Q1: One hundred and forty-one new poems by 127 poets. This must be one of the biggest editions yet! How on earth do you make the reading and selection time for this?
By battling for every flash of daylight and mindsight I can get! Most creatives learn to work in brief windows amidst their jam-packed day-jobs. But poems are the perfect form for flooding those windows with sudden rushes of life — the pieces I chose for this volume filled me with an instant sense of ignition, lit me up and demanded rapt re-readings.
Q2: The newish series design, a sort of take marbling, works so well with the one-word titles of each volume. Tell us about how breath came to be the title of the 2025 edition?
It can be uncanny how some collective image or focus arises from the spread of submissions that arrive in. This year it was utterly striking how breath was a shared source of both connection and anxiety within the pieces. There was an intense concentration on breath as a living vapour which enmeshes all our bodies, but also as a channel of pollution, as poets bore witness to the airborne particles of power we daily breathe in.
Q3: For 2024 the tone of the poems seemed so angry. This year there’s a deep anxiety but also, as you say in your editorial, a connectedness, a resistance and a tenderness. When the planet is heading for the fire, how is poetry helping us hang in there?
The focus on breath transfused the poems with intense attention to what keeps us alive and singing. If there was still an urgent focus on directing the outbreath against political issues, it was paired with an awareness of the inbreath, the qualities of tenderness, togetherness needed to refill our vessels, keep making noise, sing on.
Q4: The featured poet for the 2025 edition is Mark Prisco. Tell us about him and his work.
I’m so excited to have the chance to feature Mark’s poetry — he is the no-joke real-deal, a lifelong poet who lives and breathes his craft, and gives it every atom of oxygen he’s got. ’ve been in awe of his poetry for years, its striking authenticity of voice, its electric originality, its quicksilver tone and cutting edge. His work takes no prisoners, hits hard, gives no quarter, but is also capable of taking your breath away with sudden lyric tenderness that leave your ‘heart smoking in the corner’. I’m thrilled to introduce Mark’s dynamic work to a wider audience — and the core resolve which surges through his work ‘to not let go’ is one that will deeply resonate.
Q5: The publication date has been moved to align better with National Poetry Day in late August. A good move?
Such a great move! What better time to launch a collection gathered from across the nation than amidst the countrywide celebration of all things poetry! National Poetry Day has become such a hot date on our creative maps, so it’s fantastic to bring the shared work of our most
exciting poets directly into that spotlight.
Q6: This issue is also notable for its three In Memoriams: Mark Houlahan’s moving tribute to Vincent O’ Sullivan and Michael Steven’s to John Allison and Peter Olds. A generation passes. What have the young poets yet to learn from them do you think?
Poets keep each other alive. That’s the reality of it — both those who know each other personally and sustain each other face-to-face, and those who only ever come to connect through the pages of their books. When one of us passes, there’s a deep sense of loss, but also of the need to revisit, treasure, pay tribute, pass their legacy along. We are so very often writing in the dark, so it is vital to give witness to those who light our way. I don’t believe there’ll ever be a generation of poets who don’t need to draw from their ancestors.
Q7: And as per the last few years, the three winners of the Yearbook’s schools’ competition, which you judge, rub shoulders here with seasoned practitioners. What strikes you about these poems from young poets who are only Year 11, 12 and 13?
Judging the highschool poems always blows me away! I’m in awe of the fire, audacity, honesty, heart and bite they always bring to the page — and the level of craft in these winning pieces shapes all of that intensity and energy into razor-edge final form. It’s a beautiful thing that in a volume that remembers the life-long poets we have lost, we also get to foreground and celebrate the startling new voices who will shape our future.
Q8: We asked you this last year but it was such a good question that we will ask it again: If there was an award for the most bewitchingly titled poem in this collection, to which poet would it go?
Oh, there’s so many kickass titles this year. Mark Prisco’s ‘one dying animal to another’ and ‘when you’re dead there’s time to think’ do it for me. Also Lee Fraser’s ‘Tea party in a burning car’ and Rebecca Ball’s ‘informed consent for the disposal of body parts’.
Q9: And for the most fiendishly complex?
Online life seemed to generate these! Jeremy Roberts’ ‘Cyberspace took the jizz out of my love’ and Shivani Agrawal’s ‘we’re just collecting some error info, and then we’ll restart for you’ have to take it.
Q10: This is Poetry Aotearoa’s fifty ninth volume. Fifty-nine years of publication! Why is it as important now as it was back in 1951?
For those of us with poetry in our veins, it’s impossible to imagine life without it — what on earth would drive and light and flame our lives if it didn’t exist? I can’t imagine who I might be as a poet if I hadn’t been fed by Poetry Aotearoa, first by soaking up poems as a reader, then by venturing (tremblingly!) to send in my own work. It’s my hope that this series goes on doing for others what it has done for me — sharing creative breath that fills all our lungs.
