Q & A with Emma Neale

Photo credit: Caroline Davies

Emma Neale — is a novelist, short story author, poet, and editor based in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Her seventh poetry collection, Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit (Otago University Press), won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her other accolades include the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature, the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, and the Lauris Edmond Memorial Prize for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry. A past editor of Landfall, she is a widely respected voice in Aotearoa’s literary landscape.

What draws you to write poetry - and what keeps bringing you back to the form?

I always hope to reignite the wonder and recognition I felt as a teenager, when the fusion of content and form in Tuwhare’s ‘Rain’ made the walls dissolve and I felt I was somehow re-entering a world I hadn’t even realised I’d lost.

There are things I love as a reader of poetry, which draw me back to try to write it: how intimately poetry understands the musical aspects of language, the potential for layered word play, the shapely nature of the page as a visual field, the dramatic timing of theatre, the consolations of philosophy, and how compelling it is to witness all of these things pull together in one small space. An as with other art forms, I keep returning to it because it helps to beat back a sense of isolation. Poetry is a pact, a dialogue, between speaker and listener, writer and reader.

Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day brings poetry into the public realm. What do you think about this kind of poetic visibility - and where would you love to see one of your own poems appear?

The wider the reach of poetry, the better. It’s a public health measure! Poetry offers succour, entertainment, subversion; it questions the status quo, it digs underneath the veneer of cliché and con.

I love the public readings on offer on NPD and the poster element. Seeing a poem in a slightly unexpected place is so arresting. I first struck that phenomenon on the London Underground, back in the 1990s, where posters of poems up inside the tube carriages seemed like time capsules that lifted readers away from the chuntering, noisy, crowded, claustrophobic commute. They were especially welcome when I couldn’t sit down or even reach for a book in my satchel because of the squeeze of rush hour.

I’d love to see a poem of mine somewhere similar: a bus hub, a train station, a train carriage, an intercity bus, an airport terminal: somewhere it could act as a kind of balm, comfort, diversion, for the jetlagged, work-lagged, stress-lagged.

Why do you think a day dedicated to poetry, in all its forms, still matters now?

It reminds us that poetry is shared, communal, diverse: it’s for all readers. It’s a sister of song, and nobody ever asks if song still matters.

What threads or obsessions run through your shortlisted collection- and did anything surprise you as the work came together?

I came across a line from the poet Joseph Brodsky — ‘The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie’ — which seemed to complicate what I had been thinking about the loss of honesty and authenticity in the public arena, in our era of ‘alternative facts’. I wanted to dig deeper into that. I became obsessed with the lie, the fabrication, as a tool both of survival or camouflage and as a terrible, destructive force.

I had far too many poems in my initial manuscript, and yet even from that early version, I’d had to leave out many ways we can deceive one another, or deflect from the truth.

A couple of things surprised me about the drafting process. The only way I could successfully confront some Large Elephants in the Room (i.e. characters like Trump and Putin) was side-on, in a poem like ‘Tyranny’. When I tried to write about various political lies directly, the poems were killed by the noise of the liars’ buffoonery and hyperbole and the language lost access to nuance, mystery and musicality. Perhaps this was partly a case of already knowing what I thought: so those poems weren’t small crafts of exploration, they were just badly wielded drumsticks, banging on.

It was pleasantly surprising, instructive, to realise that winnowing out quite a few poems that I’d thought were necessary for a thorough treatment of the themes actually helped other poems to resonate more clearly.

Tell us about a poem, poet, or line that’s currently living in your head - and why it resonates with you.

I am never not hearing, the last verse in Lorine Niedecker’s full poem:

Poet’s work

BY LORINE NIEDECKER

It stays with me because of the way it jokes about art, craft, ‘skill set’ and commerce, yet in a tone that doesn’t quite sit still: the wryness and irony read differently according to the economic climate reader finds themselves in. In one sense, it asks, what do you really need, to live a full life? What does art offer that so-called ‘gainful employment’ can’t? Also, there’s definitely a sense of the hauntings or obsessiveness, the difficulties, of craft in that last stanza, too. It makes me think about when a poem won’t come right; how you have to keep drafting and redrafting; it also captures the obsessiveness of the writing bug: or, to tweak and paraphrase a line from the novelist Niall Williams, that writing is a condition for which the only cure is writing.

There are definitely ‘layoffs’ in the publishing world (not just the in-house staff of presses, but also, writers dropped from lists), so sometimes I hear it delivered with a ‘yeah, right’ tone. It coils around in my mind’s ear because of the way it does what it says: it condenses. And the method is strikingly poetic, the longer you look at it: it uses a stepped layout to mimic a kind of hammering out, the physicality and repetitive movement of labour (suggesting both the grandfather’s idea of a trade, and also that mental labour has its own toughness), and it also uses multiple echoing sonic flickers to give it memorable sensory energy. It’s a witty engagement of content and form, and again, there’s all the more ‘wow’ because of the brevity.

What does it mean to have your collection recognised in this way - and what do you hope readers might take from it?

The recognition has definitely been a big ‘pinch me’ moment.

I’ve followed the three judge’s own writing and reviewing careers for a long time and have found solace, energy, beauty, biting satire, comedy, elegance, education, entertainment, self-aware whimsy, challenge and wisdom in their work. It feels wonderfully surreal to have my book recognised by them.

I’d love these poems to offer readers respite and shelter from the struggle to understand what the hell is going on out there, in the wind and the rain of living in the times that we do.

In other words, I hope the poems help articulate things they might already have felt or sensed, and they might, in reading them, feel less alone.