Tukurua’s prize-winning poet celebrated in joint NZ-USA anthology
The Guest Room of the Southern Cross bar in Wellington last Tuesday evening (12 July) was the venue for Bill Manhire’s launch of Duets, a series of three unique poetry chapbooks that each pairs a poet from New Zealand with one from the United States.
One of the three New Zealand poets featured is Joan Fleming of Tukurua (the other Kiwi wordsmiths being James Brown of Wellington and Sam Samson of Auckland). The books are published by Wordpress and were edited jointly by Zach Savich and Mark Leidner from the US, and Wellington editor Alice Miller, while the cover design is by Tom Henry, a Wellington collagist and printmaker.
Joan’s poems, under the title Two Dreams in Which Things are Taken, are juxtaposed alongside Massachusetts poet and publisher Emily Toder’s collection called I Hear a Boat. The other two American poets featured are Dora Malech (who teams up with James Brown) and Andrew Grace (with Sam Sampson).
Joan, whose previous work has appeared in various journals, among them Best New Zealand Poems, Sport, JAAM, and Turbine, says she wrote all the 20 poems in the book two summers ago, huddled away in her caravan at Tukurua. “At the time, I had escaped the city-buzz of Wellington to come down to Golden Bay. I had been struggling to put together a different book of poems, which I had been working on for two years previous, but I put that manuscript aside and started writing these prose-poems. They came very quickly and editing them was a joy, a very intuitive process. I’d been studying the craft of poetry for years, so that I was at a point where I could put all my analytical-brain learning aside and just write from the heart.”
Joan was contacted out of the blue by editor Alice Miller, who invited her to be part of the project.
“We selected Joan as our emerging New Zealand poet because we very much admired the way her work weaves sound, image, and emotional punch. They’re a good example of what makes New Zealand poetry smart, beautiful, and unique. Her prose poems are like small windows that open into wider narrative worlds.”
Bill Manhire also praised Joan’s poems, saying he had admired her work ever since she won the Biggs Prize for Poetry.
“Her work reminds me most of all of the English poet Stevie Smith—not just the juxtaposition of words and drawings but also the apparently simple and innocent presentation of feelings and situations that are in fact deeply mysterious.”
Joan says she particularly liked the idea of pairing one New Zealand poet with an American counterpart. “I spent my high school years in Colorado in the States, and I’ve always adored and read a lot of American poetry, so I feel a strong connection to the place.”
Joan has now upgraded from caravan life and rents a house at Tukurua. She works at the Dangerous Kitchen two nights a week and spends the rest of her working time extramurally tutoring creative writing courses for Massey University. She also teaches poetry to children at our local primary schools and sometimes makes short films.
Duets can be purchased ($15) by emailing <duetsbooks@gmail.com>. Find out more about the poets at <http://duetsbooks.wordpress.com>.
Gerard Hindmarsh
