No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand

By Independent Publishers Group

What, then, for the work of poetry? It's at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it's also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. And, as we were reminded by an audience member at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival in 2020, who are we to say poetry cannot change the world?A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it.Our poets are eulogists and visionaries, warriors and worriers. Most of all, they're ordinary people prepared to sit and stare at a blank page, trying to do something with the bloody big troubles looming over our past, present and future.— from the introduction by the editors

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781776710898

Book preview

Front Cover of No Other Place to StandHalf Title of No Other Place to StandBook Title of No Other Place to Stand

First published 2022

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.aucklanduniversitypress.co.nz

© Jordan Hamel, Rebecca Hawkes, Erik Kennedy and Essa Ranapiri, individual authors as credited, 2022

ISBN 978 1 776710 898

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

Cover design and artwork by Philip Kelly

Internal design by Megan van Staden

To those fighting for our future

and those who will live in it

Contents

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

RANGI FAITH

Starlight Reserve

DINAH HAWKEN

The uprising

VAUGHAN RAPATAHANA

he mōteatea: huringa āhuarangi

TAYI TIBBLE

Tohunga

MICHAELA KEEBLE

science communication

JESSICA HINERANGI

Mummy issues

TIM JONES

Not for me the sunlit uplands

ROBERT SULLIVAN

49 (environment 1)

CHRIS TSE

Photogenesis

TRACEY SLAUGHTER

seven days

URSULA ROBINSON-SHAW

Everything is nice

AIMEE-JANE ANDERSON-O’CONNOR

My ex-boyfriend was a doomsday prepper.

PHILIP ARMSTRONG

Lines Written During a Committee Meeting

Best Before

ALISON GLENNY

from Interglacial

CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier

Love in a Time of Climate Change

ANKH SPICE

Franz Josef Glacier 2020 (will they say)

The coast road is closed

NADINE ANNE HURA

‘It should be alright’

BERNADETTE HALL

In search of happiness

SARA HIRSCH

Flood Warning

FAUMUINA FELOLINI MARIA TAFUNA‘I

Marshallese Blue

If I could be so lucky

SARAH MAINDONALD

Rakiraki (Fiji) Category 5

MICHELLE RAHURAHU

Hinemoana II

ANNE-MARIE TE WHIU

Missionary Position

ANAHERA GILDEA

Shift

TE KAHU ROLLESTON

The Rena

DAVID EGGLETON

Deepwater Horizon

Time of the Icebergs

HINEMOANA BAKER

Last Born

KIRSTY DUNN

whai

MIRIAMA GEMMELL

ngā pakitara e whā

KAREN LEEF

Te Mutunga Iho

LANIYUK

So you want an Indigenous Poem

REX LETOA-PAGET

Lalomauga

DADON ROWELL

There isn’t a right way to feel when your country catches fire

BRENT CANTWELL

the sounds of Mallacoota

VICTOR BILLOT

How good is this?

TUSIATA AVIA

Jacinda Ardern goes to the Pacific Forum in Tuvalu and my family colonises her house

SELINA TUSITALA MARSH

Unity

JAMES FAIAU

Asi–Sea/Ocean Lament from Baelelea, Solomon Islands

MIKAELA NYMAN AND REBECCA TOBO OLUL-HOSSEN

Two sides of the same story

MIKAELA NYMAN AND CAROL ARU

Sea sisters

RICHARD PAMATATAU

Two Steps Down

HELE CHRISTOPHER-IKIMOTU

Dear Banaba

KARLO MILA

Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018

HELEN HEATH

The Anthropocene

CAROLINE SHEPHERD

The Whale

NINA MINGYA POWLES

The Harbour

CINDY BOTHA

Hermit Crab in a Doll’s Head

DANI YOURUKOVA

The moon is rusting and we don’t know why (but it’s almost certainly our fault)

All my plants are dead and I’m pretty sure it’s your fault

CHRIS HOLDAWAY

from Bioluminescence

WHINA POMANA

Gold Bloom

ALEXANDRA HOLLIS

Stormchasers

CASSANDRA BARNETT

Storm Mother

MADDI ROWE

Utopia

ASH DAVIDA JANE

carrying capacity

location, location

ANUJA MITRA

Precarious

E WEN WONG

the house that Saturn built

FRANKIE MCMILLAN

The Uprising of My Aunt

FRANCES LIBEAU

escape the weather

DOMINIC HOEY

Rain

The Last Season

NICK ASCROFT

They’re Playing the ‘You’ve Gone on Too Long’ Music, but the Essential Struggle Is to Think Yourself More Important Than the Schedules of Plebeians

CARIN SMEATON

A Property Manager Walks into a Forest

SINEAD OVERBYE

Hinemoana

DANIELLE O’HALLORAN-THYNE

She’s the whole mutha-fuckin ocean

TRU PARAHA

in my darkling universe

STACEY TEAGUE

spell for the end of the world

spell to unearth (bones)

JESSIE PURU

Papatūānuku Gets a Green Prescription

ROMAN PARROTT

Burn

RHEGAN TU’AKOI

EMAILS FROM AIR NEW ZEALAND ARE THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE

RHYS FEENEY

the world is at least fifty percent terrible

brutalism

LAURA VINCENT

Anecdotal happiness

ZOË HIGGINS

End of the Berhampore Golf Course

Techno-optimism

Waiting

JANET NEWMAN

Drought, Horowhenua

JOAN FLEMING

Drought summer

Catalogue

TATE FOUNTAIN

Countdown

CADENCE CHUNG

Eviscerate

EMMA NEALE

Wanting to believe in the butterfly effect

LEONA KAMUHANGIRE

When I lived …

HANNAH LEES

Annihilation

SUDESH MISHRA

Nocturne

JAMES NORCLIFFE

Lambton Quay

REBECCA BALL

Lindis Pass

TARA BLACK

Just Right

ELIANA GRAY

Summer’s hot and so is everybody else

JESSIE FENTON

In 2006, Disney Channel released a crossover episode called ‘That’s So Suite Life of Hannah Montana’ and I don’t know if I’ve felt real joy since

MEAGAN FRANCE

extinction

ARIELLE WALKER

dream futures from a plant placed beneath your tongue

RUBY SOLLY

Subterranean

STEVIE DAVIS-TANA

Daughters of the Land

BRIAR WOOD

One World

KAHU KUTIA

Epilogue: E kore au e ngaro / I shall not be lost

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Foreword

Climate change is so massive – so literally and figuratively global – that one wonders about the value of the particular, the specific, the local, the here, the now. Are these writers merely screaming – albeit skilfully – into the abyss? Have these editors merely rearranged deckchairs of words on a sinking scientific ship? If deniers of climate change are unlikely to open this book, what value is there in preaching poetry to the choir? What is the point of quietly – or even noisily – reading about climate change when the crisis in which we find ourselves demands action?

These are not rhetorical questions. Every single poem in this anthology speaks to the relationship between words and worlds.

E tū! this book commands. But what does it mean to stand? Even as it challenges and extends the legacy of poetry written in these islands, the title of No Other Place to Stand brings to mind Allen Curnow’s enthusiastic prophecy in 1943 that ‘some child, born in a marvellous year, / Will learn the trick of standing upright here.’ Curnow’s oft-quoted lines echo a time when ‘standing upright’ was in question – especially for Pākehā who were grappling with how to be from ‘here’ – but in Curnow’s time at least a grounded (ground-centred) ‘here’ could be taken for granted. Almost a century later, this anthology challenges the smugness of assuming that ‘here’ is itself a constant. The ‘trick of standing upright’ feels more complicated if one is learning how to do it when knee-deep in churning water.

Curnow’s poem was a response to extinction: his words speak to the experience of seeing a moa at a museum. He describes the moa’s ‘failure to adapt on islands’, which perhaps suggests another way to figure the many human-produced causes of climate change – environmental catastrophe as a ‘failure to adapt’. Are these poems about climate change likewise about extinction, even if viewed through different glass display cases? Or are they about hope or humble perseverance? Curnow recognises his own limitations and the limits of his generation but is, as are many of the poets in this anthology, deeply interested in the future, especially as represented by children and later generations. Cynically, the idea of bringing about urgent action on behalf of human inheritors appeals, like the ‘team of five million’, to a combination of altruism and narcissism (and, when phrased awkwardly, can feel heterosexist and colonial). But so many of the poems here demonstrate expansively the relationship between intergenerational debts and the (albeit diminishing) possibility of bringing about required but inconvenient change for the sake of the people who will see us as (failing? loving? respectable? embarrassing?) ancestors. Perhaps Curnow reminds us that it is when standing face to face with the limits of our own possible futures that we are best able to imagine something that operates according to a different logic.

While the title of the anthology may tip its hat to Curnow for some readers, for others it will invoke the concept of tūrangawaewae. When the karanga is for poets who write about climate change, who responds? The line-up in this volume is not the same as in your average ‘NZ lit’ anthology or writers’ festival. The editors point out in their introduction that half of the poets are Indigenous, and certainly the voices are diverse in ways that range far beyond those imagined by institutional tick boxes or mainstream television advertising. As you read this poetry, these two things feel strongly connected: indigeneity and other forms of presence and diversity. This list of contributors is the New Zealand that some of us know but which is rarely visible in public spaces: this New Zealand that is not the same old ‘Māori and Pākehā’ but is instead ‘Māori and so many others who call this place home’ that the Treaty makes possible in its wildest dreams. Tūrangawaewae as a place to stand is deeply Māori, but it is not soapbox, it is not nation state, it is not parochial and it is not clique.

The reconfiguration of who is speaking, and what we might mean by standing in a place, questions the future focus of so much conversation about the negative effects of climate change. Certainly urgent current action is required now to avoid particular effects in months and years to come. But, as Indigenous Australian writer and thinker Tony Birch puts it, ‘the impact of climate change is not a future event. It has occurred in the past, and it is occurring now.’ Poem after poem in this collection traces the relationship between climate change and a constellation of long-standing oppressions: colonialism, capitalism, racism, gender-based violence and so on. The consciousness-raising and decolonisation through which we come to understand that climate change is inextricable from Everything Else That Has Happened Here Since 1769 (and in other places since other ‘firsts’) demands reconsideration of relationships that have been violently chopped off: the relationship between tangata and whenua, the relationship between human and non-human animals, the relationship between the seen and unseen worlds … and also the relationship between ‘here’ – the ‘New Zealand’ of the anthology’s title – and ‘here’, the vast, multi-nodal network that makes up Oceania. Activist and creative networks long nurtured in the region, and felt so keenly through movements like the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific and various Pacific women’s organisations, find new and particular expression here. As people stand here on these pages and look across to relatives on other islands experiencing the acute impacts of climate change, we reaffirm our deep connections with each other and join Albert Wendt, Epeli Hau‘ofa and Teresia Teaiwa in recalling the extent to which we are shaped by the ocean. In this anthology Māori writers reconnect with Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, and non-Māori poets stand to speak on and with and from and to this place.

Finally, it would be a gross oversight to talk about climate change without mentioning science. After all, isn’t science what we really need here? Isn’t science going to get us out of this problem? Isn’t science the thing we should be pushing our kids to study so they can get Jobs and Things and maybe even help with climate crises? Aren’t climate change deniers just failing to understand science and so, reciprocally, if we could teach them science well enough wouldn’t they start to believe in climate change? In this anthology, poets from so many perspectives trace the ways they know climate change. If science is about what we know of the physical and natural world, science is precisely what this poetry demonstrates, draws on and produces. However, as Western science has doubled down on its claims of being deeply secular, and as this apparent secularity has been mobilised to challenge forms of climate denial that are connected to particular religious commitments, the very same secularity – the uncoupling of the physical and natural world from wairua – undermines so many (especially, but not only, Indigenous) forms of conceptualising, grappling with and ameliorating climate change. Without knowledge connected to the spiritual, cultural, emotional and genealogical realms, how can we make sense of the impact of forced removal from particular places or from particular relationships? Many of these poems are a testimony to many forms of scientific knowledge;