Manawatü to Montreal award for Massey poet

Friday, September 13, 2013

Manawatü to Montreal award for Massey poet

Manawatü’s iconic wind turbines are the central metaphor in a poem by Massey University creative writing senior lecturer Dr Bryan Walpert just long-listed for the C$20,000 Montreal International Poetry Prize.

Dr Walpert’s poem “Aubade,” is set in the Manawatü and invokes the presence, sound and movement of the windmills as a backdrop to his central subject, a relationship.

The Longlist Anthology, published this week, comprises 80 poems from writers in 13 countries. They were selected from nearly 2000 entries from 70 countries by the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize Editorial Board, an international jury of ten eminent poets.

A shortlist of 50 poems will be announced next week, and the winning poem at the end of September. It’s the second time Dr Walpert has had a poem in the Longlist; the first was in 2011 for the inaugural Montreal Poetry Prize, held every two years.

Dr Walpert says it is “a great honour to be included in the Longlist – I’m thrilled”.

He’s also delighted that the wind turbines – a unique feature of the Manawatü landscape which he sees every day from his house – have found their way into his poetry and now into an international anthology.

The title of his poem (one of three he submitted) refers to a dawn poem, traditionally about lovers parting at dawn, and features in his recently completed manuscript, Native Bird, for which he is seeking a publisher.

“It’s my first truly New Zealand-focused poetry collection, and part of its interest lies with the experience of immigrating here from the United States, with setting down roots and raising a family in a new culture.”

New Zealand birds feature frequently as objects of meditation and sources of metaphor, though not in this particular poem “Aubade”. Some of the poems have been published individually here or abroad.

The Montreal International Poetry Prize website says it aims to encourage “the creation of original works of poetry, to building cross-national readership and to exploring the world’s Englishes.”

The preface to the online anthology says; “The themes powering these poems are drawn from the whole gamut of human experience, including travel, history, science, technology, nature, love and sex. Some poems contemplate the mundane, such as quitting smoking or yawning, while others consider such fanciful topics as humans growing antennae. There are also politically focused works, and poems about God, mythology, spirituality and prayer.”

Dr Walpert, who won a national Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award in 2007, is the author of two poetry collections; A History of Glass and Etymology, and a short story collection, Ephraim’s Eyes.

His keen interest in the relationship between poetry and science yielded a critical study titled Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry, in which he examines different types of creative resistance to the authority of scientific knowledge.

Read Dr Walpert’s poem in the Longlist Anthology here: http://montrealprize.com/2013-long-list/
 

ENDS

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