#tayi tibble

[auntiems]

POETRY STARTERS, from my favorite poets. includes: kinsale drake, linda hogan, trista mateer, whitney hanson, hania rafaqat, nikita gill, tayi tibble, leanne howe.

"nothing hurts more than to feel your heart is in pieces and to be told to 'look on the bright side, it's all for good purpose and reason'."

"i saw a strawberry moon tonight rising, i learned the word in my language for laugh ... we found it together."

"there are lullabies downtown; the desert moans at night, bringing the smell of cold or a bloody nose."

"so, you who live there now, don't forget to love it, thank it. the place that was once our forest, our ponds, our mosses, the swamplands with more birds and lowly creatures."

"how does a wound heal when it's not on the body?"

"you can walk around pretending you aren't necessary but the universe is a poet. and one day, the universe decided it would sit down and write you alive, empty stardust into your veins and make you exist."

"i would rather people speak up imperfectly than not speak up at all."

"i hope that you find a love that doesn't require you to read between the lines."

"i hope that you never doubt again. that when you are even in pain, you are a miracle, that every part of you is incredible."

"may my dreams come true. may my enemies eat shit."

"i'm sorry for what i said, and what i didn't say."

"suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. be still, they say. watch and listen. you are the result of the love of thousands."

"and i remember the year we were the two strongest "girl swimmers" in our syndicate. this meant we were forever forced to race the boys for western feminism and you would always win, even against the boys who were so like men the teachers treated them as if they were more muscle than human."

"minutes before the rain begins i always waken, listening to the world hold it's breath."

"you love me, yes. but not in the way i deserve to be loved."

"you are good, and you are whole, and you are not alone or unwanted or weak or standing at the edge of something you can't come all the way back from."

"we have lost the luxury of tenderness. sharpen your teeth."

"i will not forgive what you have done."

"if i have children, i hope they live quiet lives. no fires for them. no sickness. no breaking news stories. i hope they die of old age, far from the pages of history books.

"just to listen to the tavern banter. just to walk around outside, somewhere with clean air and two moons. just to be someone again with a clear purpose and enough goals to keep moving forward."

[aaknopf]

Visit Original Link

A poem of girlhood and after by Indigenous New Zealander Tayi Tibble, whose second collection, Rangikura, comes out in America today. In the dictionary of Māori language, hōmiromiro is defined as “a white-breasted North Island tomtit…a little black-and-white bird with a large head and short tail.” It is often used to refer to someone with a tomtit’s keen vision—that is, a sharp eye for detail.

Hōmiromiro

I used to dream about a two-headed goldfish. I took it for an omen. I smashed a milk bottle open

on a boiling road and watched a three-legged dog lick it up and in the process I became not myself but a single shard of glass and thought finally

I had starved myself skinny enough to slip into the splits of the universe but once I did I realised that the universe was no place for a young thing to be and there is always a lot more starving to be had.

When I was a girl I thought

I was Daisy Buchanan. I read on the train. I made voluminous eyes.

Once I walked in front of a bus and it exploded into a million monarch butterflies then I was ecstatic!

As a girl, I could only fathom

time as rose petals falling down my oesophagus. It tickled and it frightened me. I ran around choking for attention.

I had projections of myself at 100 my neck weathered and adorned like the boards of a home being eaten by the earth.

When I was a girl I would lie

on the side of that road in the last lick of sun and wait for the rabbits to come saluting the sky of orange dust

and then I would shoot them into outer space.

For many years I watched them bouncing on the moon. But then I stopped caring and so I stopped looking.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Rangikura by Tayi Tibble.

Browse other books by Tayi Tibble and follow her on Instagram @paniaofthekeef.

Hear Tayi Tibble and Harryette Mullen read from their new poetry collections at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, CA on April 10 at 8:00 PM. Tayi Tibble will be joined by Sasha LaPointe in Washington for a series of readings and conversations at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle on April 13 at 7:00 PM, at King's Books in Tacoma on April 14 at 1:00 PM, at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge on April 15 at 7:00 PM, and at Third Place Books in Seattle, Lake Forest Park, on April 16 at 7:00 PM. Tayi and Sasha will also be at Broadway Books in Portland, OR, on April 17 at 6:00 PM. Tayi will be at the LA Times Book Festival signing books at the ALTA booth (Booth 111) on April 20 at 11:00 AM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[lifeinpoetry]

I want to drown / in a bathtub / carved out / of rose gold / fill it up with champagne and / shame too thick to choke down / I want to dissolve / into night / it fits / tight and acidic / like a womb

— Tayi Tibble, from "LBD," Poūkahangatus

[pwpoetry]

Q&A with Tayi Tibble

M: Can you tell us a bit about the title of your collection?

T: Poukahangatus is a transliteration of Pocahontas, articulated in Te Reo Maori phonetics. It doesn’t have an actual or complete meaning in Maori, but broken down, ‘pou’ means a pillar, a column, a totem, and ‘kaha’ means strength or bravery, and I like those meanings being present in the title for the collection.

The title is also lifted from the opening essay, ‘Poukahangatus: An Essay about Indigenous Hair Do’s and Don’ts’ and just as the essay explores, I think as a title, Poukahangatus suggests themes of indigenous representation, appropriation, story sovereignty and reclamation, which are recurring and the undercurrent of the collection.

M: This was your debut--what was it like shaping it, and what have you worked on since?

T: I wrote Poukahangatus while I was studying towards my MFA at the International Institute of Modern Letters, so it was shaped through workshops, supervision and a year of concentrated study which was all super helpful to both the book's development, and my own development as a writer. It was an intense but very rewarding experience — it was the first time I had ever explored my culture, my family, the history and impact of colonization in my writing and in New Zealand at the time, there was a bit of a gap in our literature that held both Te Ao Maori (the maori world) and the modern, globalized world of pop culture and the internet, so writing into that space was very fertile, but in part, sort of vulnerable too.

Since then, I wrote a second collection Rangikura, which will also be published by Knopf at a later date. It’s similar to Poukahangatus with its themes of family and colonization, but its parameters are a little tighter, and the intensity turned up — it has an undercurrent of climate change urgency; exploring the relationship between the desecration of the earth and desecration of indigenous women. I’m currently also starting a third collection, but it’s taking its time to reveal itself.

M: There's a range of forms in your first collection. Can you talk a bit about the prose poems that anchor the opening and appear throughout?

T: I’m interested in prose poems because I am interested in storytelling. I write poetry of course, but I also consider my poems to be, and want my poems to serve as, a form of indigenous storytelling; a way to capture and articulate our indigenous knowledge and experiences, and pass them along through generations.

I guess I like how prose poems invite density, generosity, and exploration while also offering the visual cue or expectation that there might be a narrative drive or a story. Many of the prose poems in Poukahangatus have a narrative drive or tell stories. For example, ‘Tangi in The King Country’ is a series of prose poems that tell the story of two small children returning to their marae or ancestral lands for the first time. In another poem titled ‘Pania’ a relationship between an exotic dancer and her client is told over three blocks of prose, which also draws on the traditional myth of Pania of The Reef, a sea maiden from the Ngati Kahungungu tribe of Aotearoa. It’s important to me as a writer to share the stories of my people, and prose poems are a functional way to do this. I like playing with dense blocks of text, but still working the language enough to make it feel light and sing like poetry.

M: Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel your work is in conversation?

T: I’m not sure if they're in conversation with, but the books that spoke to me as I was writing Poukahangatus, and in turn helped me to find my voice and speak with courage and confidence were Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire and Fale Aitu by Tusiata Avia. They sort of formed the atmosphere I wanted to write into, these passionate wahine writing about power and ancestry with truth and reclamation

[rebelgirlreads]

‘Poūkahangatus is a hybridised word of my own invention, phonetically mimicking ‘Pocahontas’. It has no literal Māori translation, though ‘pou’ in te reo Māori means pillar or pole, and ‘kaha’ means power or strength.’ - Tayi Tibble

In the movie, Pocahontas remains in America. In reality, she became an important figure in relations between Native Americans and colonisers, which lead to her leaving the country and dying far from home. 

In the book, she appears in the first poem – ‘An essay on indiginous hair dos and don’ts.’

In 1995 I was born and Walt Disney’s Animated Classic Pocahontas was released. Have you ever heard a wolf cry to the blue corn moon? Mum has. I howled when my mother told me Pocahontas was real but went with John Smith to England and got a disease and died. Representation is important.

[lifeinpoetry]

He ran his tongue over her bruised knees and she was immediately overwhelmed by the intimacy between skin and bone, by the feeling of his wet front teeth, by the wetness of her purple and yellow trauma swelling just beneath the surface. It was always there, an invisible pollution, but finally it had risen and—dear God—somebody wanted to kiss it. Sometimes her body was a swimming pool full of dead bees and foliage, and sometimes she liked that better. It kept the delicate boys away. When she was little and lived by the sea, she swam a lot and was fearless with her body. She let herself be thrashed and turned about by wave after wave, this way and that way. Her grandmother always said Never turn your back on the ocean, because you never knew what might be coming in. She used to think about sharks and stingrays, then tidal waves, then she thought about a horizon full of big white sails. Still, she always felt safe in the water, and she welcomed the invasion.

— Tayi Tibble, from "Pania," Poūkahangatus

[lifeinpoetry]

According to Greek mythology, according to Wikipedia, Medusa was a ‘monster’; she is generally described as a winged human female with venomous snakes in place of hair. Gazers upon her ‘hideous’ face would turn to stone. However, it is less known that Medusa was a master carver, engraving her existence in bone forever. Anything else said about her is a rumour and a violent appropriation. In fact, it must be difficult not to sprout a head of snakes in a society that constantly hisses at you.

— Tayi Tibble, from "Poūkahangatus: An Essay About Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts," Poūkahangatus

[lifeinpoetry]

In a hotel room, a man runs his hands through your hair like a surveyor. He is surprised when he asks you if it’s dyed. Groans when he tells you that he has never seen hair that black before. But what he really means is skin, what he really means is you’ve been a bad bad girl, what he really means is I don’t typically fuck with minority races but I still want to fuck you. He touches you in a place that makes you wish your hair was a crown of snakes, but it’s not enough to make you leave. Your mouth is a perpetual O that looks like a yes please and never a no. Representation is important.

— Tayi Tibble, from "Poūkahangatus: An Essay About Indigenous Hair Dos and Don’ts," Poūkahangatus