Time out from the hurly burly to dip into poetry
It might be a trick of memory, but I don’t recall learning much poetry at school. Or maybe it’s more a case of forgetting about something that didn’t seem relevant or was taught in a way as to be … forgettable. Now, I am in a house surrounded by poetry books and collections bequeathed to us by my late father-in-law, Bernard Gadd.
He celebrated the birth of our eldest daughter by writing her a poem. At our wedding, he recited one – not a love sonnet but a cheeky rhyme which declared “surely it was time” for this wedding given we’d been together for nearly a decade, bought the house and had the (first) child. There’s a picture of him on the New Zealand Poetry Society website at the wedding, entertaining a crowd of family and friends. For a while there, we were privileged to have a family poet capturing significant milestones in verse.
Now, Miss 18 is well on her way to following in her grandfather’s footsteps but he may well have looked askance when Miss 14 arrived home one recent Monday and questioned whether haiku were even “real” poems. “Myself, I like lyric and prose poetry,” she declared.
I read her Beep Test from Hannah Mettner’s most recent collection, Saga, because she’d been moaning about having to do the beep test at school that day and how her PE teacher has twigged to the fact that she’s actually a fast little runner. The last line: ‘What would happen if I stopped running from thing to thing and walked for a moment, directionless,’ resonated. It reminded me of taking time out from the hurly burly of the day to dip into one of the poetry books that threaten to overwhelm the room I work in.
I like the fact that we have a National Poetry Day and that all over Aotearoa, there are poetry-themed events. It highlights the multitude of ways to discover and enjoy poetry; that, perhaps, it more freely lives and breathes outside of classrooms. So, to celebrate this Friday’s Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, Kete devotes this week to honouring New Zealand poetry. You’ll find a new poem online each day because really, what better way to start the day than spending a little time mulling over the ways in which our poets view the world?
Dionne Christian, Kete Reviews Editor