Do we want all the stories? Differently told stories? Intersectional stories? Dominance, and the idea that somethings or someones can be known fully, is so extinctive, and rude, and end-game anthropocene. So we need to constantly reset. Women, othered, colonized, refugees, migrants, kids of diasporas have no choice but to offer antidotes, and hurl flares at all the unknown backstreets.
An almanac is a type of calendar, a keeper of days. The Grief Almanac includes descriptions of Wellington places at different times in your life and in other lives, such as the Waimapihi Stream – from washing-place to street, to petrol station. Can you say a little about this tension between place and time? I now conceive of the doors between the two being permanently open. However, there’s nothing unique about this thinking, whether via biology or physics or archaeology, or indigenous thinking which contrasts Western worldviews of linearity and constant reboot. In The Grief Almanac I was interested in the stalled resonances between the layers – just because we can’t see the Waimapihi Stream doesn’t mean it’s not there.
But in the four years since returning from Greece (and four months since the Christchurch killings), I’ve come to see three things: that there’s no one, normal, default type of Kiwi; that loud, bodily, immersive grief is not just Mediterranean, or Eastern, or foreign-old world-tragic-gothic; and – most importantly – that there have always been better ways to grieve in Aotearoa New Zealand.
What is the role poetry is called to play for a country in crisis? In this respect, how important is to get this poetry into the world? Poetry is everything, or was so for thousands of years, as information, record, witness, bridge. And epic poetry was of course passed down orally from parent to child, communities connecting over music and rhythm of sound and sense. This oral aspect of poetry, its percussion and cry, is vitally important to me. But poetry is more than the news. It is deeply connected to our humanity, creativity, generation. It is graffiti, the I am here, we are here, this is what we feel, how we survive.