The Rules from Kirsten McDougall

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Kirsten Mc Dougall

Okay, I’m someone who hates wasting my reading time, so if you don’t like the idea of writing ‘rules’ don’t read any further (but do read rule 5).

Personally, I love/hate writing rules. It’s very appealing to think that if you follow The Rules then you will write The Book, but what a load of shite. It’s a bit like those magazines that give you 5 bullet-points for happiness. You should read any rules with a coarse grain of salt. Generally, I only apply the rules that fit with what I’m currently trying to do. I heard on the radio that this is pretty much what humans do – ask questions that support their preconceived answers. The other great thing about these rules, maybe aside from the one about double entendres, is that they can all be applied to running.

I’ve been taking my writing seriously for ten years now. Some days I think I’m getting the hang of it, and then I go and read a book like Prowlers (Maurice Gee’s masterpiece from 1987) and realise that I have neither the talent nor experience. So, until I do, I shall fall back on The Rules. Here are some of the good ones in no particular order, collected just for you.

 

Read your work aloud to yourself.

Kate Camp told me this years ago – basic good advice. You can hear the sound of your work better out loud. You’ll pick up clangers, repetitions and typos very quickly. You’ll hear your characters’ voices. Does that dialogue sound real or like what a character in a book might say?

 

Don’t give up your day job.

This one I’ve followed and ignored. You will not make money from writing. You will not be happy if you don’t write. It’s a bind and a constant frustration. The main thing is that if you want to write you must make time for it, regularly, whether it’s your day job or not. The time might be 5am (Nigel Cox) or right through the night (William Faulkner). Whatever. Just do it. (See how the running application works?!)

 

Rule 5. Every hour get up off your arse and move around for a few minutes.

Okay, this one is from my osteopath. This is probably the only rule anyone should follow. I’ll go further – always follow this rule.

 

‘Don’t be making time changes on your first page. Give your reader and character a chance to settle.’

This from the astonishing and terrifying Irish short fiction writer Claire Keegan. I sat in on a workshop she ran last year at Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, where she gave out a lot of rules. This was one of them. I’m currently testing it in my next novel, where I have a time change on the first page. I wrote the opening passage, then looked up on my wall and saw this rule. (I hang her rules on my study wall). She’s probably right. We’ll see.

 

Don’t quote songs.

This is practical advice. It takes an age for a music publisher to give copyright permission and you will need to pay for it. Unless David Bowie is a good friend, don’t use his lyrics in your work.

 

‘Do not make use of double entendres. Since your work is intended to be overtly erotic, you should only concern yourself with single entendres. If you happen to come across a double entrendre in one of your drafts, a handy trick is to divide it down the middle and move the second half to any section of your manuscript in which entendres may be lacking.’

This is taken from Seth Fried in an article on erotic fiction, read the full article here.

I love this rule for its mathematics. It’s not erotic fiction, but my novella Homefires had a double entendre joke in it. When I wondered aloud the wisdom of putting a joke in a story, Damien Wilkins (my MA teacher while I was writing Homefires) said that he’d read a story with a good joke in it. Well, it’s a good joke and I copy it here for your reading pleasure:

A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a double entendre. So the bartender gives him one.

In the future I’ll be using more entendres, double and single, halved and quartered, hung and drawn, in my work.

 

It’s a long, hard, slow game.

This gem from Gregory O’Brien. He was my first writing teacher back in the day when I thought I might be a poet. He’s talking about marathons. And writing. They’re kind of the same thing.

 

Write to amuse yourself.

Seriously, if it doesn’t amuse you then what’s the point? This is my litmus test. If the characters and the words on the page aren’t making their own electricity, then probably the scene and the words are dead. Discard and start again. Or find the one sentence that is alive and grow a new paragraph around that. Frances Wilson reviewing Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies in The Observer finished her review saying ‘Mantel, like Cromwell, seems not to mind if we are there or not: she is writing, as he was living, for herself alone, where they said… well, we should all aim to write as entertainingly as Mantel.’ Indeed, we should all aim to write as entertainingly as Hilary Mantel.

 

Kirsten McDougall’s first book The Invisible Rider was launched last weekend. She was a winner of The Long and the Short of It short story competition in 2011, in which her story ‘Clean hands save lives’ won first prize in the short section. You can catch her at next week’s Writers On Mondays with Gigi Fenster and Lawrence Patchett when they talk about “Blood and Money” on August 27th.  Full WOM programme details here.

Ideas? Search Me

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Writers in my MA Scriptwriting class quickly find out they have to come up with a lot of ideas very quickly – sometimes on the spot. And not little ideas – big ideas that could make a feature film or full-length play. My hope is to make them aware (if they’re not already) that they are swimming in an ocean of potential stories – they don’t need to clutch at the first straw that comes floating past, rather they can endlessly make up ideas, audition them, make them compete against each other. It should always be a question of why this idea instead of all the others, what’s the imperative to write this one now?

Earlier this year, when sending the writers off to think up yet more ideas I took pity on them somewhat and produced the following cheat sheet they could use if they felt they were running dry. It’s a series of Google (or search engine of your choice) search terms – pairs of words. A lot of the pairs have got some kind of inbuilt tension, a friction between them, from which drama is likely to spring. The idea is that the real-life stories the search terms reel in from the net provide inspiration for fiction.

This is me trying to be modern – usually I just send idea-challenged writers back to the newspaper, that old-school and reliable compendium of human drama in all its forms.

To throw some arbitrariness into the mix – and prevent uncomfortable racking of uninspired brain – feel free to plug any of the two-word search terms below into Google and follow the results till you feel the tickling of a new idea …

Take what grabs you from the net stories these terms link to, and make your own story for a 30 minute theatre piece.

Search on …

Strange case

Bizarre incident

Family tensions

Desperate dilemma

Sibling rivals

Past haunts

Town divided

Passion proves

Feuding friends

Mystery unsolved

Lovers vow

Ken Duncum is The Michael Hirschfeld Director of Scriptwriting at the IIML. Ken will be  at the next Writers on Mondays with David O’Donnell at Circa. It’s said that, all going well, the playwright/director relationship can be ‘better than a marriage’.  Ken and David will talk about who does what and who did what in their world premiere production of West End Girls (running at Circa, 4 Aug-1 Sept). Where – if anywhere – are the creative divisions between writing a play and directing it? Are they two different things – or different phases of the same thing?

Michael Hofmann — Translate what you don’t know

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Look at poems in a language you don’t know, or know only imperfectly; it’s easier if you stick to our common alphabet, though in theory you could work with Sanskrit or Russian (if you don’t know those). What English words do the foreign words suggest to you? Write them out, and then take your ‘rough’ and work with it until you have made it into something you might have written (a); or, alternatively, until there is something odd or half-baked or suggestive about the words that you like (b).

Say, Ungaretti’s tiny poem, ‘m’illumino/ d’immenso’ – what does that suggest, what might those 2 words and 2 letters morph into? Mailmen and dustmen, doctors of internal medicine, I am the threshold of a great palace…

Either outcome – the smooth or the rough – will teach you something about your own boundaries, and with luck, will carry you beyond them. Besides, it never hurts to look at words to the point of hallucination and beyond. (I was going to call my first book The Alphabetical Dog.)

Translator and poet Michael Hofmann is in Wellington to give the annual lecture for the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation on 9 August.  He will also teach a masterclass at the IIML, and appears in conversation with Bill Manhire in Writers on Mondays, 13 August.   Full WOM programme details here.

Hofmann has published four volumes of poems and won a Cholmondeley Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for poetry. His translations of German writers from Brecht, Kafka and Roth to Patrick Süskind and Herta Müller have won many awards, including the Independent‘s Foreign Fiction Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the P.E.N./Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. Michael Hofmann has also been a prolific reviewer, and his widely published critical writings encompass a broad range of novels, poems, paintings, plays and movies.

Terese Svoboda’s Big Line

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Line allows you to breathe, to hold the words in your head before charging into the next set of words. But what if you don’t breathe, what if you dive into the poem, like Bernadette Mayer in the example below, and swim past all the beautiful fish to the very end of water, each line indented two spaces, to indicate no breaks, just the poem going on and on and on? Prose does this now and then when a character is drugged or rushed or over-stimulated, why not poetry?

What I propose isn’t prose poetry, per se, it’s using line to excess, overextending it for effect, really flexing syntax, manipulating punctuation. While writing this kind of poem, you must pay a lot of attention to how you manoeuvre. Too quick and you’ll cut off your oxygen, too slow and the reader won’t want to wade on behind you. If you opt for a list somewhere along the way, make it fascinating. If you use several voices, each has to be clear. Enjoy yourself.

The bed is like a typewriter, sometimes I think the bed’s a refrigera-
   tor with the holographic head of a man in dichroic color to be
   seen in ambient light on the door, I mean the cover of the
   book the bed is, you do look all the time at some of the same
   things until the names of the objects might as well fall off
Then maybe you die, that’s the scare of mornings, it’s loose or lush
   like this or blood but darker than it ought to be, it all has a
   beauty and a structure I haven’t seen all of yet like a story, I
   always forget the most important part

— Bernadette Mayer, excerpt from Midwinter Day

Terese Svoboda is an award-winning American writer of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She has just been commissioned to write a biography of the poet Lola Ridge, who spent her early years in New Zealand and Australia. Terese will be teaching a masterclass at the Institute of Modern Letters this Monday, 6 August, when you can also catch her in conversation with Mary McCallum and reading from her work as part of the Writers on Mondays series, 12.15 pm, at Te Papa. Full WOM programme details here.

The Syllabic Childhood of James Brown

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This is the first exercise I give to my under-grad Poetry Writing class (CREW253). There’s plenty of imaginative scope, but the constraints place a big emphasis on control. Lack of control is a major problem in many of the poems submitted by course applicants. By ‘lack of control’ I mean poems that lurch tonally, are full of incoherent sentences, random rhymes and poor punctuation. Successful poems that seem out of control are usually, in fact, very carefully managed. We move on to exercises that encourage pushing language around more, but how will you ever learn to juggle if you can’t first throw and catch?

Write a poem called ‘My Childhood in ­________’. Choose a place you’ve never lived, but maybe know a little bit about. For example, ‘My Childhood in Laos’, ‘My Childhood on Bikini Atoll’, ‘My Childhood on Mars’, ‘My Childhood in 1848’.

You could talk about your family (you can use your real family or make up a new one). Do you live in the city or country, a house or apartment? What do you like doing? Do you go to school? Do you have a pet? Has something interesting ever happened to you or your family? Do you like where you’re living or would you like to move?  These possibilities assume your speaker is still a child, but you could write from the point of view of an adult recalling their childhood.

Try to write in your normal voice, as if you are talking to a friend. Do you talk in rhyme? No.

Your poem must be a syllabic poem! That means each line needs to have the same number of syllables. You can pick the number you want, but 7 or 9 often work well.

You must also incorporate one of the following lines into your poem (not as a first or last line):

‘She carved the meat and then she was crying.’ (Robert Hass)

‘Someone is dying of too much afternoon.’ (Geoff Cochrane)

‘The darkness surrounds us.’ (Robert Creeley)

‘The dog left me there, and I went on myself.’ (Robin Robertson)

‘A is for atlas, but I am not in it.’ (Edwin Morgan)

‘The droppings of last year’s horses.’ (James Wright)

‘The cowbells follow one another.’ (James Wright)

‘She didn’t know what she wanted.’ (Robert Hass)

‘Come here, Sweetie, out of the closet.’ (Sylvia Plath)

‘It is difficult even to choose the adjective.’ (Wallace Stevens)

‘And that has made all the difference.’ (Robert Frost)

‘I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.’ (Theodore Roethke)

‘Your new life passes in review.’ (John Hartley Williams and Matthew Sweeney)

‘We are kind to snails.’ (Fleur Adcock)

It’s OK to change the line’s tense and gender to fit with your poem.

Here is a syllabic poem by Thom Gunn about a snail. Every line has 7 syllables (except one has 8 – he cheated!).

Considering the Snail
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth’s dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail’s fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

James Brown was born in Palmerston North, hence the title of next week’s Writers on Mondays event where he’ll discuss his work with Fergus Barrowman. His new book of poetry Warm Auditorium has just been released. You can also catch him reading tomorrow at 12.30 in Unity Books Wellington, with Bill Manhire, Geoff Cochrane, Harry Ricketts, Lynn Davidson and Helen Heath. Full WOM programme details here.

SWITCHEROO with Bernadette Hall

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Bernadette Hall

Why not imagine you’re someone else, speak in another voice, from another time, from another side of the gender fence, perhaps – just do a switch.

I’d suggest locating the new you by voice, rather than by trying to construct a character entirely from the outside. First jot down some fascinating words. Maybe you’ve found them in an Elizabethan poem or in the translation of a Peruvian novel. Now imagine ‘you’ have  turned up from another story, it could be from history, art, literature, fairy tale, music, whatever excites. Now speak (write) ‘your’ version of a small moment imagined from that story, pulling in the vocabulary you’ve previously jotted down.

You can find an example in my poem ‘ Just a short note from the watchman, another minor character’ on-line in Trout 17. I’m writing a short sequence called Footnotes to the  Oresteia and the watchman emerged, speaking in a surprisingly elaborate fashion.  I have to say that I love him to bits.

Bernadette Hall taught at the IIML in 2011 while Chris Price was in Menton. She also edited the Best New Zealand Poems that year. As a curtain raiser for National Poetry Day on 27 July, Writers on Mondays will introduce a baker’s dozen of the 25 poets whose work was chosen by  Bernadette. We welcome Hera Bird, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Janis Freegard, Rob Hack, Dinah Hawken, Anna Jackson, Helen Lehndorf, Kate McKinstry, Bill Manhire, Harvey Molloy, Marty Smith, Ranui Taiapa and Tim Upperton. Full WOM programme details here.

This writing exercise gives you license to be completely unoriginal.

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If you think about it, unoriginality is everywhere. A fair chunk of some pretty great poetry is simply a “version” of an earlier work. Think of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, John Gardner’s Grendel or Caroline Bergvall’s “The Canterbury Tales.” Think of Carol-Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, where she blatantly versions every myth and fairy-tale from King Midas to Beauty and the Beast. All of these writers make it new by making it again.

 In this exercise, I encourage you to choose a clutch of poems by another writer to “version”, or re-write. The older, the better. Antiquity is a good place to start. The Roman poet Catullus wrote lots of poems that are just the right length (short) for this exercise. Sappho’s fragments work well, too, as do some of Ezra Pound’s shorter Cathay poems, which “version” (some say translate) poems of ancient China.

First, read the poems. You will have to read them in translation, in English, unless you can understand Latin, ancient Greek, or Chinese, in which case I am jealous. The trick is to spend a bit of time with each poem first. Read it once, twice, thrice. Sit with it for a while. Let it sink in, let it enter your bloodstream. You are not doing a translation. Do not transcribe the poem line-for-line. Let the poem make a home in you. Let it start seeding new images, before you pick up a pen.

Now, close the book of poems, and write your “version”. It doesn’t matter how faithful your poem is to the “original.” The less faithful, the better. So, poem 78b by Catullus, which in James Michie’s translation reads thus:

…What pains me most is that your spittle-slime

Has fouled my sweet girl’s sweet lips. But the crime

Is one you’ll have to pay for, for your shame

Shall echo down the centuries, and Fame

Grow old and ugly muttering your name.

 

might turn into something like this:

 

Into the pearl-cave of her girl’s mouth

you bloomed your black tongue.

Time’s square will blink your image

on its screens for decades to come.

 

Or poem 87 by Catullus (James Michie’s translation again), which goes like this:

 

No woman can

Truthfully aver

That any man

Ever loved her

As I loved you.

No lover bound

By pledge of heart

Was ever found

True on his part

As I was true.

 

might become this:

 

No one can say

I didn’t smother you

with the blood

of my heart

I did

Drown

drown

 

Anne Carson in Men in the Off Hours achieves some wonderfully deviant and spooky versions of Catullus, so I recommend checking those out for inspiration.

Here’s one last re-write, versioning a poem from Pound’s Cathay:

 

The Jewel Stair’s Greivance

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,

It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,

And I let down the crystal curtain

And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

 

And here’s my “version”, which is, again, quite far from the “original” version by Pound (which was already many steps removed from the “original” ancient Chinese):

Don’t slip, don’t soak,

don’t watch the moon.

Diamonds on the soles

of nothing.

Pound’s version of this poem has a lengthy footnote explaining the poem’s imagery. The footnote is almost as long as the poem itself! It might be fun to try “versioning” the footnote, too.

Joan Fleming’s début book of poetry The Same As Yes was published last year by VUP.  She won the Biggs Poetry Prize in 2007, and her work has appeared in Landfall, the Listener, Sport, and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. She is currently studying towards an MA in iterative poetics at Otago University.

You can catch her at next week’s Writers On Mondays with Lynn Davidson, Harry Ricketts and Helen Heath when they talk about The Graft of Poetry on July 16th. Full WOM programme details here.

Because – Bernard says so

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Bernard Beckett

This exercise is about developing a particular habit when it comes to thinking about narrative development, and is actually a drill I first came across within the context of theatrical improv. Called Because, for obvious reasons, it involves taking a mundane opening event and riffing off it in the following manner:

The car battery was flat.

Because the car battery was flat, I took the train.

Because I took the train, I saw a For Sale sign on a property across the bay.

Because I saw a For Sale sign, I texted my husband, and asked him to meet me at the station after work.

Because I asked him to meet me at the station after work, I was surprised when he didn’t show.

Because I was surprised he didn’t show, I assumed he’d mixed the message up, and was waiting for me at the property I’d spotted.

Because I assumed he’d mixed the message up, I found myself alone outside the house that perfectly matched the home we’d both always said we wanted, thinking back over the last few weeks, beginning to worry.

Because I found myself beginning to worry, I phoned him, even though I knew how much that annoyed him.

Because I phoned him, I discovered his phone was switched off….

And so a flat battery gives birth to a tale of deception and infidelity.

The activity is less about generating narrative (although it can be useful for doing this), and more about ensuring that the narrative you want to create has internal consistency. Because is a way of papering over the cracks of plot construction, because it plays to a folk psychology intuition that events in our lives are causally linked, and creates that type of story where it feels as if the unfolding tale represents the inevitable consequence of the starting conditions.

The same process can be used to reverse engineer your stories, laying out the events and seeing where the becauses fall, the theory being that it’s a sound idea to interrogate thoroughly the non-causal linkages, to check what you still have is a story, rather than a collection of incidents.

Bernard Beckett is the 2012 writer in residence at the IIML. During the year he hopes to finish the novel Lullaby, which will complete a trio of metaphysical novels aimed at young adults. The first of these, Genesis, is his most widely read work, and has been translated into over 20 languages. He is also co-writing a screenplay for August and in the early stages of planning for a series of essays on education in New Zealand.

You can catch Bernard at the first Writers on Mondays session for 2012, next Monday July 9th. Full WOM programme details here.

Read Bernard Beckett’s New Zealand Book Council profile.

Best of the best

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We were pleased to see The Best of Best New Zealand Poems getting an enthusiastic review from Terry Locke in the new issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature.  When a review opens like this

 The title of this book is a double superlative whammy and does a good job of attracting attention. The big question, of course, is that having gained attention, does the book sustain and reward it.

you worry for a moment about what’s to come. Then you read on, and at the words

 My simple answer is yes, and I’ll explain why.

you heave a sigh of relief.

We were pleased with the review, which at seven pages in length is substantial. But we were particularly interested in Terry Locke’s comments on the poets’ own commentaries, which from the beginning have accompanied BNZP’s annual selections.

The commentaries function differently. One sort provides an insight into the composition process. An example is Andrew Johnston’s account of how he came to write ‘The Sunflower’, a poem which is one of my picks for the book as a whole. The account itself is manifestly intertextual, with references to Swinburne, Ashbery, the King James Bible and the painting of Anselm Kiefer. This sort of commentary cues the reader’s appreciation of craft. . .  Another sort of commentary is illustrated here, from Rhian Gallagher:

“My father was, as they say, a man of few words. He came out from Ireland in his twenties, worked on building the hydro dams down south and then in the freezing works, hard manual labour. The physical act of burying him was my brothers’ and my eulogy to him. The poem comes from these real events. There is a nod in the poem to something of the ritual involved in a Catholic ceremony while at the same time wanting to break through the potential veneer when ritual turns into an empty vehicle.”

This kind of commentary functions as an interpretative cue. Juxtaposed with the poem, it enters into dialogue with it and the ensuing relationship contributes to a reader’s meaning-making process. . . for me, the commentaries were irresistible, contributing enjoyment and enhancing engagement with each poem anthologised.

If you’d like to subscribe to the Journal of New Zealand Literature, you can do so through their website. The current issue is particularly lively, with reviews, learned articles, thoughtful polemic, and a piece of memoir from current NZ Poet Laureate Ian Wedde.

You can listen to most of the poets in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems reading their poems here and full information about the anthology is here.

On 23 July as a curtain raiser for National Poetry Day on 27 July, Chris Price will introduce a baker’s dozen of the 25 poets whose work was chosen by Bernadette Hall for the 2011 issue of Best New Zealand Poems. We welcome Hera Bird, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle, Janis Freegard, Rob Hack, Dinah Hawken, Anna Jackson, Helen Lehndorf, Kate McKinstry, Bill Manhire, Harvey Molloy, Marty Smith, Ranui Taiapa and Tim Upperton.

Check out the full Writers on Mondays programme here.

Poetry Parnassus

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Two of our MA graduates, Tusiata Avia and Kapka Kassabova, are representing Samoa and Bulgaria at Poetry Parnassus, the Olympics-related poetry festival which is about to take place in London. Tusiata and Kapka have both been interviewed for the Festival by UK poet S J Fowler.  Here are one or two excerpts.

Kapka Kassabova

SJF: In its sheer scope Poetry Parnassus offers a unique opportunity for you to interact with fellow poets from every corner of the globe. How do you think this collective experience will benefit those who attend, to be exposed to so many different traditions of poetry, to hear poetry in so many languages?

KK: The world doesn’t often see an Olympic congregation of poets, so it will either be alarming or exhilarating to the public (and the poets!). And eye and ear-opening, I think, to be reminded that the world only speaks English some of the time. The rest of the time it speaks and writes in hundreds of other languages. Isn’t it mind-boggling?

SJF: The Parnassian ideal that really centres the Poetry Parnassus project reaches back to the Poetry International festival held in London in 1967 which sought to address notions of free speech, community and peace through the art-form of poetry. Do you believe this tradition needs to be maintained in 2012?

KK: Especially in 2012! We desperately need the quickening spark of poetry in our lives. We are surrounded by jaded attitudes and people, and poetry, as Robert Frost said, is that by which we live forever and ever unjaded.

Tusiata Avia

SJF: In its sheer scope Poetry Parnassus offers a unique opportunity for you to interact with fellow poets from every corner of the globe. How do you think this collective experience will benefit those who attend, to be exposed to so many different traditions of poetry, to hear poetry in so many languages?

TA: I have always loved international festivals for this reason – the coming together of poets from different places. Many of us tend to operate in a fairly solo way, so the opportunity to be part of this community of poets is something very special. Poetry Parnassus takes this to a different level, to have so many poets from so many countries will be very exciting indeed. Connections are made, friendships are forged and one would have to be made of stone not to be inspired.

SJF: Could you describe your poetry, though I know this is difficult if not terribly reductive, in reference to what you think poetry should, and can, achieve as an artistic medium?

TA: I’m known as a Pacific Island poet, because I write in [and] about the Pacific and of course because I am a Pacific Islander. I also often write poems set in other ‘exotic’ places in the world. But that is really only a vehicle for much more universal themes that I think many artists explore. I write about the human condition, about the place of the child, the place of the immigrant, the place of the outsider. I write about love and violence, justice and injustice. All those things that human beings struggle with. Most of my work tends to be shot through with a dark humour.

One aspect of my poetry that I’ve always be passionate about is it’s ability to reach people. While I write for the page, a certain amount of my work suits the stage very well. I am known (in New Zealand particularly) for my performance poetry – I have a one woman show called ‘ Wild Dogs Under My Skirt’ which fuses poetry and theatre. In this way poetry reaches a wider audience – and often an audience that would not normally open a book of poetry – than it does on the page.

Poetry can be life changing, it can reach into the soul, past the protective barriers we all erect, and touch something in us. It can move one to tears, it can trigger a spark of recognition – a feeling of being seen and understood, it can light a fire of inspiration, it can stir one to action. The moments my poetry has done any of these things and I have been there to witness it have been some of the most precious of my life.

There’s more of Kapka Kassabova’s interview here.

and more from Tusiata Avia here and there are many more interviews with the Parnassus poets here.