It's a brisk spring evening at Tūranga, and a steady stream of people are trickling into Tautoru / TSB space as the sun begins to set. The atmosphere is lively, though the very front row of seats is the last to be filled (eventually achieved thanks to some cheery cajoling from Word volunteers).
Host Victor Rodger (just a legendary playwright in himself, no biggie) brings the chatter to a stop. He remarks on the rare delight of emceeing an entire event while seated, then introduces the premise of the evening: seven poets, seven minutes each. He quotes Madonna to kick things off: "don't just sit there, let's get to it, read a poem, there's nothing to it."
Ariana Tikao is the first to take the stage. A Kāi Tahu writer and musician, she shares new work from her much-anticipated debut poetry collection, Pepeha Portal.
She's left her reading glasses behind, but you'd never know it - she doesn't miss a beat in her opening poem. Relentless and vivid, the Ōtautahi audience is drawn into her earthquake experience: her child crying out; the sensation of the quake like "riding an electric bull in Texan bar". She spans the landscape of the city and beyond, invoking its whakapapa.
Her next poem, 'To'u Reo', is a gorgeous celebration of Reo reclamation: raw frustration ("Why the hell am I not fluent by now?") meeting peace, strength: "Aē, the reo inside me is perfect... mana is a fire, never extinguished."
Ariana questions the idea of 'settling': like sediment in a glass, turning water cloudy, she reads a poem about Palestine. After detailing the horrors of war, she asks us in a repetition all the more gutting for the softness of her voice:
"is this settling?
Is this settling?
Is this settling?"
Next up it's Joanna Preston, author of the Ockham-award winning Tumble, and familiar face around Ōtautahi creative writing spaces. Sans preamble, she begins with 'Excursion', a poem which takes us along the road to Agloe, New York, "where there may indeed be dragons."
Joanna then gives us the heads up: much of the work she is sharing tonight relates to the loss of her father. "Buckle in", she tells us – there will only be one happy poem this evening.
Joanna moves through several portraits of her father, a selection from a wider series of poems. First, as a werewolf, whose "suit fits him like a pelt", as a theophany (as the sun brushes "its fingers over the strings of daybreak"), and, finally, as a still life:
"Who knew death could mold him so gently?
... Leaving, I thought I could hear the boatman clipping his oars."
Victor tells us Joanna is running a masterclass, The End of the Line: an introduction, tomorrow. Sadly if you're reading this report, you'll have to try and catch another of Joanna's classes – but it was no surprise to me to find she would be presenting on the use of line breaks in poetry: If anyone knows how to break a line well (and a reader's heart!), it's Joanna.
Next up, it's poet, educator, and community advocate Sara Qasem.
Victor introduces her with the quote voted the best of 2020 by the New Zealand public: "Let it be known, these tears are not for you." It's from Sara's powerful statement in court to the terrorist who committed the 2019 Christchurch Mosque attacks. Sara brings this power with her onstage, a keffiyeh draped around her shoulders.
She explains the context behind much of her writing, and her writing on topics some find difficult: it's her way of staying with what is happening in the world. She begins with the poem inspired by her experience of being told she should just 'write about clock towers' - things of beauty, rather than her rage or hurt. She is urgent, deliberate, jarring; she tells us the facts. She is speaking to provide 'an image that will lodge somewhere under your ribs', impossible to ignore. She asks us to picture a five-year-old girl, the "small geography of a child's body".
The poem finishes with a couplet that has been rattling around in my head ever since:
"I am trying to build a line sharp enough to reach you
Before the next line is you."
In her next poem, she responds – and is in conversation with - Ralph Hotere's artwork, 'Ko Wai Koe' ('Who are you'). It's about identity, and Sara's father, with small, intimate details, like the olives he once cured himself, sat still in their jars 'cloudy with brine'. The final lines are hopeful, and hang in the room long after Sara leaves the stage:
"As though lineage were a lantern...
As though voice alone builds a path home."
Erik Kennedy bursts on stage with flair and a hint of existential despair. A familiar face at Ōtautahi poetry events like Catalyst, Eric is known also for his collections 'There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime and, most recently, Sick Power Trip.
He begins with a buoyant number about the protest action of letting the air out of SUV tires – a piece of "good, clean, fun", and a trend now a few years old, like cloud bread. He's exuberant, earnest and frustrated by how more extreme "japes" (kidnapping oil execs, etc) are "forbidden". The crowd loves it.
He moves into what he says might be the closest thing he has to a love poem this evening - 'The Class Anxiety Country Song'. It's the only thing we've heard tonight that rhymes, and ends with a heartwarming,
"If the easy way is right,
Then God, he made me wrong."
Then we're back to the terror of the world with Everyone's trying on their old nuclear war poems'. The line about "dressing like our dads did" is beautifully referenced by what Eric reveals he is wearing: his own father's necktie.
Nam Le is next, with an athletic leap onto the stage. In Victor's introduction, we hear that Nam's next work is a poetic geography of Naarm/Melbourne, and that he's currently completing a residency at the Michael King Writers Centre in Tāmaki Makaurau. Of course, we know him from his previous works - 'Small Boat', 'On David Malouf', and, as he begins to read from tonight, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem.
In his poem, '15: diacritical', Nam walks us through the tones of the Vietnamese language, using the familiar (and unfamiliar) to bring them closer: the "trill of wind"; the "descant of US bombs." Depending on how tones are applied to a word like 'ma', we hear 'mother', 'tomb', or 'ghost', to name just a few. In honour of father's day the following day, Nam continues the father-thread by reading another dad poem - it's gently gutting, and I can feel the audience hanging onto each word, until he reaches the final line,
"... and the earth recedes."
Next up is the inimitable Rebecca Hawkes, author of the luscious poetry collection, Meat Lovers. Victor's introduction also mentions Rebecca's Masters degree in Half-truths, topped off by her recent Master of Fine Arts in Yearning.
Rebecca begins with what she calls ' a slice of meatlovers', set in the foothills of Methven where she grew up. Sparkling Bucolic details the birthing of a calf, deliciously, viscerally detailed, and somehow utterly human. The audience is both shuddering and enraptured.
Next, a reading from Hide, a manuscript', Rebecca's new poetry endeavour published by Ōtautahi's ngā pukapuka pekapeka. 'Hide' weaves together myth and the strange, rich imagery of nuns drawing the side wound of Christ, while playing with the textures of a farming childhood. It's hard to capture here – I recommend you get your hands on 'Hide' and peruse its delicious innards yourself.
It's brand new, launched only a couple of days ago at Little Andromeda, during what sounds like a lush, atmospheric evening, complete with Rebecca's cello-playing flatmate. Sadly the flatmate is absent tonight – but the reading still springs to life, with "lovingly" drawn wounds drifting through the air. "You cannot," Rebecca recites, "Blame the mutt for what it does..."; there are "so few options for a sheepdog once it has tasted blood."
And yes, I notice Rebecca's incredibly on-brand cow-hide tote under her seat after she leaves the stage!
Our seventh and final poet makes her way under the spotlight: it's the one and only Kate Camp. Her newest book, Leather & Chains, publishes her teenage diary from 1986, and features responses from 2026-Kate (add yourself to the holds list, now!).
It's been a stellar lineup, or course, and I've been excited for everyone – but I'd be lying if I said Kate didn't hold a particularly special place in my heart. Ever since I read her collection of personal essays, You Probably Think This Song is About You, I've been hooked. She has such a way of capturing teenage-and-young-adulthood: the strange and often dangerous decisions made, and the seriousness with which we take ourselves at that time (and sometimes, never again). She's so funny and dry, yet generous and deeply heartfelt in her writing – so I am delighted to find all this translates to her reading, too!
She reads a poem from 2013's Snow White's Coffin, which transports us to the "sarcophagus of childhood memory": "As a child," she reads, "I worried about forgetting." She describes drifting through "empty Sundays": "sometimes life would feel too big, even then." Her voice blankets the room; the audience is rapt.
Then Kate confesses a vulnerable yet mundane habit of childhood: picking the scabs off her knees while sitting on the toilet.
"Need I say I ate them?"
The audience loses it.
"Who is taking this down?"
(Me, Kate Camp!!! Sorry!!!!).
In her next poem, Kate brings out another banger line I scrawl down furiously:
"The problems of this world will not be solved by tiny cars."
And one which floats the idea of having "another whole life" to make sense of the first. She wraps up with a final, new poem (eliciting an extra rustle of excitement from the crowd), called What do people do all day?, in which many beautiful images are invoked, but the most powerful of all is that of a poet, writing poems, placed at the very top of the house in a Richard Scarry illustration.
It's whimsical, but oddly moving: I picture an industrious pig, perhaps in a pair of overalls, hunched over its work in the attic, while, out in the world below, cats ride bicycles and rabbits push wheelbarrows. Is this the true Poetic Powerhouse? Is it what Kate intended? Who is to say.
Victor journeys through what we've heard: he lists the portraits painted, the scabs devoured, the young girl alone in the car. What a journey! As he says, we have been treated to a true hākari: a feast of different flavours.
I for one am feeling pretty well-nourished on my cycle home.
Cerys, South Colombo
More poetry
More WORD Christchurch
- Our WORD Christchurch 2026 page: Picks of the festivals, reportage and more!
- Visit the WORD Christchurch website
- Follow WORDchch on Instagram
- Follow @WORDchch on Tik Tok
- Like WORD Christchurch on Facebook
Add a comment to: The Poetry Powerhouse: WORD Christchurch Festival 2026