How did you develop your poetic writing?
While I had babies at home in my late 30s, I took up the pen for real. I wrote junior novels and short stories. I enrolled in Hagley Writers’ Institute, a newly formed local school for writers, determined to make a commitment to my writing. My tutor was a famous local poet, Bernadette Hall, and the poetry flooded in. I made friends with other writers and began considering myself a writer. I joined a local writers’ group and entered competitions and started sending my work out to journals and anthologies. It took a long time for me to unlearn school writing and tap into the creative river of my brain. 10 years after taking to the page, I had my first poem published in the local paper.
Did you have any influences? What ideas or themes do you investigate through your work?
I wanted to write about my passion for New Zealand and being a New Zealander. The land and my identity with the land, how the degradation of the land was connected to the treatment of women, indigenous people and minorities through capitalism. I wanted to understand my relationship to my family, as an adopted person, a daughter of the 70s, a wife, a mother. I read a lot of poetry and attended readings by New Zealand authors – Brian Turner, Fiona Farrell, Lloyd Jones.
Some local poets ran classes – James Norcliffe, Frankie McMillan, and Joanna Preston. Joanna, NZ Book Award winner, made a huge impression on my work both through her critiques of my poems and through her classes, which often focus on reading for writing. She introduced many poets to me, both local and internationaI. Some local favourites – Tusiata Avia, Bryan Walpert, Anna Jackson, Alison Glenny, Helen Rickerby, Rebecca Hawkes. I tended, and tend, to be a magpie and eclectic reader. I’m attracted to the glinty thing in the moment, yearning for the new, words and language that grapple with naming the world in its ever unfolding state.
What about form or structure – Is that important to you?
Very. My favourite exercise if I’m stuck is to pick up a poetry book or a poem that hit me over the head with its strange vibrating energy and then use the structure of that poem as a way, or even template, into writing my own poem as either a response or to figure out what’s on my mind/heart. This idea came from Joanna’s Poetry Class – to first go line by line through the poem and describe in your own words what you think each line is doing. For example, I might describe an original poem like this:
Line one: short line, image of hurt between two people.
Line two: indented short line, carry on image but add surprising info.
Stanza break
Etc
Next, I put the original poem away and fit my own experience to the template. The poem will end up with the same structure and often themes as the original but otherwise my own. It seems mechanical, but there you are, I like having something to hang my creative voice on. No different, I see, in the way we use daily structures to hang our lives on – breakfast, lunch, dinner. When I’m teaching, I’ll often use structure as a way into the poem. Why has this poem used very little punctuation? Why does this poem walk across the page, have long lines, this shape, etc?
I wrote the following poem “Five Mistakes” borrowing the structure and themes of Joan Fleming’s “Seven Mistakes” https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2023/04/03/poetry-shelf-monday-poem-joan-flemings-7-mistakes/
Five mistakes
after Joan Fleming
my son hugs me too close to his chest
swaggers when he walks away
the days react with my daughter’s skin
as if the lie of a billion trees would help
that I bear my children
like a weapon
and our neural pathways form
the hard cracked lines of mum and dad
the unbearable gap between us
when we spoon
not the endless blue in your eyes I come back to
in this poem
(Some Bird; Sudden Valley Press 2023)
How many collections have you published and what is the process by which you produce a collection?
I have three poetry collections published. For each of them, I have used a kind of feather cloak, or matrix, in which to hang the tassels of my poetic intent.
In my first, Contents Under Pressure (Pūkeko Publications 2019), I set out to represent the broken world of the city I live in the aftermath of the Canterbury Earthquakes that decimated 10,000 homes and sent ripples of mental illness through a generation of children. I used the broken narrative of a mother-turned-graffiti-artist as she sneaks out one night to graffiti a wall at a local mall. I organised the poems into a kind of collage of her thoughts, overheard snippets of language, actions, which both protested against and celebrated her city. I also used a lot of visual markers (fonts, concrete layouts) for individual poems as a metaphor for the graffiti art she was making.
The second collection Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press 2023) was perhaps organised more like a first collection as it began with a group of poems I’d written over the years. Many of the poems were about me trying to figure out why I had been so angry in my role as mother. I happened to read Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers (Melville House Publishing 2019) by Sady Doyle, outlining the 5 archetypal roles women have played in literature and the media. Meanwhile, my “Me Too” poem about stones being thrown at birds placed third in the Hungry Hills competition in Ireland, and it struck me I could organise my poems around these roles with the emphasis being on woman as birds – house-sparrows and crows (crones), for example … and we New Zealanders do love our birds. When the poems were laid out, it became obvious which poems didn’t fit and where new poems were to be written to fill the gaps. I really enjoy arranging poems into a collection – the way certain poems sing to their neighbours and how you build up that emotional arc across the whole.
My third collection anthology (n.) a collection of flowers (Pūkeko Publications 2024) started as a challenge to myself to write a flower poem a day for a month, inspired by Aotearoa’s tiny native flowers. From there, I decided to set the book out as a kind of field guide with an illustration and some information about the flower in the header of the page, and poems that ranged across Aotearoa’s natural history, through cultural, social and personal histories and environmental destruction. The sections of the book were divided into the life-cycles of the flower.
If you would like to see more of Gail Ingram’s work click on the following link: www.theseventhletter.nz/
