Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa[i]
This is a timely and stirring book. It points to real advances while also raising questions about our poetry that call for a response. The period we have entered is one of a discombobulated socio-cultural heterogeneity, by hook or by crook. Te Whāriki is the latest (yet another, I hear you say) in a long line of news. We’ll come back to newness (the word recurs) after establishing our bearings.
Sub-titled Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa, the anthology occupies 204 pages. Each poet is sampled with 3-4 poems (32 pages overall) alongside their personal statement (19 pages). Each is further subject to a critical essay, written mostly by locally-based academics (two are based overseas, two are non-academics; 88 pages). Our three co-editors launch with an Introduction (‘He Kupu Whakataki’), each contributing as well an individual poet essay. The introduction is followed by two stand-alone essays, one by Amy Marguerite (herself a credible candidate for inclusion as a poet; 8 pages) on ‘the poets of the potluck’; the other is Tru Paraha’s ‘Visual Poetry’ (the longest single contribution, and the least germane to the overall project; 18 pages). In summary, given that 20 pages are left basically blank, the poems to prose ratio is roughly 1:6. Te Whāriki, as subtitled, is primarily a Reading anthology. Accordingly, two points are worth noting: first, the contents are symmetrically arranged into 13 well-matched sections; second, a corresponding collegiality (based on shared interest) exists among the 13 contributions. Approbation rules: ‘The kind of criticism we are interested in is less about finding fault than finding ways of understanding’ (13; my italics). What is intriguing about this editorial concurrence is that while appearing to conform to ‘tradition’ to some extent it turns the tables on it. The Arnold-Eliot critical compact whereby ‘the best that has been thought and said’ is preserved through fully informed discrimination (‘finding fault’ is a miscue) veers in this gathering towards a more simply appreciative ‘enhancing the experience’. I’ll return to this virtuous circle later.
The samplings I speak of are delightfully intemperate. Far beyond singing the praises of literary nationalism (1940s-50s), universal popular revolution (1960s-70s), or the extraordinary L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E enterprise (1980s-90s), the call to emancipation in the 21st century is borne out of a weird constellation of entrapment and release from the contemporary culture-custom-sexgender-education-ethnic-political straightjacket – in short, from normalised behavioural expectation per se, including this body and the family one is named into. The poets are presented as exemplary chrysalis-bursting figures in a forceful literary resurgence.[ii] Te Whāriki (lit. fine woven mat) showcases a range of disinhibited voices of the marginalised and otherwise stifled in a return of the irrepressible.
Katharsis (κάθαρσις) suggests ritual purgation. We witness this in the onrush of words and images (in the poems plus accompanying personal statements and critical essays) that tumble and crash and eddy in pentuppéd release. The result is fiercely expressive rather than reflective. Sometimes when one’s pushed (or pushes) hard against one’s will (or another’s) one shouts (in defiance or fear or reprisal or shame or sheer delight) the loudest – or else one may opt to dabble in outdated hand-me-downs:
Dani Yourukova's poems might take the form of a quiz or a
choose your own adventure series, allowing the reader to
shape the poem following their own desires. (Introduction)
u blo on my fingers
and I feel ur breath in the
soft gaps
that i am trying to live in (ranapiri)
In Hawkes’s poetics, the sweetness of something you might
want to eat is always cut with the acidity of abjection.
(Yourukova, feisty essayist, worthy of inclusion as a poet)
Herewith a relentless sh®edding of reserve dubbed ‘New Sincerity’ (a Jasmine Gallagher phrase referenced by Yourukova and others). Jackson declares ‘the aesthetic of the broken’ and a new I that is ‘hardly the “I” of lyrical sincerity’. Self-figuration functions as concourse rather than firmness in identity. From Chris Tse’s perspective, ‘I had learned to turn my body into my greatest // disguise’. Both the eye that sees and the ‘I’ that processes the seen serve as ensembles, ‘multi-faceted’, addressing these ‘end times’ from within an unpindownable survivalist position. In his essay on Tibble, Sullivan speaks of personas prone to combust and reconstitute: ‘the fractured, shifty nature of the self in post-millennial poetry’, especially in Tibble’s endeavoured ‘cross-indigenisation’. ‘Oversharing’, Marguerite observes, is de rigueur. Even when verbal – or behavioural – constraint is evident, as in the delicate, formally constructed poems of Oscar Upperton, placidity of surface belies inner roil: the water pooling on approach to the precipice knows not when or where it may fall. ‘Let me go home’, says one of Upperton’s poems. The stakes are frighteningly high.
There is a tremendous push and pull happening, adumbrated by the critics, most palpably in the poetry and discussion of Hawkes, Tse, ranapiri, Tibble, Jardine, Cho. The same applies to Solly and Kersel, although here the convulsions, the implacable to-be-crossed chasms, are as much ethnographic as personal or romintimate (another coinage linking fraught intimacy to the proclaimed new ‘Romanticism’). ‘Loneliness and yearning’ are the truly indigenous:
Our tūpuna were good at drowning. I will not let my pen write your name
Straight off the boat at Gallipoli, to invoke you in black cursive
drowned before the battle began, and shatter my skin-thick protection.
seventeen and a half.
(‘Wairaki’, Solly) (‘Protection order’, Kersel, also ‘Vā: Glossary’)
The radical disinhibition I speak of is at once exorbitant, discordant and heedless (“disorder of desire”, McNeill aptly quotes Halburstam). ‘He Kupu Whakataki’ speaks of ‘performative exuberance’. Desire (sexual and otherwise) runs rife and ‘wolf’ proves the predator of choice. Often the quick shifts in image and tone are extreme and disconcerting (‘Oh no / the mood for you / shudders through me / like an insect’s glitching’, Hawkes). Another poet, Kersel, best characterises the intractability of repair: ‘How sincerely I know nothing for sure’.
The same refusal to be cowed is shown by the poets’ (less so the critics, who incline to probity) dauntless wit and humour, even when couched in a reinvention of inherited classical forms. From within these citadels, the critics tell us, binaries offer ‘insufficient boundaries’, and the resort of all 13 contributions alike is “formulations that resist the orderly impulses of modernity” (quoted from Halberstam). Stephanie Burt’s perceptive account of ranapiri aptly speaks of their ‘speak[ing] for themself uncomfortably and ecstatically from that in-between position’. Ultimately there is no proper out to come out to: how precarious it proves to gift your own unbelonging to a populace that boasts increasingly few readers – indeed, in poetry’s case, fewer than few!
Which returns us to our virtuous circle. Always newness seeks to be legitimised and join the mainstream. For this, really, is Te Whāriki’s purpose. An important question to ask is what aligns and distinguishes it from earlier comparable breakthroughs like Arthur Baysting’s The Young New Zealand Poets (1973) and Lydia Wever’s assemblage Yellow Pencils: Contemporary Poetry by New Zealand Women (1988). Eighteen of Baysting’s 19 poets are pakeha men in their 20s (except 30-somethings Haley, Loney, Olds); similarly Wevers’ poets are nearly exclusively pakeha with an average age around 40. Te Whāriki is ‘samesame but different’: six of ten poets identify as female; two are gender-transitioned; three have Māori heritage one Asian and one Pasifika; sexual preference is not de rigueur.[iii] The sought elder’s blessing, provided by Kendrick Smithyman in Young Poets and by Vincent O’Sullivan in Riemke Ensing’s Private Gardens (1976; forerunner to Yellow Pencils), is in Te Whāriki supplied by Anna Jackson, more tellingly if less directly (role-sharing is preferred in modern times). She is the unobtrusive thread that runs through the mat. First named, she is joined by co-editors Robert Sullivan (friend and fellow-poet-academic) and Dougal McNeill (Te Herenga Waka colleague). Indeed, Te Herenga Waka university and press and literary establishment, dominates. Eight of the ten poets (all university graduates) have studied at IIML (International Institute of Modern Letters), an adjunct to the university. This is said not to contest the credentials or authority of the university, teaching, or literary publication enterprise, but rather to point to the exigencies (realpolitik?) that come with authenticating/institutionalising youthful attainment. The volume doesn’t say so explicitly, but it is reasonable to regard Anna Jackson as the key mentor (I welcome the thought) and Te Herenga Waka the centre of the rejuvenated poetic (others may disagree).[iv] It does also, of course, raise the further question of what may be ‘out there’ that doesn’t belong within the same esprit de corps?[v] For me, it would be better to have these mutual relationships and presumptive ‘sphere of influence’ more candidly addressed. In any case, the heartwarming accord-within-discord image of clustering I end with is that which appears on the cover and within the pages of Jackson’s own excellent Pasture and Flock: New and Selected Poems (2018) – a mother hen, fussing over her scattered chicks, gathers them all safely in. And a formidable and lovable flock it is, too.
notes
[i] Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aotearoa, Anna Jackon, Dougal McNeill, Robert Sullivan eds (Auckland University Press: Auckland, October 2025) 204 pages.
[ii] One cannot help but relate it to the fraught expressionism of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, literally ‘the scream of nature’. A minority speaking to a minority about a minority and everything else.
[iii] Chris Tse, the oldest of the poets, already a past laureate, is only three years younger than James K Baxter was at his death. Democracy and demographics are no strict determent of high poetic attainment – nor is either necessarily well-served in return. Art thrives according to its own measure.
[iv] A secondary link exists between Jackson and her (and Te Whāriki’s) publisher Auckland University Press (where two of the young poets plus three of the commentators-also-young-poets have been published). Furthermore, two Te Whāriki poets and two poet-essayists were ‘discovered’ in the five issues of AUP New Poets (issues 5-9, 2019-23) edited by Jackson, the series resuscitated by her in which she had made her own local debut (issue 1, 1998). Jackson’s recent critical text, Actions & Travels: How Poetry Works (AUP, 2022), is where I first came upon a wholehearted critical endorsement of several 1990s-born IIML/THWUP ‘writers who may not be so well known’, including Ash Davida Jane, Hera Lindsay Bird, Rebecca Hawkes, essa may ranapiri, Tayi Tibble, all important names in Te Whāriki. Serendipity and destiny share neighbourhoods.
[v] Several new age poetry anthologies have appeared in recent years in which Te Whāriki poets are often prominent; and digitisation has enabled a plethora of publishing opportunities, especially for younger writers. For example, Starling15 (2023) features 15 platform-providers for emerging writers: ‘WORD – The Front Line: fifteen journals, presses and platforms launched in recent years showcasing the work of emerging writers in Aotearoa’, https://www.starlingmag.com/issue-15/fifteen-journals-presses-platforms.