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.