Makyla Curtis is Pākehā, born in Aotearoa. Ko Rangitoto te maunga, ko Tay te awa. She grew up north of Tāmaki Makaurau and attended school on the North Shore with a view of Rangitoto. Her family is from Scotland, near the River Tay. She went back to live and work in Scotland for a number of years in the late 2000s. Makyla is currently completing a BA Hons in English & Writing Studies and a Certificate in Languages: te reo Māori at the University of Auckland. She is a letterpress printer, a zine-maker, and an enthusiast of printmaking, artist books, and typography. www.makyla.wordpress.com
Hannah Owen-Wright is an Auckland-based poet/performer, who began learning the craft of performance poetry whilst on a student exchange year at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Earlier this year she collaborated with fellow page2stage mentee Maria Ji on VOW, a spoken word theatre experiment that ran as part of the Auckland Fringe Festival. She is presently in the UK, performing shows with the UK poetry organisation Apples & Snakes.
Poem notes
We have collaborated on a bunch of poly-vocal poems over the past couple of years. The collaborations began when Hannah wanted a voice to overlay a whispered poem she had written. After that first performance collaboration, we began to write pieces together that were intended for performances at LOUNGE and PoetryLive. These three pieces recorded for 6 pack were produced through distinctly different methods: coming together with some prewritten thoughts and gelling them together in a malleable adaptable kind of way; writing and playing together with sounds, especially vowels, to produce different soundscapes which we then combined; and fishing through Wikipedia for visual and metaphorical preoccupations to thread together. It wasn’t until after we had recorded these poems and listened back to them that we realized how prevalent some of these threads and verbal ideas are throughout our own poems. And so in listening to our solo works, you will likely get a sense of what we each bring to the page when we work together and how these ideas are transformed by the speaking of many voices.
|
