Ankh Spice : coda

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I’m a chronic ‘dipper in-and-outer’ who has dozens on the go at any one time, in various bags and stacks and in the car, so I’ve chosen to answer this by emptying one backpack, looking at the smallest (I swear) of the bedside stacks, and at what’s in my most recent downloads for e-versions.

Black Bough Poetry -  Christmas/Winter Volume 2 Anthology (Amazon KDP 2021)

Jenny Mitchell -  Her Lost Language (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2019)

Taylor Byas – Bloodwarm (Variant Lit 2021)

Glenn Colquhoun – Letters to Young People (OldKing Press 2020)

Short Poems of New Zealand – edited by Jenny Bornholdt (Victoria University Press 2018)

Linda Pastan - Carnival Evening (Norton, 1998)

Wislawa Szymborska – Poems new and collected (Harcourt 1998)

essa may ranapiri – ransack (Victoria University Press 2019)

Jane Arthur – Craven (Victoria University Press, 2019)

Anindita Sengupta – Walk Like Monsters (Paperwall 2016)

Mary Ford Neal – Dawning (Indigo Dreams Publishing 2021)

Serge Neptune – These Queer Merboys (Broken Sleep Books 2020)

Lynn Valentine – A Glimmer o Stars (Hedgehog Press 2021)

Kyla Houbolt – Tuned (CCCP Chapbooks, 2020)

Kari Flickinger – The Gull and the Bell Tower (Femme Salvé Books, 2021)

Lee Potts – And Drought Will Follow (Frosted Fire 2021)

Anna Saunders – Feverfew (Indigo Dreams 2021)

Danielle Rose - The History of Mountains (Variant Lit 2021)

Han VanderHart – What Pecan Light (Bull City Press 2021)

G. B Clarkson – Crucifox (Verve Poetry Press 2021)

Beth Gordon – The Water Cycle (Variant Lit 2021)

Isaura Ren – No Heroes (Gumroad 2021)

Matthew M.C. Smith – Origin: 21 poems (Amazon KDP 2018)

Carol Krauss – Just a Spit Down the Road (Kelsay Books 2021)

Elisabeth Horan – The Mask (The Broken Spine 2021)

Here’s a few extras I’ve pre-ordered or ordered or am about to blurb that I’m really looking forward to (once the sea-snail post to Aotearoa catches up):

Robert Frede Kenter – Eden (Floodlight Editions 2021)

Stuart Macpherson – Waterbearer (Broken Sleep Books 2021)

Sarah-Jane Crowson – Stories from the Eyes of an Owl (Rare Swan Press 2021)

Kari Flickinger – Ceiling Fan (Rare Swan Press 2022)

Stuart Buck – Hypnopony (Independent 2021)

Katy Naylor – Postcards from Ragnarok (Alien Buddha 2021)

Ankh Spice : part five

How does a poem begin?

Often with something the world throws at me, colliding with something I didn’t know was already germinating inside. I have a particularly strong urge to look very closely at detail, and I believe it’s a powerful thing to be able do that. For me there’s synaesthesia at play too – the small details of the natural world in particular are like sirens, I am physically unable to ignore a broken shell hit by the light in a certain way. And often it feels like there’s a reason for the ‘need to notice’ that very thing at that very moment – it’s subconsciously connected to a concept or experience my brain’s been gnawing away at. There’s this wonderful ‘click’ when the two converge, very-conscious and very-not, the ‘Oh!’ moment, and if I can catch the feeling of that I think the reader feels it, too, therapeutic and satisfying. More literally, moving begins the poem – running or swimming puts me into a state where phrases coalesce and arrange themselves as if by magic in my head. As someone with ADHD, my brain a lot of the time is a skittery, leaping, crowded thing, but both being drawn in deep to detail and moving have the same effect – everything goes held-breath, slows down, grows quiet and floaty-clear. In those states, poems are born. They layer and sort and make sense of all the vast noise of our navigating in a way I can’t ever explain, except by writing them, and hoping other people feel it inside the lines.

Ankh Spice : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Enormously important. I think in a way music *was* the beginning of poetry for me - my mother sang to me even before I was born, and right through my childhood. Story-songs, poems-to-music, an enormous and eclectic range; opera, folk, songs in te reo Maori, in Irish, cowboy ballads, Victorian-era weepies. Her own mother was a comic-opera singer, and she carried that particular delight in sound-word weaving in her blood, and passed it to me, and I think all of that early immersion still resounds in my work. I learned to read music at the same time I learned to read words, very early, well before I started school. I play three instruments, and like the house I grew up in where the record-player or radio was a constant, under our roof it’s very seldom there’s no music playing. I write much of my poetry in my head as I run, swim, move around, and that’s always with headphones in, music on. I think it’s two types of flow state in confluence there – our brains find one momentum in movement and one momentum in music, and together they’re a powerful crucible for an art form where rhythm and sound is so key. It’s always beautiful to me when people have said, hearing me read, that they hear the rhythm, flow, and music through my work. I do think the rhythms of our head-voices, if we can translate them into poems, find synch with the ones inside other people’s heads, and when that happens, it’s special. There are a couple of poems in the book that very directly reference music – Songbird requiem (Liberae me), after Haroula Rose, and Ninth Wave (IV: Finale, D minor), which is a reference to Beethoven’s Ninth – but it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that almost every poem in the book contains music in one way or another.

Ankh Spice : part three

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

There are poems (and collections) I read over and over again. Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s ‘Song’, Glenn Colquhoun’s ‘The Art of Walking Upright’. I’m fortunate to own multiple collections from Linda Pastan, Joy Harjo, Wislawa Szymborska, Hone Tūwhare, and a riffle through any one of them will often land me right where I need to be in that moment. Aside from poetry, I’m a lifelong fan of Sir Terry Pratchett, and I read his books over and over again – they feel like being welcomed home, every time, to a home you needed but weren’t lucky enough to have. His book Nation, along with Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, are two of my favourites, I’ve read them each at least twenty times - for the depth of the human condition they contain and the very wry, very real and tender way they hold this weird living thing we’re all doing in hands full of mourning/rage/humour/respect/wonder – much the same way my favourite poems do. And when I can’t decide if I need poetry or prose or reality laid bare, Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is all three, beautifully woven into something as close to magic as any writer could ever touch.

Ankh Spice : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

An English teacher introduced me to the work of Janet Frame when I was about 12. Although most of her well-known work is not poetry, she did write a great deal of it. Many writers and poets have signposted new pathways in my brain, but Janet was the one who affirmed that the steps into weird-shadow, into the strangeness of personal-lateral, and into being shaped by the particulars of place and different-brain attention to small details as very significant, all those steps I was already taking even at that age, were valid. During that year, I was admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit for the first time, deeply unwell, and surrounded by deeply unwell adults, because there were no adolescent-specific inpatient services at the time. I took a few of her books with me, including a copy of ‘The Pocket Mirror’’, the only volume of her poetry published in her lifetime. My own story echoes hers to a mild extent – she was famously saved from a lobotomy when a doctor learned she’d won a literary prize for that book. I was spared electroconvulsive therapy at 14, partly because a psychotherapist fought against it after reading my poetry journals. I suppose this is a lateral answer – perhaps Janet Frame didn’t change the way I thought about writing so much as let me know that perhaps there was already worth in the ways I couldn’t help thinking about it and everything that feeds it. And I think she gave me permission to write from the deeply personal, sometimes scary places – conscious that there’s little silver hooks of universal hung all the way through the net of the confessional. Other people who have been caught on them recognise their glimmer, and know they’re not alone in being caught, that when the poem allows itself to swim free (there is a redemption in most of my work of this type), just maybe they might, too.

Ankh Spice : part one

Ankh Spice is a poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. He’s completely obsessed with the sea, and he insists that our natural environment, and those old stories we don’t even know we know, mingle in magical ways to shape the human beings we become – and that sometimes we’re allowed to notice it happening.  

His poetry has been widely published over the last two years, with eight nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His poem ‘New Cloth’ was joint winner of the Poetry Archive’s WorldView2020 competition, and a video of him reading it now lives in perpetuity in the Archive. He co-edits at Ice Floe Press and is a poetry contributing editor at Barren Magazine.

Ankh’s debut full poetry collection, The Water Engine, was published in November 2021, and is available from Femme Salvé Books: https://femmesalvebooks.net/the-water-engine-by-ankh-spice/

He also has a Stickleback micro-chapbook due out shortly with Hedgehog Poetry, and a two-part chapbook of imagistic poems paired with his own photography forthcoming with a small independent UK press – dates to be advised.

Twitter: @SeaGoatScreams

Facebook: @AnkhSpiceSeaGoatScreamsPoetry

Website: www.ankhspice-seagoatscreamspoetry.com

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is unique. I feel a freedom inside it to play with all the aspects of language, in a way I don’t feel with other forms of writing. It’s possible to suffuse a poem with multiple subtle meanings, feelings, concepts, leaps beyond and sometimes apart from the literal meanings of words. To use cadence, shape, word order, enjambments to encourage a miniscule pause of contemplation in a particular place, or to emphasise a word that puts a whole new twist on the meaning of a phrase, a riff based on a very lateral sideways slide from just the sounds in a word – all of this is like having a magical paintbox with endless colours to layer ‘brainfeel’. It has the feel of that ‘animal of the possible’ - far more subtle and complex than its parts would seem to allow. Words are the bones, but even the shape of the skeleton is not a given, and a poem doesn’t have to evolve by the rules in ways that other writing seems to. Even more beautifully, poetry permits and opens up the personal response door inside a reader, with so much wiggle-room for meaning: one person looks and perceives the elephant, one the ant, one something completely alien. You don’t get that so much with prose – it tends to lead you where it wants you to go. I greatly value permission to take the paths less seen - in every sense.