Selina Tusitala Marsh - Tapa Notebooks

Selina Tusitala Marsh took a Tapa Notebook to Paris in March 2006 then to BLUFF 06 in Southland the following month. The notebook travelled on through a year of teaching, talking, reading and editing in and around Auckland and the poet’s home on Waiheke Island. It was delivered 8 May 2007 to Special Collections by a delegation of students from the University of Auckland’s English 347 Poetry off the Page after an outing to Albert Park to video and photograph Selina’s performance of ‘Not Another Nafanua Poem,’ recently published in Best NZ Poems 2006..

Paris : Quick poetic scrawls made on a piece of A4 paper while sitting in the middle of a dark, dank 12 th C church in Bordeaux. It’s an attempt to capture in a stream-of-consciousness the mix of modernity and ancient time, the mesh of mythological and doctrinal images, the porous sensations of power and powerlessness lurking in the arches spanning the ceilings The piece of A4 turned out to be a step-by-step instruction guide that Tim Page (our multi-media expert here at Auckland) had put together for me so that my presentation on Pasifika Poetry (for which I was in Bordeaux in the first place) would work seamlessly. However, I did not manage to show Pasifika Poetry (on the internet nor on the backup copy on disk) because, to put it simply, and despite me pointing it out to the conference organisers, a dvd player is not a computer!

Bluff: A banal thing such as a supermarket receipt also tallies up the emotional cost incurred by a mum away from her young family again. I just had to stick the receipt in there.

Nafanua: The scribbled out comment was written in frustration. It happened to end with what became the title of the poem. These parenthesised comments feed and shape the main text and this page reminds me of the difference between a rant and a line.

Ha`akula: A draft poem written to celebrate Mark Kneubuhl's novel Smell of the Moon, launched in 2006 and hailed as the first American Samoan novel written by a Samoan. I had left my draft incomplete when, unknown to me, my seven year old son Javan picked up the notebook where it was lying (kitchen table, floor of the van, couch in the lounge . . . ) and finished the poem. He then went on to compose his own poem, accompanied by drawings (à la Albert Wendt-style in Book of the Black Star). As in life, my space and his space are essentially one.

Last Page: The Samoan proverb ‘E lafulafu a tama seu gogo’ (]It is the dirt of the youths catching seabirds’) is applied to things that look unpromising but end well: an apt descriptor of this Tapa Notebook! Handing it over into the public domain was much harder than I expected. It’s messy, incomplete, with irregular handwriting and scribbles around the place, hastily sellotaped pictures and glued in entries that were written elsewhere. It’s not even 'creatively messy' or 'artistically disorganised' – its just messy messy. But that's the way I work, in unromantic splurges of thought and emotion, doing what I can when I can and saying 'if not now, when?' So the Tapa Notebook is ‘dirty’ but it’s a good dirt. It’s the dirt that precedes caught seabirds offering nourishment or navigational guidance. There's even a youth in the Notebook! As a mum and poet, I know that passing on a love for words, imagery, and language, is one of the best ways Javan can nourish and navigate his soul around in this world.

Pasifika Poetry Web
BLUFF 06
Not Another Nafanua Poem (BNZP 2006)
Tapa in the Park 8 May 2007 [video wmv | mov]
Tapa to Archive 8 May 2007 (English 347 gallery)