Note on the title of the book: it comes from the opening epigraph and took me ages to figure out and keep – I had some other titles such as bullet to binary which is a reference to the American band mewithoutYou (who I do reference in the book somewhere – I’ll point it out) and every part of me is cold except for the parts of u that are burning (which is a line from one of the poems in the book) i think i just liked the one word title in the end as it is direct and feels like a request or a demand or something and it ties back to Orlando.
my tongue as rope
This poem was written after a lot of the work in the book had been finished for a while. It wasn’t part of the original manuscript and was only added late when I found out I could add four or five extra poems. I ended up putting it at the front because it felt like a good way to start – an arrival. The tying up of the knot that I will spend the rest of my life or the rest of this book, I guess, trying to figure out – whether that be undoing it and seeing all it’s strands pool or pulling it even tighter to deny coherency. The poem itself I think is trying to reconcile my many strands of ancestry, I whakapapa to Tainui as well Clan Gunn in Scotland and I have ties to England in some way. So many of us come from contradictions or seeming contradictions or so just so many threads winding together.
It’s the first poem that uses slashes instead of the more conventional line break. I really like the slash it keeps everything compact on the page and there is this violence in it that I think reflects the content here. And it always seems to me to refer to a more perfect version of the poem that uses line breaks like there is a more perfect version of the self somewhere that has space to breathe.
Favourite line: ‘a long and parentless fish / or I can’t make out the position of / the hook’
I like hooks and it is the first time I mention them in the book aside from referencing them on the cover. Also the galaxy being a fish comes from the story of the shark Te Māngōroa who Maui placed in the night sky.
Where I was when I wrote it: I have no memory of writing this I think it was an extremely quick process but it was written late in 2017 and ended up being published in a special trans issue of Yale’s Palimpsest. It was an attempt to get a sense of transition but between past and present and there and here, and then holding all of that in one space. I am going to be transitioning for the rest of my life.
Recommendations: another poet Ava Hofmann who had work published in that same issue of Palimpsest has some amazing work up online these are some of my favourite pieces from her as she plays with potentiality and coexistence between contradictions. This is a link to her website.
Edit: I evoke Cook through the Endeavour in this poem and there is so much I could say about that man and what his presence meant/means especially in regards to Tuia 250 but I’ll just link to this fantastic essay from Alice Te Punga Somerville instead.
essa may ranapiri 