The bite of winter drives us to indoor hobbies such as knitting and needlework, and that can be satisfying for some. Here at Cityscape, though, we like to mix it up. Which is why we love poetry.

You can read and enjoy it curled up in your favourite armchair. Or you can go out and see poets deliver their lines live and direct. You can even have a go yourself. Now that’s gonna warm you up!

From the poets who launched their careers with Denis Glover’s Caxton Press in the 1930s to stalwarts Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe and a new generation represented by Claudia Jardine, Ōtautahi Christchurch has been a major force in the development of our national voice.

The common rooms, coffee houses and private soirées that were once the venues have been augmented by the likes of Space Academy and Little Andromeda. Poets and stand-up comedians mingle on these stages, to the benefit of all. Slam poetry prioritises the stage over the page and Christchurch audiences love it.

Since 1989, a major force for poetry in the city has been the Canterbury Poets’ Collective. From early days at the Arts Centre, to the WEA, the Madras Café Bookshop, the CPIT Students’ Union and now the Imagitech Theatre at Ara, the collective’s Poetry in Performance readings have continued – the longest-running series of poetry readings in the country.

Open mic nights have been central from the beginning, often giving new poets their first public outing, as well as more established names an opportunity to road-test new work.

As you might expect, the collective has a poetic way of expressing why it does what it does:

Poetry is what sustains us
when nothing else makes sense.

That sounds like something we can agree with!

Q&A: Claudia Jardine

Claudia Jardine wrote her latest poetry collection, Biter, at Te Matatiki Toi Ora The Arts Centre, where she lived for three months as part of its Creative Residency programme. The page comes first in her writing process but Claudia lives for performing her poems live and for hearing others perform theirs. That’s why she always invites a couple of poet buddies along to her book launches. Claudia has an MA in classics with distinction from Victoria University of Wellington, where she won the 2020 Alex Scobie Research Prize and a Marsden Grant for Masters scholarship. Having been part of the live poetry scene in Wellington and Christchurch, Claudia feels here is a more beginner-friendly community. “There’s quite distinct circles but we are all in it together. There’s lots of people willing to give it a go.”

When did you start writing poetry? I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. My first poem was published when I was 17, in Re-Draft, which is a collection of teenagers' writing published each year by Clerestory Press. That was in 2013. I was more into slam poetry then. I did lots of performances. I was a national finalist in the Rising Voices young poets competition in 2013. That’s on YouTube. It’s pretty cringeworthy for me to watch now but then Rome wasn’t built in a day! After high school I went to Victoria University in Wellington and studied poetry and also studied at the International Institute of Modern Letters. The publication Starling started up around then. This is for writers aged under 25. That was a nice coincidence – while I was trying out being a poet, here was a publication just for me. I was writing a lot of poems at the time and sending them to journals. It’s all part of the process of moving from thought to page to publication to performance.

How do you find out where to send poems? Word of mouth. When you get published in a journal they run a short bio of you. I look at the bios of other writers to see what journals they have been published in. Then I put together a timeline of submission deadlines. It’s a very methodical approach but then I do love research.

Stage or page? I prioritise the page. It’s my chosen vehicle. It goes there first. I write it and rewrite it and then say it out loud and think about the pauses, sounds, words that aren’t earning their keep.

Any advice for budding poets out there? The word you end a line with is important. Don’t waste the chance to use it to impart meaning. Also, go to some open mic nights, see what talent range exists. Some people are scared of sharing, thinking they are going to be judged. Go out and see other people giving it a go and being brave enough to do it. Trust your own judgement and follow what you like. What’s your go-to spot in Christchurch? Grizzly. I love their eggy breakfast bagel.

Disturbing Suburban Magic Trick

Cilla ate six Quality Baker raspberry buns
she squirmed
belly swollen like a blimp
begin! disturbing suburban magic trick
with pink icing intact
she threw up all six
afternoon tea was ruined once again
all eyes on Dad
too proud to own a dog smaller than a footrest
besotted with our black Lab
he mumbled something about
his Great Uncle Len
and a black dog who could play cricket
a well-trained dog called Peter
who fetched, fielded and ran batters out
came when called
and put the ball down
and I thought, yeah
Great Uncle Len
Len who went up Chunuk Bair
dug shallow trenches between dead men
while his senior officers were playing cards back at camp
saw Malone split to shreds
Len would have had a well-trained dog
a friend to dig the strawberry patch in Katikati with
not like our Cilla, the overeager leg slip
who looks at us like she looks at a bin

From BITER (Auckland University Press, 2023), p15.

Gail Ingram

An award-winning writer from the Port Hills of Ōtautahi, Gail Ingram is the author of Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019). Her second poetry collection, Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press), is due out this year. Gail’s work has appeared in Landfall, Turbine/Kapohau, Poetry New Zealand and others. She has an Masters of Creative Writing from Massey University, is managing editor for a fine line, and a short fiction editor for Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction.

You’re afraid you’re a matuku

you may not go unnoticed
but you feel as though you do
especially when you go boom
boom boom   the echoes in your throat
are deadened by the swamp and
reeds of a secretive past  you wish for
the pulse of your catch  the thrash
of an eel  flapping around
your long neck  but your meat is
harder to find in the ever-decreasing edges
of the bog  stolen by upright invaders
who seek dry feet
do they hold their chins up
when petrified?

James Norcliffe

Poetry has had few champions in Ōtautahi quite like James Norcliffe. His 12 collections span several decades divided between pursuing his own writing and helping other writers develop their own career. In 2022, James received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Poetry and this year the Margaret Mahy Medal. He has twice won the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Award and been shortlisted for the Montana poetry awards. His latest collection, Letter to Oumuamua, was published this year.

Picnic in the cemetery

Why the cemetery?
It was peaceful and there was plentiful parking.
What did you eat?
A boiled egg as white as the alabaster statuary I cracked it on.
Anything else?
Two cheese sandwiches washed down with a glass of Chablis.
You did not feel it was sacrilegious?
I did not think the dead would mind my continuing to eat.
What did you learn?
I was reminded of my impermanence;
something I shared with the cheese sandwich.
What did you take with you?
The memory of cracking an egg on an angel.

‘Picnic in the Cemetery’ by James Norcliffe, Letter to `Oumuamua (Otago University Press, 2023)

Frankie McMillan

Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer. Her latest poetry collection, There are no horses in heaven, was published by Canterbury University Press.

What extremely muscular horses can teach us about climate change

She tells me she’s read about it, this link between horses and climate change, but when she went to the internet, a message popped up page not found and all she can imagine is that the horse’s breath is a ferocious wind that lays the desert or the tundra or whatever to waste and, really her mind is saddled up with the strangest of facts; how an octopus has three hearts, how bees sleep in pairs and hug each other’s knees at night and, ‘Stop right there,’ I tell her because I know what’s coming next, it will be about the gorillas making a new nest each night in the trees, and the male sleeping below to ward off hyenas or other dangerous beasts and she lies on the double bed in the motel room, far, far away from the desert or tundra or jungle or savannah, and she points to the single bed by the door and tells me if I were the male gorilla I’d be sleeping right there, ready to defend the troop and I shake my head troop? but she’s read about it, it’s the collective noun, so then I take off my belt and trousers, and I ask her if I’m not an extremely muscular fella and ‘Page not found,’ she says, ‘page not found.’