Interview: Poet Liam Jacobson
Author:
Liam Jacobson
Publisher:
Dead Bird Books
ISBN:
9781991150646
Date Published:
7 September
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$30.00
Dead Bird Books is about to publish poet Liam Jacobson’s debut collection Neither and describes the 26-year-old as ‘one of the country's most exciting young writers.’ They and Dead BirdBooks’ cofounder Dominic Hoey sat down to talk about touring poetry and romanticising the everyday.
If a sharp eye is a gift for a poet, Liam Jacobson (Kāi Tahu) received it.
We’re sitting in a busy café on Auckland’s Karangahape Road – no spare tables, barely any space between them – when Jacobson stops mid-sentence to apologise for sounding distracted: “It’s just that every time I look up, I see my name…”
Not quite in lights just yet, but on a hand-drawn art work where café staff have recorded in words and pictures the best things about working for themselves. Café Liam says, ‘The freedom to do whatever the hell I want to as long as it’s in the kitchen.’
You get the feeling it’s a sentiment poet Liam, 26, may agree with. They’re about to launch a debut poetry collection, Neither having had poems made into Phantom Billstickers posters and in the plant-based cookery book, Dirt. Dead Bird Books is publishing Neither.
Author and poet Dominic Hoey and arts facilitator and producer Samuel Walsh started the independent press to address what they saw as “a lack of opportunity for writers whose work sits outside the margins of Aotearoa’s traditional publishing landscape.”
Neither will be DBB’s ninth release in six years; to promote it, they’ll return to the way they always wanted to share poetry and sell books – by touring and performing live readings in venues where poetry might not be the norm. It’s what they always intended to do, says Hoey, until the Covid pandemic shuttered venues and kept people at home.
“It’s a good way to sell books,” says Hoey, no stranger to live performance thanks to his days as a rapper and MC. He’s promoted his own poetry this way, too. Sometimes it finds receptive audiences in unexpected places, sometimes not so much.
“It can be confrontational because you may be performing to people who maybe don’t want to listen,” he says. “Sometimes you come across the most amazing audiences. I remember going to a little town outside of Nelson – I can’t remember the name of it – and the venue was full of bikers and forestry workers and I thought, ‘I’m going to get a fuckin’ hiding,’ but we performed and sold more books there than we did at a sold-out Wellington show. People were on the bar and reading the books! I quite like that but I know it’s not for everyone…”
He talks of another show, up North, where the audience wasn’t so enthusiastic.
“The politics can get people going…”
Raised in Manurewa, schooled at Dilworth and now living in Ponsonby, Jacobson says there might be politics in his poetry but it’s perhaps not overt.
“I don’t really know all the time what’s in it; I don’t realise until later.”
“I’m excited for the poems to have their own kind of legs,” says Jacobson. “When they live with you for so long, it gets a bit cluttered and they get all stuffy. I am excited to see what else they can become…”
Jacobson (pictured above) and Hoey have known one another for several years; they can’t remember where they met but Hoey recalls being told that Jacobson was like a young version of himself: “… which is weird because our styles are really different. I met him and thought, ‘he’s a nice person,’ and then I read his work and thought, ‘he’s actually really good.’ Then we read together…”
Hoey has wanted to publish Jacobson’s work ever since but it’s taken a few years to arrive at this point, not helped by losing a ton of work when Jacobson’s laptop crashed and burnt. Hoey says the timing is probably about right now they can get out and actively promote Neither.
Like Hoey, they’re familiar with live shows. As a teenager, their mum encouraged them to go to workshops run by the theatre company Massive and, for a time, it looked like a stage career might beckon. Jacobson was one of six performers chosen to go to Glasgow as part of a 2016 exchange programme; the same year, they were the National Poetry Slam runner-up. They left school, got a BA in Sociology and Film Studies, kept making art – Jacobson also draws – and did a bit of travelling, heading to Denmark to see their father and half-brothers. Jacobson still draws, works in an art gallery and likes exploring other art forms. A recent trip to their first ballet, the brilliant and astonishing Lightscapes by the Royal NZ Ballet has left them keen to see more dance.
For now, though, poetry is the medium with most appeal. Sometimes.
“What do I like about poetry? Well, sometimes I hate it… but it makes things feel that they can be important and that they can stand for something. It’s like when I’m broke on the bus, I can turn that into something. When I’m procrastinating, I can make things feel like they’re worth something even if it is just me being lazy.”
Hoey says Jacobson romanticises the everyday.
“He’s got a real mastery of imagery that’s second to none.”
Neither will be launched at the Fringe Bar in Wellington on 7 September then in Tāmaki Makaurau at the Basement Theatre on 14 September. Later in the year, visits are planned to Golden Bay, Christchurch, Dunedin, maybe Lyttleton accompanied by another of DBB’s young poets, Isla Huia.
“I’m excited for the poems to have their own kind of legs,” says Jacobson. “When they live with you for so long, it gets a bit cluttered and they get all stuffy. I am excited to see what else they can become and I am excited to just go and be active, that’s the thing with writing because it’s so often a little insular thing but then there can be this whole other aspect to it when you can be moving around, shouting at people. It will be exciting to be back in that space.”
OLD FRIEND UNDER YOUR BREATH I’M WARM
spew your tail
serpent of spit & dust
spinning the eye in the hand of the void golden
your skin hangs from your teeth
it’s you who’s risen through the head of the quiet
it’s you who said all bodies are god
nature is spoken
leaks one of her mouths
your name running down her chin
falls into a belly sof with fire
peels back red skin rusted in time
lain with an echo far in the mind of wild soil
its face pressed like clay rising skyward
mouth open at the edge of sound
under the man that had smothered the rest of me
turning with winter’s skin
you’re glowing violet while the clouds wilt at the ankles of a public dream
mine shiver held in a psalm in the dark driven from my skull
your hand is light against me
my eyes itch
spread like leaves wet with sleep
where fog haunts the light above the edge
through bodies of bodies, bones of ruby, dead of night, in the shadow of your
watchful avatar, we walk the late palm mad on fire/
ur memory inside me like tar
sprouts the hands of the ends of the branches of the sun,
hanging low & warm under the breath of a red night lullabied into
death who kindly mothers the world
its face is lost in its face
time has made dust of its fat
the fat world & its deaf ear is burning
a body lies shy at the ass end of science
buried deep in the sleeves of machine imagination
a phantom name sweeps up against my cheek, crimson & toothed
the old star among you sets in a bath of skin
kneeling with me by the water
rolling high as the hills behind us
i hear it neon static calling me through the meat, “THE GROUND IS
UPSIDE DOWN
WRINKLING UNDER YOUR CLOWN SHOES” along the way,
i saw the gates sat gentle
in a mouth of ivy held in a fist of fame
& there was the flesh falling from around me like snow in the gaps of the dark
& there was my most held, higher skull asking “who the mouth’ll serve now?”
& “what’s one more heavy night?” & “though we’ve rushed awake the cinema
& named it after us &
aren’t any longer empty in distance in an era of ruins whispered into a long golden cloud through a fire falling from above,
we were between hungers when the world came close”
From Neither by Liam Jacobson (Dead Bird Books, $30.00)
This story is part of Kete’s build-up to National Poetry Day. To read more about Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, see https://tinyurl.com/5n998vxm
