Blog posts that reflect on some or all of the poems in my debut poetry collection ransack. This is really not going to make much sense if you haven’t read the book – sorry. Also if I try and polish all of these posts then I won’t write any of them so expect confusing sentence structures and too many tangents. Kia ora!
The Cover
Essentially I tried to get a wonderful painting by Ralph Hotere for the cover but his estate said no – so I painted my own thing. That is the short of it haha.
It started out as a hook that I drew in sharpie (the book ends on the image of an upside down question mark so it like echoes or resonates through), then I went over it with black acrylic paint and then followed that up with this weird pinky-red acrylic which I really like. (the silly thing is that I used a cheaper paint so it wasn’t a standardised colour so tracking down a bigger tube of the same colour was quite difficult).
a hook a heart an explosion which is the name of the painting is part of a series I did trying to find something for the cover – they all use the same colours and same paper and in my mind speak to the moment of chaos as Papatūānuku and Ranginui are being separated but are still connected. You can see them all here.
It’s really cool that I was allowed to use the painting I had done but it does it make it a totally personal affair, the form of the book is just me there is no one else’s art I can hide behind, and perhaps that was what I wanted to do hide behind the extremely talented Hotere. And maybe that wasn’t the most respectful impulse for using his wonderful work. What a little mana-muncher I am lol. But yeah still waiting for the ‘that cover is dog shit’ response and then me timidly agreeing and hoping they don’t find out it was my design haha.
Also modernism… is it? Flattening of an image acknowledgement of materials? Merh I am not an art historian.
So a thing I want to do with these blog posts is link to some other work at the end preferably by indigenous or queer (or both!) creatives:
Obviously go and find Ralph Hotere’s work if you haven’t or just want to look at it again. An image of Red On Black by Hotere (which was the painting I wanted for the cover) is available at this link: https://hcocharitabletrust.co.nz/art-collection/
Other people that I thought of asking to do the cover but didn’t due to time pressure were: Wairehu Grant @shamblingrambler and Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho @hurianakt.a (find them on instagram they’re both incredibly talented Māori artists ❤ )
On not talking about something that doesn’t exist and the actual first poem in this book.
The Orlando Letters
One of the ways I want/ed people to approach the book is whenever they come across a letter to Orlando it gives them the opportunity to leave – I really like sitting with poetry books myself and just slowly getting through, and because I haven’t figured out how to put a poetry collection into parts yet (I had written three manuscripts before this and all had some form of interweaving present) the threaded-through nature of the letters was my way of creating little sections. Stylistically and because of how fucking personal they all are the letters kind of don’t exist they have no page numbers and they are not referenced in the contents page.
I guess I could talk about where I got the idea from? There is a fantastic and heart-breaking collection called Dear Herculine by the American poet Aaron Apps. The whole book is essentially letters to Herculine Barbin who was an intersex person from France living in the 1800s, the book is a way for the writer or narrator to come to terms with loss and trauma and their own intersex body. I wanted to do something similar, but I couldn’t write a whole book of letters it would be too much – too heavy. I started writing the Orlando Letters to allow myself to be way more direct than I was being in my other poems (which I will get to).
One formal thing about the Orlando Letters that was intentional is the trend of sentence fragments and the liberal use of the fullstop as opposed to commas – I wanted the letters to feel breathy and fragmented and I also really suck at remembering to use commas so it came out like that haha.
Also for anyone interested the redaction it is covering the year ‘2017’, I didn’t want the book to become suddenly aged so I redacted that information – also I like the redaction it gives a sense of I really shouldn’t be reading this. Or at least that is how I’ve intended it. Also I will not be revealing what it is underneath each one, some of it is just sensitive information.
Favourite line: ‘I’m writing to you because I saw someone dress up as you and it made me cry”
I like this line a lot because it’s so direct. And it’s true. The best moments of the Letters go like that I think.
Where I was when I wrote it: Probably in bed alone in a dark room, I feel like I’ll have mostly the same answer to this but we shall see lol.
Recommendations: if you can track it down and/or afford it I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Aaron Apps Dear Herculine it is an incredible book, just not an easy one to get through.
So there you have it the first indication of how this going to go and also I think an example of why I write poetry and not blogs.
essa may ranapiri 