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Introduction: Foveaux Report

Index of Poets

Marine Forecast
Easterly rising to 30 knots this afternoon. Sea rough. Southeast swell 3 metres, easing. Northeast swell in east 2 metres, easing.Fair visibility in areas of drizzle.

We said we’d write the introduction on the way across to Rakiura. Somebody’s laptop braced against a bulkhead, somebody else dictating deathless copy. Enough poets on the boat to keep it loose, lyrical and laconic on the third-roughest stretch of water in the world. We’re en route for Oban, the southernmost settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand, to do the third and final reading of Bluff 06 and to launch the online anthology that has been assembled over three days by email, by floppies and flash drives, by mp3 recorders and from bits of paper with runic inscriptions adorning their crumpled surfaces.

We won’t know the final count until the cyber scissors cut the e-ribbon in the last moments of the reading tonight. What we do know is how rich and various the contributions are, and how far an invitation can travel when word of mouth joins forces with Send, Forward and Reply All, those screen functions that bring faraway so close.

So we’re far away at the bottom of the South Island, Te Wai Pounamu, heading for Halfmoon Bay and the legendary hospitality of Rakiura. But we’re as close as the click of your mouse.

Thanks to everyone who sent or brought us a poem, and to those who helped us to these transports.
  

Brian Flaherty, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen
23 April 2006
  

The Invitation

OBAN 06 is nzepc’s online poetry anthology, building 21-23 April 2006 as part of the BLUFF 06 poetry symposium in Southland. Bluff’s famous Oyster Festival happens over the same weekend.

Bring a poem on a disk to any of the symposium events OR email your contribution to nzepc@auckland.ac.nz between 21-23 April.

We aim to build a local and international poetry anthology over three days, launching Sunday 23 April in Oban on Rakiura (Stewart Island). We welcome your poem. We’d like it to engage with time and place, transience and duration, memory and forgetting, coming and going, poetry and oysters – any or all of the above.

If you could see this jet
fire-seeded sky,
chill here with me
on a plastic chair
on the veranda, we'd hear Bluff hum
while lines of sodium and magnesium
bridge and wharf lights
bleed to black,
inexactly
as on other nights, other verandas,
another port - a kauri pew,
wings on the sill of an inside-out
lit window,
scrying the dark
insistent stars, fireflies -
we have talked of poetry.

        Cilla McQueen. ‘Antiphony (Letter to Peter Olds)’

Anthology compilers: Brian Flaherty, David Howard, Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen and nzepc team

Submission guidelines

• work should be your original composition
• if it has been published elsewhere, please include acknowledgement and publication details
• the compilers reserve the right to copy-edit contributions before uploading
• copyright for individual contributions to the anthology remains with the author

Information about BLUFF 06 at New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (nzepc)