZETC collection.

When I first started at VUW, I'd recently returned from Oxford, where I'd been quite removed, physically and intellectually, from my years as an undergrad at Canterbury. One of my early tasks was assessing our collection with respect to google suite of tools. I'd not yet really had much to do with the Sport journal, but one of the pages was highly ranked for both "fucking poems" and "fucking poetry" and I instantly connected with the poem. The poem reminds me of two wonderful years I spent as part of the Canterbury Writers Group set up by the then Writer-in-Residence Bernadette Hall (whose Wikipedia entry I would later edit). For me those years were filled with poetry that was long on passion, shock value and pseudonyms but short on writing craft and life experience. We edited two anthologies (Find the Red (which ran to two printings) and Eels in a Bucket); we drank cheap red wine; we supported each other at poetry readings; we got to know the AA crowd (they were in the room immediately before us); in short we had a ball. One of my poems from the period eventually washed ashore in the School Journal, so maybe it wasn't an entirely misspent youth.

All that floods back to me when I read Short Poems About Fucking by James Brown from our Sport collection. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

stuart yeates

Tuesday, 5 July 2011

Māori Language Week

Kia Ora and welcome to Māori language week. The theme for this year's Māori Language week is Manaakitanga or Maori hospitality and Customs. There are several mentions of this term in our collection.

We thought we would take the opportunity to highlight some of our highly used Māori language works.

* A Dictionary of the Maori Language by Herbert W. Williams.

* Nga kōrero a Reweti Kohere Mā by Te Ohorere Kaa and Wiremu Kaa.

* 28 Maori Battalion by J. F. Cody.

These three works are in our ten most accessed items for the past 6 months. We are very pleased to see Maori language works being highly used in our collection.

If your currently studying Te Reo Maori you may like to use the 'Māori-English / English-Māori parallel texts only' search function to show works with translations between the two languages.

We are also looking forward to publishing another Māori work 'Te Whakatuwheratanga o Te Tumu Herenga Waka' or The Opening of Te Tumu Herenga Waka. Te Tumu Herenga Waka is the meeting house at Victoria University of Wellington and this work discusses its founding and the Epa, Poupou and Heke found inside.

Tuesday, 17 May 2011

Best New Zealand Poems Audio

We are happy to announce that selected poems on the Best New Zealand Poems Website are now available as audio files. Each poem has been recorded by the poet themselves. The audio files correspond to poems selected in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems, an anthology now available from Victoria University Press, edited by Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins. We have been working with the International Institute of Modern Letters to make these recordings accessible. We hope to have the remaining poems available by mid 2011. You will find audio for many well known New Zealand poets and we hope you enjoy being able to listen to each poem as well as read it.

Tuesday, 5 April 2011

“Chew and depth” in New Zealand Poetry anthology

A brand new issue of the online anthology Best New Zealand Poems has gone live, containing the best 25 poems from 2010.

The anthology includes work from well known writers like Fleur Adcock, Elizabeth Smither, Ian Wedde, Jenny Bornholdt, James Brown, Gregory O'Brien and Poet Laureate Cilla McQueen as well as some of the rising stars of New Zealand literature.

This year’s Best New Zealand Poems is edited by Victoria University Senior Lecturer Chris Price—a former editor of Landfall and herself a well-known poet. She says she is particularly pleased to have included “two comets long lost from the local poetry firmament”—David Mitchell, who has published almost nothing since his near-legendary Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby in 1972, and John Newton, author of the much admired book about Baxter’s Jerusalem, The Double Rainbow.

She notes in her introduction that she was looking for—and found—“poems with enough chew and depth to make them worth repeated tasting.”

Series editor Professor Bill Manhire says that it’s exciting to see such a strong selection at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. “It’s one of New Zealand’s best kept secrets, just how good we are at poetry – Best New Zealand Poems is one way of telling the world what we all know locally.”

Professor Manhire and his colleague Damien Wilkins have been making a “best of the best” selection from the first ten years of Best New Zealand Poems. It will be published by Victoria University Press, and launched in May at the Auckland Writers’ Festival.

Professor Manhire says that sound files will soon to be added to back issues of Best New Zealand Poems. “We already have authors’ notes and lots of useful links. But everyone tells us that poems make most sense when their authors read them aloud. Now you’ll be able to see the poems on screen and hear the poets read them at the same time.”

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

New additions to the collection.

It has been a while since we updated our front page so we thought we would highlight some new works in the collection. We have a backlog of historical New Zealand and Pacific works that we are working our way through so keep an eye out for more to come. There are two noteworthy additions that maybe of interest.

The Founders of Canterbury provides the intriguing correspondence between Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Robert Godley and other key figures of the settlement of Canterbury between 1847 and 1850. This addition to the NZETC Collection is timely considering the recent devastating earthquakes which have struck Canterbury and the slow process of grieving and rebuilding. Our thoughts go out to all Cantabrians during these hard times.

Voices of Auckland, is an attempt to redress the unfavourable view of Auckland province that was being circulated in the United Kingdom during the mid 1800s. It includes information about the greater Auckland area from the Bay of Islands to the Bay of Plenty. It also provides a variety of advice to potential emigrants. The following example of advice is from Rev. Richard Taylor:
"To single men, intending to emigrate, I would say, marry before you go out; a good wife is a great treasure and stay to a young man. Many have been ruined, because they have not had a bosom friend to sustain them in times of trial, besides the social comfort thus derived; for none can tell how dreary a young settler's home is without a wife, and how many temptations she saves him from. Therefore, to every single man I again say, marry, for wives are not to be had abroad; property is of little consideration, compared with that of a partner."

Thursday, 16 December 2010

Turbine 2010 is online now.

The 2010 issue of literary journal Turbine is now online, featuring new writing from emerging and established writers, with motherhood, earthquakes, and snow emerging as themes in this year's quietly apocalyptic selection.

Turbine is published once a year by Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML).

Sixteen of this year's IIML Masters students have work on display, including this year's Adam Foundation Prize winner, Rayne Cockburn, with an excerpt from her reading journal offering an insight into how reading great literature feeds the creative process.

Also in this issue are two new poems by, and an interview with, 2010 Victoria University Writer in Residence Jenny Bornholdt, former Poet Laureate, who talks about the poetic quality of children's writing, and what is meant by the term 'school of poetry'.

Audio recordings by six poets, including Jenny Bornholdt, 2009 Biggs Prize winner Bill Nelson, and Victoria University Lecturer Anna Jackson, offer the chance to hear poetry come to life.

Two new storm-buffeted but enchanting poems appear from Bernadette Hall, who will be taking up a teaching fellowship at the IIML next year to stand in for senior lecturer Chris Price, who will be spending much of the year in Menton, France as recipient of the 2011 Mansfield Prize.

"The 2010 edition of Turbine is full of award-winning writers, with a startling piece of fiction set in a disquieting theme park from two-time Macmillan Brown Prize winner Cate Palmer, and poetry by no fewer than three previous Adam Prize recipients Cliff Fell, Lynn Jenner, and Ashleigh Young," says Chris Price.

"The issue traverses the high brow and the low. Cliff Fell's work alone ranges from classical Latin love poetry to an examination of Kiwi profanity."

The NZETC works with the IIML to publish Turbine and hosts the journal on our server. If you wish to see the other editions of Turbine you can do so here: Turbine index page.

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