Book takes: Why you should read more home-grown poetry
Tracey Slaughter, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024 editor: "Words count, voices matter in poetry. Open this book and stand with them". Photos / Supplied
When writer, teacher and editor Tracey Slaughter took over the job of editing the annual Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook three years ago, she walked into a job with a storied history. The yearbook was founded in 1951 by journalist and teacher Louis Johnson who wrote of suburban life and ordinary relationships rather than rural idylls.
Slaughter told publisher Massey University Press that she recalls inheriting boxes “brimming over with copies of every past issue, Poetry Aotearoa’s history.
“The immensity of what this journal has accomplished really hit home as I sifted through — an incredible legacy of voices that have shaped our poetry landscape was included in those volumes. To go on creating a space that celebrates our diverse poets and sustains our poetic community is crucial — this issue is another testament to how much power our voices have when shared.”
The 2024 yearbook includes 123 new poems by 102 poets culled from more than 1000 submissions. Here Slaughter shares three things she hopes readers take from reading Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2024.
Words count, voices matter in poetry
When I was reading submissions for the latest volume of Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook there was an election going on in the background – the drone of empty slogans felt like the opposite of poetry to me. I watched politicians smile through their reel of pre-loaded power-broking soundbites, I listened to their box-ticking bullet-points of campaign promise, then I returned to poetry. And up against all that election static, the poems were using a wholly different language – one where words were still wired to the human, the felt, the lived, the real.
Not that the poems were apolitical – they were anything but. They poured in angry, unapologetic and eyes-wide-open to the systems at fault – they were earthed and embodied and they called out the scars left on both. There was a level of ferocity and fight that was simply unmistakable, a risk-taking driven by emergency. They insisted on exposing the climate of hurt, the meshes of damage done by capitalism.
They lit up the point where personal pain meets collective oppression again and again. In startling contrast to the free-market buzzwords and sell-out rhetoric that flared from election screens, they forced the focus back on to a colonised planet that did not have time to calculate tax-breaks, on to the weather that was already smashing through interest rates and into our homes. They stood head-on against the dead values driving the flood.
Words count, voices matter in poetry. Open this book and stand with them.
The titles alone should excite and entice