broadsheet 30 features Tony Beyer

The latest issue of broadsheet 30, November 2022, features the New Plymouth poet and teacher Tony Beyer and features a selection of unpublished poems.

Poets included are: Peter Bland, John Gallas, Piers Davies, Tim Saunders, Tim Jones, Vaughan Rapatahana, Alistair Paterson, Siobhan Harvey, Janet Charman, Annie Klier Newcomer, Ron Riddell, Michael Harlow, Jenny Powell, Gill Ward and Mark Young.

Editor Mark Pirie writes in the Preface:

“Tony Beyer was born in Auckland in 1948. He currently lives in New Plymouth where he has been a teacher. A prominent New Zealand poet since his inclusion in The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse and in Oxford’s An Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetry, he has continued to publish many collections.

I have known Beyer since the 1990s, when I was editing JAAM magazine, and published two of his collections with HeadworX: The Century in 1998 and his selected poems Dream Boat in 2007. Dream Boat was a large volume of his work and selected poetry from his collections up to the 2000s. Beyer also edited Poetry Aotearoa, a small journal that was an influence on broadsheet.  It’s nice to be able to feature some more of his writing in broadsheet. He has gone on to be a finalist in the poetry category of the New Zealand Book Awards with his collection Anchor Stone from Cold Hub Press in 2017.

On the back cover of Anchor Stone, Beyer wrote:

As a New Zealander, I acknowledge that English-language literature in this part of the world is only a very few generations old. Its distinct flavour is the achievement of close but significant ancestors. There is always a place for the local voice and its traditions. It’s also a useful reminder of how new concepts of identity don’t always eclipse those of the past, often in fact strengthening them. This place and the ways we find to voice our belonging in it are at the core of valuing environmental existence. We also honour other cultures by having a culture of our own, however flawed or patchy.

This is a good comment on how Beyer sees poetry and culture.

His work featured here shows his distinctive style with lower case lines and stanzas and minimal punctuation. His easy conversational tone comes from the anecdotal storyteller tradition. The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature wrote:“Beyer’s language, always resourceful, at its best can have the bite of strangeness.”

I have invited a few other editors who have supported Beyer’s work over the years to appear alongside him. Michael Harlow edited his Caxton Press book The Singing Ground in the 1980s. Alistair Paterson published his work in Poetry NZ. Mark Young has been a consistent publisher of his poetry in Otoliths over the past decade.

The rest of the contributors are poets I invited who have been supporters of or past contributors to broadsheet. It’s great to see many of these voices again in this issue.

Mark Pirie, Wellington, November 2022″

issue 30 of broadsheet is available now

broadsheet, no. 30, November 2022, featuring Tony Beyer, is available now.

broadsheet 29 features Kevin Ireland

The latest issue of broadsheet 29, May 2022, features the distinguished Auckland writer and poet Kevin Ireland and features a selection of recent poems, mainly from his 2021 collection Just Like That.

Poets included are: Peter Bland, Petrus Borel (trans.), Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Bernard Brown, Johanna Emeney, Riemke Ensing, Brian Turner, Mark Pirie, Vincent O’Sullivan, Bill Manhire, C K Stead and Dorit Weisman (trans.).

Editor Mark Pirie writes in the Preface:

“Kevin Ireland obe has published novels, short stories, memoirs, a book on fishing and another on growing old. Awards include an honorary doctorate, the 2004 Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement and the 2006 A.W. Reed Award for his contribution to New Zealand writing.

It’s an honour to feature his work in broadsheet. Ireland was a favourite of mine when I first began writing poetry in the 1990s. Widely anthologised, he wrote accessible, witty, satirical and well-crafted poetry moving with ease between rhyming forms and free forms.  Early poems like ‘Striking a Pose’ still come to mind years after they were written.

I asked Kevin to write a brief statement about his work included here:

I’m delighted to be in such good company and privileged that so many of our best poets have responded with wonderful examples of their art, and that the poems the remarkable Mark Pirie has broadly and generously selected to represent my own new writing are straight from Just Like That, a book published last year by Quentin Wilson Publishing. I have applied myself to regular writing over a lifetime because it has many appearances of a true job with a real sense of purpose, so later this year Quentin Wilson will bring out my third memoir, which was not just a pleasure as an effort to tidy up some obscure, dusty cupboards, but as a larger experiment in finding an interesting method and a form. It is to be called A Month at the Back of My Brain.

I worked with Kevin Ireland to invite contributors for his special issue, including friends from many years in his writing-life.  Those who replied and sent in work are included here: Peter Bland, C K Stead, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Riemke Ensing, Bill Manhire, Bernard Brown, Johanna Emeney, Brian Turner and Vincent O’Sullivan.

A few contributors are outside of the feature. I was delighted to receive some work by Dorit Weisman translated into English from the Hebrew, and a translation of Petrus Borel by New Zealanders (and brothers) John Gallas/Kurt Gänzl.

I hope you enjoy this issue which recognises a master of the art in New Zealand.

Mark Pirie,

Wellington, May 2022”

issue 29 of broadsheet is available now

broadsheet, no. 29, May 2022, featuring Kevin Ireland, is available now.

broadsheet 28 features Jenny Powell

The latest issue of broadsheet 28, November 2021, features the Dunedin writer and poet Jenny Powell, and features a selection of bird and marine life poems.

Poets included are: Nick Ascroft, Jeanne Bernhardt, Kay McKenzie Cooke, David Eggleton, Michael Harlow, Roger Hickin, Carolyn McCurdie, Martha Morseth, James Norcilffe, Peter Olds, Michael O’Leary, Mark Pirie, Richard Reeve and Annie Villiers.

Editor Mark Pirie writes in the Preface:

“Jenny Powell (b.1960), an established Dunedin poet, writer and teacher, has a growing reputation nationally and overseas. An accomplished performer of her poetry, she has built a considerable oeuvre of poetry and prose since the 1990s.

Around 1996, I started corresponding with Powell via JAAM magazine and sought to collect her work. She had an original way of saying that stood out from the many submissions I received in those years and was a graduate of John Dolan’s writing class at the University of Otago. Our exchange culminated in Powell’s first collection Sweet Banana Wax Peppers being one of the first titles to be published by my publishing company HeadworX in 1998.

A prolific poet and collaborator with other writers, Powell has now published eight collections of her poetry (with HeadworX and Cold Hub Press respectively) and two collaborative poetry books with others, Double Jointed and Locating the Madonna. In 2016, Otago University Press published Powell’s first prose work The Case of the Missing Body. This year, she has published a new collection on the painter Rita Angus, Meeting Rita.

It’s great to continue our publishing connection of 23 years by featuring her work in broadsheet. Powell has chosen new work specially for the issue and has written a brief statement for her poetry presented here.

I began writing about birds for a display at the Dunedin Botanic Garden. During this time, a secondary school biology group participated in a science activity at a local lagoon. 12 swans were dead. Being tuned in to bird life (and now death), it was a poem waiting to be written. The school borders on a harbour inlet where Royal Spoonbills seasonally visit. They waded into a poem that was hatched during a day of staff development. Finally, conversation with a friend during a walk around the Leith River outlet to Otago Harbour prompted the longer poem, meandering, as in our walk, in shadows under bridges and lighter patterns on water, arriving at a new cycle overbridge. 

As with previous broadsheet features, I have worked with Powell to select some of her friends and editors to appear alongside her. It’s great to have many familiar faces back for this special issue. The Central Otago writer Annie Villiers (outside of the Powell feature) also appears in broadsheet for the first time with two prose poems.

Mark Pirie,

Wellington, November 2021″

issue 28 of broadsheet is available now

broadsheet, no. 28, November 2021, featuring Jenny Powell, is available now.

Elizabeth Smither’s poem ‘My American Chair’ included in Best New Zealand Poems 2020

Elizabeth Smither’s poem ‘My American Chair’ first published in broadsheet 25 (May 2020) was selected by editor David Eggleton for Best New Zealand Poems 2020, the annual online collection from the IIML (International Institute of Modern Letters). broadsheet is pleased to have first published this poem and congratulates Elizabeth on her inclusion.

See broadsheet 25 for Elizabeth’s poem and the rest of the issue. The poem was offered by Elizabeth specially for the Janet Charman feature issue.

broadsheet 27 features Richard Berengarten (UK)

The latest issue of broadsheet 27, May 2021, features the distinguished UK poet Richard Berengarten, and features a selection of prose poems from a Work in Progress.

Poets included are: Michael Duffett 1943-2019 (USA), Basim Furat, John Gallas, Alex Jeune, Margaret Jeune, Michael O’Leary, Mark Pirie, Vivienne Plumb, Harry Ricketts, Marion Rego, Anthony Rudolf (UK), Madeleine Slavick, Bill Sutton and F W N (Niel) Wright.

Editor Mark Pirie writes in the Preface:

“Richard Berengarten was born in London in 1943. He is an English poet who has lived in Greece, Italy, former Yugoslavia and the USA. His latest book, Changing (2016), is a homage to the I Ching. A dedicated internationalist, he has published around 30 books and received numerous awards in the UK, Serbia and Macedonia. He lives in Cambridge, UK.

I met the poet Richard Berengarten on my UK visit to London and Cambridge in 2005. We were both published by the same publishing house Salt in England at the time and our publisher recommended I call by his place in Cambridge while I was passing through. Richard was very obliging at short notice and generous company. He has kept in touch since then and sent poems to the journals I have edited: JAAM in 2005 and later broadsheet.

Through his friendship with me, he has strong poetic links with New Zealand. Four chapbooks in his Manual series have been published by the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop in Paekakariki. His poems have been translated into more than 100 languages, and Dr Michael O’Leary translated one of Richard’s poems ‘Volta’ into te reo Māori.

I asked Richard to send an intro to his prose poems I have selected here:     

I’ve written fair number of prose-poems over the years but have published few and have only thought of putting them together in the last eighteen months or so. The short pieces here come from a retrospective selection I’m planning. Coming across notes, drafts and snippets in old notebooks I find I’m surprised by things I find in them. Now and then I copy something out and feel it’s still as alive as if newly written, and time stops mattering as these old bits and pieces trigger new poems too. In my experience, the incipient prose-poem calls insistently for utterance in exactly the same way as a verse-poem does. The voice of either is always other. Some of the poems that appear here come straight out of dreams.

It is a pleasure to feature Richard’s prose poems for a New Zealand audience.

Elsewhere, I have invited a few of his friends Michael O’Leary, Anthony Rudolf, and the late Michael Duffett (through permission of his wife Debra Duffett) to appear alongside him. I am also pleased to welcome back some previous contributors to make this an eclectic and diverse sampling of current New Zealand poetry.

Mark Pirie, Wellington, May 2021″

issue 27 of broadsheet is available now

broadsheet, no. 27, May 2021, featuring Richard Berengarten (UK), is available now.

broadsheet 26 features Andrew Fagan

The latest issue of broadsheet 26, November 2020, features the Auckland singer/songwriter and poet Andrew Fagan, and includes 11 recent poems from his 2018 Spoken Word CD, it was always going to be like this, in print form for the first time.

Poets included are: Peter Bland, Mary Maringikura Campbell, Laura Chalar (Uruguay), Bill Direen, David Eggleton. Siobhan Harvey, Karyn Hay, Alex Jeune, Bill Manhire, Annie Newcomer (USA), Michael O’Leary, Alistair Paterson, Mark Pirie and Ron Riddell.

Editor Mark Pirie writes in the Preface:

“Andrew Fagan is a well-known singer and songwriter, an accomplished sailor, and a published author of poetry, a children’s book, and two non-fiction sailing memoirs. He continues to tour regularly around New Zealand with his band Fagan and The People and less frequently, about every two years, as frontman for The Mockers’ reunion concerts.

I have taken much interest in his song lyrics as poetry, as with other gifted lyricists like Neil Finn and Dave Dobbyn in New Zealand. I have written on his poetry for JAAM magazine previously and I still feel what I wrote in 2002 is applicable now:

Fagan’s poetry — eclectic and multi-faceted though it is — is very much a shape-shifter moving between the land in the rich Kiwi vein of such well-known poets as Denis Glover, James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Allen Curnow, A R D Fairburn, and Alistair Campbell. As with these poets … Fagan possesses a keen interest in the land, its history and its inhabitants; he also possesses a sharp social wit and a good understanding of human relationships … Fagan is a distinctive new voice (in the performance mode of Sam Hunt, John Cooper Clarke, David Eggleton et al), and, in terms of discussing his work, I think it can best be divided up into three aspects. The first is ocean/landscape poems; the second is love/sex poems; and the third I have classified loosely as light verse/social commentary/political poems.

His poetry featured in broadsheet fits these categories, and comprises new poems taken from his 2018 poetry CD, It was always going to be like this. These newer pieces along with Fagan’s new album Act Normal show that he continues to build a significant body of poetry and lyrics.

As with previous features, in consultation with Andew Fagan, I have invited some contributors that have helped with Fagan’s poetry over the years, supporting, organizing or being involved with him in readings and events, such as Ron Riddell, Siobhan Harvey, Bill Manhire, Karyn Hay, Michael O’Leary and myself, along with fellow musician/writer Bill Direen and the performer and current Poet Laureate David Eggleton.

A few contributors to this issue are outside the feature or have recently published books through my publishing company HeadworX. I also  welcome back the much admired poets Peter Bland and Alistair Paterson.

Mark Pirie, Wellington, November 2020“