Ruby Porter is a poet and prose writer. She has completed a Fine Arts (Honours) and Arts Conjoint (majoring in English) at the University of Auckland, and is doing her Masters of Creative Writing as part of the 2016 cohort at UoA. Ruby has been very lucky in the mum department, with three loving ones, all of whom are great writers themselves and have encouraged Ruby in her own creative pursuits. She owes a lot to them – Mary, Sara, and, particularly, Linley.
Poem notes
‘Matariki’ is the oldest poem of the lot, written while I was still at Northcote College in 2010 for Michele Leggott’s project, A Million Poems for Matariki.
‘In his car’ and ‘Looking at a photo’ were written for readings organised by Owen Connors called Fuck Me: Sex Under Capitalism. The second reading, for which ‘Looking’ was written, had a focus on visual culture, ie pornography.
All the rest were written in Lisa Samuels’ paper, English 343 Writing Poetry in 2015. ‘Eel’ was developed from a line poem exercise, Hercules Goliath & Jonas – 76 feet was developed from a timing in composition exercise, and ‘Imogen’ was developed from a ‘bottom of the ocean exercise’ (and is also directly influenced by another paper, English 354 Writing Selves taught by Anna Boswell). ‘How to tell the truth but tell it slant’ came from a pastiche exercise, and takes lines, words and phrases from Emily Dickinson, Kathleen Stewart, Susan M. Schultz, Alex Jespersen and Pritika Lal.
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