Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
CODA #2: The future of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry?
CODA #2: The future of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry?
As a brief coda to last year's series of commentary posts regarding Aotearoa New Zealand poetics and poetry, I am privileged to be able to feature three fine women poets: Ivy Alvarez; Reihana Robinson; Grace Taylor. All three fit, if you will, the parameters I claimed would establish the future direction of an increasingly multicultural country. None of them could be classified as pākehā middle-class poets and all tend towards the experimental and/or performance and/or indigenous striates of poetry. Significantly and obviously, all three are women. Theirs is the future of poetry in the skinny country of Aotearoa — inevitably, for as I have stressed several times previously — the demographic of Aotearoa is rapidly and rather radically on the move into major diversity. More, these three writers involve themselves in shared self-reflections about their own layered identities — ethnic, linguistic, cultural — in this zone of change, that is Aotearoa. Just like the inevitable future national flag transformation here, away from union jacks and governor-generals, poetics here will inevitably reflect more and more female, multiethnic poets of spirit; who swerve off in directions from so-called mainstream verse, while writing and performing in forms of English far from so-called standardized English, if indeed they even write in that language at all.
Kia ora.
He hokinga ki tēnei whare o ngā whiti! [A return to this poetry house!]
As a further brief coda to last year's series of commentary posts regarding Aotearoa New Zealand poetics and poetry, I am privileged to be able to feature three fine women poets: Ivy Alvarez; Reihana Robinson; Grace Taylor.