News
2024
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Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé, Center for Book Arts, New York. An insightful and exploratory overview of the exhibition by book collector, blogger, and essayist Robert Bolick.
Center for Book Arts, New York
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard ((( Sun-O ))) has been included in the Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé exhibition at the Center for Book Arts, New York, curated by Michalis Picher. A synopsis of the exhibition is below:
Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé, recalls an exhibition of the same name by Marcel Broodthaers in 1969 at Wide White Space in Antwerp, Belgium. The exhibition is centered around re-readings and re-writings of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard across different media, around that icon of the avant-garde. The exhibition will be a 1-on-1 appropriation of a historical exhibition, hence a “greatest hit” in its own right.
2023
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Many thanks to editor John Geraets for publishing a poem of mine in his excellent online literary journal remake8. I haven’t submitted poems to NZ literary journals in recent years so it was encouraging when John asked for work and included a comment on the poem by C.K.Stead.
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In the sidedoor section of the journal Roger Horrocks reflects on his personal connections to the 1897 Mallarmé poem Un Coup de Dés and my recent homage ((( Sun-O ))) which is now housed in the Special Collections at the Bodleian.
2022
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation
The final stop for ((( Sun-O ))), the Bower Ashton Library, Bristol (Books on Books Collection exhibition, 1st September – 31st October 2022) before all of the works of homage to ‘Un Coup de Dés’ will be donated to the Special Collections at the Bodleian to make them available to scholars and artists interested in Mallarmé as well as what is arguably a sub-genre of book art.
((( Sun-O ))) has appeared with various selections of homage, at the tenth and final Turn the Page Artists Book Fair in Norwich and in the West Court Gallery at Jesus College in Cambridge.
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Many thanks to the wonderful people at Vamp & Tramp Booksellers for this thoughtful presentation of ((( SUN-O )))
UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD ((( SUN-O ))) Editions For Sale
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard ((( Sun-O ))) is a 300 x 225 mm edition of 20 (10 boxed and 10 unboxed) 28-page book with unnumbered pages, digital Indigo printed on Mohawk archival paper (Ultra White Smooth pages 148gsm and cover 270gsm) with die-cut cover and hand sewn with black thread. Each is numbered and signed.
Copies 1–10 are housed in a hinged-lid box with magnetic flap, 35mm outer walls with Chelsea Beige 045 binding cloth (100 percent cotton with pigmented coating) with the ((( Sun-O ))) emblem foiled on the front in white. A black ribbon lifts out each edition. The boxes are lined with ColourPlan Bright Red acid-free paper and feature a different printed design inspired by the original Mallarmé poem and my homage. Each design is digital Indigo white ink and the typeface is DTL Elzevir.
((( Sun-O ))) was printed by Centurion, Auckland, New Zealand. Designed by jacindatorrance of Verso Visual Communications, Auckland. Hand-bound by Louise James of The Binding Studio in the Waitakere Ranges, West Auckland, New Zealand.
The work is dedicated to: Roger Horrocks, a New Zealand poet, writer, film-maker, educator and cultural activist.
There are still a few copies of the boxed and unboxed editions for sale. Contact me if you are interested.
Email: sam@samsampson.co.nz
Books on Books Review: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD ((( SUN-O )))
Book collector, blogger, and essayist Robert Bolick (Books On Books) has just published an essay on Un Coup de Dés ((( Sun-O )))
The references to music and the poem’s demonstration of musicality throughout are also hard to miss, and given its zero point of inception, the poem would be seriously remiss without them. The aim for union of text, sound and graphic image is as central to Sampson’s poem as the manipulation of syntax and les blancs is to Mallarmé’s. The aim’s importance in Sampson’s poem even has the last note and oversized word in the poem:
...the Never / rolling / listing / pitch / & / fall / A solitary / THRUM
The frequency of achieved union may be what puts Sampson’s homage in the front rank.
2021
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'This insistent reminder of the plurality of modes of signification that is raised in many different ways, without being resolved, is what I admire most about the anthology.'
Many thanks to Camilla Nelson for her sensitive reading / review of my poem – ‘Kia Toitu He Kauri’ which appeared in the ‘Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary' (Newell, Quetchenbach, and Nolan, 2021). An anthology I was privileged to be part of alongside many innovative poets whom I’ve admired over the years.
....lines that signify the denuded branches of trees—a hanging tree, a crucifix—all crucial axes within which Sampson plots his poem...
2020 Big Other Book Award for Poetry
Happy to see the "Ecopoetics" anthology of poetry and commentary Poetics for the More-than-Human World has been nominated as a finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for Poetry. From the judges... 'An anthology of ecologically oriented poetry and commentary by 140 contemporary writers from a wide range of bioregions, nations, and life situations who include the more-than-human world in their vision of accountability.'
2020
UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD ((( SUN-O ))) by Sam Sampson
Many thanks to Derek Beaulieu publisher of ‘no press’ (2005-present) for taking on the first iteration of this project. Derek Beaulieu is the Director of Literary Arts at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Visual / Concrete Poetry Editor for Ubuweb, and was the 2014-2016 Poet Laureate of Calgary.
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'Very grateful to NZ poet Sam Sampson for these two books partnering with Harvey Benge's photographs. Halcyon Ghosts, 2014 and ...exclusivity dwells in habitat, 2012. I find the work in Halcyon Ghosts with the words echoing the bird formations incredibly compelling.'
David Solo is a collector of photographs, Japanese and Chinese contemporary art, and especially artists’ books and photos. He is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Ecopoetics Anthology Reading: August 27 & September 8
Excellent group poetry reading and discussion earlier this week. All readers contributed something unique and the session felt inclusive and engaging. This Ecopoetics Anthology reading took place on Aug 27 and Sept 8 (two dates due to some technical difficulties), with an interactive discussion after the first session reading. It is now available on Chax YouTube.
The reading was hosted by Cole Swensen & Charles Alexander, with an introduction by, Bernard Quetchenbach. The readers comprised of - Lisa Fleck, Elizabeth Dodd, Sam Sampson, Mary Newell, Cheryl J. Fish, John Shoptaw, & Ann Fischer-Wirth.
Kia Toitu He Kauri – Sam Sampson
My poem ‘Kia Toitu He Kauri' (Keep Kauri Standing), or as my friend, the writer Roger Horrocks put it, my 'Scenic Drive', Titirangi poem, has been included in an "Ecopoetics" anthology of poetry and commentary: Poetics for the More-than-Human World. I was hoping to find it a home with like-minded individuals, so more than happy to be included in the company of poets whom I’ve admired over the years; Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Clayton Eshleman, Jack Collom, Jane Hirshfield, Michael McClure, Eléna Rivera, Harriet Tarlo, Cole Swensen, and many
more.There will be a ZOOM (June-August) reading series to accompany the publication and the editors are intending to publish a print edition later in the year.
Anyhow, check it out. There’s some interesting work included.
30 Days in September, Harvey Benge & Sam Sampson
I collaborated with the late Harvey Benge (1944 – 2019) on a couple of photobooks, with the most recent, titled by Harvey: ‘30 days in September’. I was thinking about the title when writing this, and how it describes what Harvey did. A statement like title, with a conceptual framework, which made you think, yeh, I’ve got it, but then revisiting the image, the idea, the positioning of each image, it made you look again, and again, and again…
I think it was something to do with the first conversation I had with Harvey, and that was over the work of the American poet William Carlos Williams. After striking up a conversation, a coffee and meeting was organised at the Atomic Café in Ponsonby, and with Harvey’s absolute belief in the collaboration, and the creative impulse behind making challenging work, we put together a photobook, with Harvey responding visually to my poetry.
If you look at Harvey’s website, a William Carlos Williams poem appears, and now I can see this was not just a casual reference to Williams, or something to decorate the home page: but a love of Williams’ dictum: ‘no ideas but in things’…the poem Harvey quotes is the well known:
The Red Wheelbarrow
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickensThe last time I saw Harvey I asked him if I could post pages of our collaborative September book on Instagram, one page, image, poem, for each day of September. I saw his eyes light up, to see another project being thrown out there into the world, to find a method in the madness of this world, to complete but another of the myriad of projects he had on the go. Looking back, I realise I posted pages of the book, partly as a tribute to Harvey, but more importantly because I wanted the world to see his work.
Thank you Harvey Benge for inviting me into your world; the flâneur of the everyday, but also such a pleasure to revel in the minutiae of each image. Images, interlopers, captured in – 'the blink of an eye' [Augen-blick] but in Harvey’s transformative play between subject and object. Revisiting Harvey’s images has made me realise what an exemplary gift he has for anticipating the majestic within the mundane; how a decisive moment in time is both fleeting yet momentously eventful, and how parallel worlds attach an uncanny music to the mind’s-eye while also being simultaneously insightful.
So in my words, and Harvey’s images...
‘in what direction are you going? / let us run / by a roundabout route evacuate a matter-of-fact’
Go well my friend....❤️
2019
1969: A Constant Flow of Light
Pretty special to be back again reading at the Titirangi War Memorial Hall, for 'Destination West', the fourth edition of the West Auckland Heritage Conference. The synopsis of my reading is below:
1969: A Constant Flow of Light
Fifty years ago Colin McCahon painted onto the front of Maurice Shadbolt’s studio bar – As there is a constant flow of light we are born into a pure land. This may not have been McCahon’s most seminal work, or even in the pantheon of great McCahon paintings, but its utilitarian value and sheer chutzpah (painted spontaneously onto a studio bar) is quite remarkable.
Sam Sampson was born in the same year this work was painted, and grew up, and still lives in his childhood home, not far from the Shadbolt house. In a series of new poems, and in a poetic exchange with C.K. Stead, he responds to McCahon’s text while highlighting the importance of his local environment.
Location: Titirangi War Memorial Hall : 2:30pm, Sunday 20 October.
Maps – in collaboration with artist Peter Madden
Once again, a pleasure to be featured in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars alongside poets – Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Nico Vassilakis, David Baptiste Chirot and Derek Beaulieu...
2018
A Question of Brightness (Dispatches from the Poetry Wars) – in homage to John Ashbery (1927-2017)
Many thanks to the editors at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars for publishing my poem 'A Question of Brightness'. Check out their remarkable online resource and extensive list of artists and writers.
Poetry Magazine – Some Remarks on Poetry and the Environment in Aotearoa/New Zealand
Pleased to read Greg O'Brien's essay on NZ poetry and how NZ poets respond to what John Kinsella termed 'international regionalism'. After finishing the impressive and detailed biography of Allen Curnow: Simply by Sailing in a New Direction: Terry Sturm (AUP) it was fascinating to see how Curnow negotiated the local with the international / the private with the universal...(or in philosophical terms, how the natural world presented "phenomena", and how the poet accessed, and presented, "noumena". Sturm's biography highlighted Curnow's doubts about the quality of his work, rivalries, a drive to promote and disseminate his work, and a doggedness in the face of adversity...how early reviews of Curnow's work referred to poems as ‘mannered obscurity’– something today we don't necessarily equate with a Curnow poem.
Greg O'Brien also made some interesting comments where he believes Curnow 'posits the reader in three-dimensional space rather than presenting a tableau or framed-up vista (to quote O'Brien):
'In "Canto of signs without wonders,” he finds himself looking skyward, not toward heaven, but to some imagined or real aerial lettering, “the sky being prime space, anyway / the most public part of this universe.” A much younger poet, Sam Sampson, alluded to Curnow’s conspicuous sky-writing (and also to the concrete poetry movement) when he set words adrift across the visual field of the page in the title sequence of his 2014 collection, Halcyon Ghosts, the form of each poem being a transcription of a flock of birds, mid-flight.
Between the poetics of Curnow and Sampson — and bearing in mind much that has come between: the work of C.K. Stead, Ian Wedde, Brian Turner, Hone Tuwhare, Cilla McQueen, and others — we find ourselves, having largely forsaken “nation,” “country,” and even “province,” moving toward a notion of “environment” or “ecology.” In this continually evolving tradition of “nature poetry” — or “eco-poetry” as it is now often called — we find ourselves having to deal with a notion of place / space / “the local” which is in constant flux.'
2017
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Had a great time talking to Dan Sperber: 7am Swim with Sperber Dan. We talked a little about poetry and music, I played a few tunes, and I had the chance to premiere my dedicatory poem for John Ashbery.
(When listening to the stream, my slot – Denizen Of The Deep – is 1hr 29m into the show.)
Geographic Tongue – John Ashbery (1927-2017)
Very sad to hear of the passing of John Ashbery (1927-2017). A touchstone poet for me and someone I always headed to for inspiration. I know he wasn't for everyone (I'm thinking of C.K.Stead's 1992 review in the LRB: 'O Harashbery!') but it was mesmerising how he made the world strange and exciting through poetry. His form of negative capability combined a late-modernist / collage / discourse which made you believe anything was possible. As others have written, when reading Ashbery it was important not to try to understand the poems but to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. As Langdon Hammer wrote in the New York Times in 2008: 'Ashbery's phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasise verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us'.
Here's a poem (audio link above) from my first book where I threaded John Ashbery throughout the work. Although a generic John like figure inhabits the poem, John Ashbery was central to my thinking when writing this poem : here's two couplets from the poem:
'...ledgers lampoon the blistered saint/John saunters, stumbles forward/ash buries the procession'('Geographic Tongue', from Everything Talks)
The year was 69 (for Sam Sampson) - NZ Books: A Quarterly Review, May 28, 2017
Happy to see the NZ Poet Laureate (2015-17) C.K.Stead's wonderful response to my unpublished poem: 'As there is': it has both 'time present and time past…' the local and international: ‘making America great again’, a slogan of today’s politics gone mad and yet a re-reading of a reading.
I’m so pleased you like my ‘consequence’, and especially that you feel it has caught something of your ambience and location: that it ‘gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’ perhaps, which of course is what you do yourself. In this case you are the primary ‘giver’ and I the receiver and transmitter. (C.K.Stead)
exclusivity dwells in habitat - Asia-Pacific Photobook Archive
Exclusivity dwells in habitat is a collaborative work with Auckland poet Sam Sampson. I came across lines from a more expansive work and on reading the word photographer was prompted to suggest to Sam that I respond visually to his piece. The resultant bookwork, published in April 2012, is in an edition of 100 copies each signed and numbered by Sam and myself. (Harvey Benge)
The American poet Michael Palmer said of the collaboration:
What a pleasure to receive your note, and the collaboration with Harvey Benge, where word and image offer such a provocative dynamic of conjunction and disjunction, the rich play between, space between.
The book is 195 x 155mm and is printed on 120gsm art paper, 28 pages with 16 photographs. The edition is limited to 100 copies. I have uploaded the entire book for online viewing: ...exclusivity dwells in habitat.
2016
Poetry in the Dunes - Runes of fact and fiction
Some wonderful photos of the event by the writer Ann Russell.
Poetry in the Dunes - Runes of fact and fiction
After reading in front of The Watchman at Karekare beach for ANZAC Day 2016 celebrations I'm heading back to the surf club with a stellar line up for Poetry Day 2016. It should be a fantastic evening, with West Auckland poets Janet Charman, Serie Barford, Jenny Clay, Sandra Coney, Rewi Spraggon, Elizabeth McRae & Sue Gee with special guests and The Rutherford Writers from Rutherford College. Follow the flames along the estuary from the beach carpark to the iconic Karekare Surf Life Saving Clubhouse. Antipasto provided. Drinks available. MC Sir Bob Harvey. Entry by Koha, Proceeds To KKSLSC, All ages welcome. Date/Time: 26th August, 6.15 - 8.30pm. Location: Karekare Beach.
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Such enthusiasm and zing!!! A three day workshop I was involved in with animator Martin Sercombe. Kids 6-12 years brought poetry to life through animation and video...a fantastic combobulation of word and image. The video showreel will be premiered to the public at Titirangi Theatre in September.
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Pleased to be participating at my local gallery in a discussion on writing. From the Te Uru site: 'Write Night is a monthly opportunity for writers of all persuasions to get together, seek advice, eat biscuits and meet like-minded scribes. Koha welcome.' Wednesday April 27, 6.30-8.30pm.
2015
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Many thanks to Michele Leggott, Tim Page, and Brian Flaherty, for the opportunity to have work included in the Six Pack Sound #2 series. This is the first recording of the poem Halcyon Ghosts, and will give readers (& listeners) my take on the notation set out in the book.
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What a privilege to have collaborative work ('Popular Mechanics') included in a 64th birthday collection for the editor impresario Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books. Tony was one of the first to publish my work and believed my first volume Everything Talks was worth publishing through his Shearsman imprint (even though I was based in NZ on the other side of the globe). With his encouragement and matter of fact approach he gave me a sense poetry was integral to my sense of being...a validation of sorts. Thank you Tony, and may Shearsman continue to bring into the world 'the quiescent music of its particles' (Gustaf Sobin).
TRANSTASMAN: Cordite Poetry Review
Very pleased to have a poem included in this smorgasbord of transtasman poetics. Many thanks to the editorial team Bonny Cassidy and Kent MacCarter.
Left in the Alphabet Soup: Landfall Review Online
A sort of anarchic teasing of our sensibilities is taking place...the work is pulsing with the beat of a living language at its heart.
2014
Poetry 2014 with Gregory O’Brien
Thanks to Greg O'Brien for including me in his poetry round up for 2014. Here's what he said about the book: 'The inaugural James Joyce Memorial Award for unabashed, unfettered but utterly justifiable experimentation is shared by two essential books: Sam Sampson's Halcyon Ghosts (AUP, ISBN: 978-1-869-40816-9) and Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle's Autobiography of a Marguerite (Hue & Cry, ISBN: 978-0-473-28412-1).'
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Photos of a fantastic evening reading at the nzepc event LOUNGE #41, with Eleanor Catton, Anand Changale, Wystan Curnow, Doc Drumheller, Ya-Wen Ho, Nicki Judkins, Mel Rands, Lisa Samuels and Steve Toussaint.
Sam Sampson’s Halcyon Ghosts: Breathless and breathtaking: Poetry Shelf
A review of my book by NZ poet, children's author, reviewer and anthologist Paula Green.
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I'm privileged to be reading at the nzepc event LOUNGE #41 (Old Government House Lounge, City Campus, Cnr Princes St & Waterloo Quadrant), with Eleanor Catton, Anand Changale, Wystan Curnow, Doc Drumheller, Ya-Wen Ho, Nicki Judkins, Mel Rands, Lisa Samuels and Steve Toussaint – on October 22, 2014 @ 5:30 - 7 pm.
Going West Books & Writers Festival
Happy to be back reading in the Titirangi neighbourhood where I grew up. I'll be reading from my new book Halcyon Ghosts on September 13, 2014 @ 1:00 pm - 1:15 pm.
McCahon House Poetry Reading Photos
I read on 'Poetry Day' August 22 at McCahon House with the wonderful poet Serie Barford, and musician Richard Ingamells and friend. It was a great evening. An overflowing bach...people sitting on the floor, spilling into the kitchen...and the intimacy of performers and audience in close proximity (plus a special concoction of mulled wine to warm up the event!). Was a great little venue with an appreciative audience.
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A series of questions posed by NZ poet, children's author, reviewer and anthologist Paula Green.
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A few quick questions about the book, followed by a series of stunning photograph and poem pairings that make Halcyon Ghosts a visual as well as poetic feast.
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Halcyon Ghosts is an ambitious piece of work. It’s a collection that rushes between the microscopic and the celestial, zooming in and out of normalcy and immediacy...
Thank you to all those that attended the launch of my book. Many of you were at the launch of my first book six years earlier and I was overwhelmed by your support on this special occasion. Auckland University Press has posted a number of photos of the event: Halcyon Ghosts Launch.
Launched!!!!!! Halcyon Ghosts was launched at the Gus Fisher Gallery: 5:30 – 7pm, on Friday 13th of June. Coincidentally, my last book was launched in 2008, at the Gus Fisher Gallery, on Friday 13th of June – six years earlier!
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Check out the wonderful book cover design for Halcyon Ghosts. The wrap-around image: 'La lampada della nonna' (Grandmother's Lamp) 1913, is a decomposed nitrate film clipping from the Turconi Collection; Moving Image Department, George Eastman House, New York. The design was done by Jacinda Torrance. The image has never before been published.
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Halcyon Ghosts presents thirteen poems, thirteen shapes of knowing – from the cinematic reel ‘The Kid’, splicing stills of the poet’s grandmother and Charlie Chaplin, to the re-verse soundings of ‘Six Reels of Joy’, celebrating the birth of the poet’s daughter. The title poem displays a ghostly counterpoint of birds and words in flight; strikethrough poems are threaded through with runes of fact and fiction. Language, Sampson demonstrates, is as particular and transitory as the patterning of the natural world. Poems layer, link and break apart, sampling and echoing other texts – whether the everlasting cataracts of Keats and Dylan Thomas or reportage gleaned from territorial newspapers of the Old West. Halcyon Ghosts is a profoundly philosophical and personal collection, an assemblage of unearthed vestiges, a quintessence – where names displaced by light, are dark but not lost . . . . Ever-changing, language spills its story.
2013
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Auckland University Press has produced a treasure trove of more than 240 classic New Zealand books, some long out of print, as ebooks in multiple formats for readers in New Zealand and around the world. Everything Talks has been included in the ebook catalogue. If you're interested in grabbing a copy, click on the above link for details, or visit Amazon, Apple, or any other major ebook retailer.
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Sam Sampson's poems 'Doubled Lexicon' : dedicated to the late, great, musical poet Gustaf Sobin (1935 - 2005), and 'Erasure' : dedicated to Don Binney (1940 – 2012), artist and conservationist best known for his paintings of birds.
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Sam Sampson’s poem ‘All the Everlasting Cataracts’ is in part a delicate, precise, re-voiced sampling of John Keats’s uncompleted epic poem ‘Hyperion’, which Keats abandoned in part because he felt it had become too Miltonic.... (A later version, ‘Hyperion: A Dream’, also remained unfinished.) At times, Sampson’s forensic improvisations on Keats’s failed attempts to get his poem right—to get Romanticism’s quest for the principles of truth and beauty right—read like an attentive copy-editor’s notes: ‘a stream went voiceless by (streamed).’
(Ian Wedde, editor Best New Zealand Poems 2012, January, 2013)
TRANSPACIFIC Cordite Poetry Review 41.0 (Feb 2013), NZ 6-Seater: A Chapbook Curated by Ian Wedde.
'I Spilled My Story', the full length poem, has been included in a chapbook of contemporary New Zealand poetry curated by Ian Wedde (which includes: Selina Tusitala Marsh, Anne Kennedy, Michele Leggott, Murray Edmond and John Newton).
'I Spilled My Story' collaged by the artist Peter Madden. This work was originally exhibited at the Ivan Anthony Gallery back in March 2012, and subsequently, purchased by the Chartwell Collection. I've uploaded a series of details from the image: 'I Spilled My Story'.
2012
A collaborative bookwork ...exclusivity dwells in habitat... with photographer Harvey Benge will be officially launched on Tuesday October 16, 2012, 6 – 8pm. Venue: Whitespace Contemporary Art, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, Auckland.
On sending a copy to one of my favourite poets, the American experimental poet Michael Palmer, he replied:
What a pleasure to receive your note, and the collaboration with Harvey Benge, where word and image offer such a provocative dynamic of conjunction and disjunction, the rich play between, space between.
The book is 195 x 155mm and is printed on 120gsm art paper, 28 pages with 16 photographs. The edition is limited to 100 copies. I have uploaded the entire book for online viewing: ...exclusivity dwells in habitat.
Sam Sampson & Peter Madden at the Ivan Anthony Gallery, Level 1, ANZ Building Corner East Street & Karangahape Road, Newton, Auckland, Saturday March 3 – 31, 2012. Read More…
2011
PIHA WINTER SERIES WRITERS & MUSICIANS, Sunday July 3, 2011. Venue: Piha Surf Club, 2pm. Hamish Keith art critic / writer, with columnist Bill Ralston, Dame Cath Tizard, and poet Sam Sampson. Local musician Helen Duder and friends. Watch video post event…
Printable Reality is delighted to present a reading by four poets (Anne French, Anne Kennedy, Sam Sampson, Ian Wedde), from Auckland University Press (AUP), New Zealand's leading poetry publisher. Collectively, the four have published more than 20 collections of poetry, have won multiple awards and fellowships, and are amongst AUP's most popular performers. Read More…
2010
C.K.Stead publishes the poem "Back then (but briefly)" NZ Books Volume 20 | Number 4 | Issue 92 | Summer 2010. (from e-mail to author) '...thank you for the book (Broken Architecture) but also for your verbal acrobatics that propelled me into the NZBooks poem (which strangely turned out to be 'about' visiting the grave of Dylan Thomas in 1957)' Read More…
DUETS Launch & Reading, Monday July 12, 2010, 6pm, Wellington. Bill Manhire will launch DUETS – a series of chapbooks that pairs poets from New Zealand and the United States. Read More…
Sam Sampson: Auckland Writers & Readers Festival, May 12 - 16, 2010.
'The New Zealand-based poet Sam Sampson's Everything Talks is a remarkably smart and engaging first book, in its engagement of the European poetic tradition with an antipodal frame of reference.' (Jason B. Jones, Bookslut, February 25, 2010). Read More…
2009
2009 NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry Winner (Montana NZ Book Awards, July 27, 2009). Read More…
'His is a poetry of pauses, turns, leaps and dives. It's all about where the stress falls, the music of verbal cadences, the weave of sonic counterpoint. He returns poetry to its primal function as ecstatic utterance: words are miraculous things, rich in resonances and echoes.' (David Eggleton, NZ Listener, 'Avoiding the plain language loop', July 25 - 31, 2009). Read More…
'Language blossoms, through the wondering ear, from word into world. Sampson's poems achieve these transformations, variously, through open-field composition, formal constraints, collage, and "listing" that allows us to reach where "likeness swirls"...' (Zach Savich, The Kenyon Review, 'The Pursuit of What Exists', June, 2009). Read More…
'These are works that attempt, in their construction, to capture as much condensation of image and nuance of feeling as possible; fleshy but pared down to the bone. Sometimes this cryptic reductionism provides intense visions. At other times we are left staring at skeletons...' (Peter Dornauf, Waikato Times, 'Sampson's poems find rhythm in sea', April 6, 2009).
'Sampson's poetry repeatedly makes such demands on the reader: to attend to the slightest difference in emphasis a vowel can imply; to attend carefully to each line, or to each couplet in a ghazal; to see the linguistic and phenomenological connections; to expand one's senses of where the boundary between self and other, plenitude and zero, beauty and bathos is situated...' (Helen Dennis, The Warwick Review, 'On NZ Poetry', March, 2009). Read More... Download Pdf.
2008
'One of the most intellectually charged recent poetry publications is Sam Sampson’s Everything Talks…' (Gregory O'Brien, NZ Listener, 'Marketplace or Laboratory?', August 30-September 5, 2008). Read More…
(from e-mail to author) '...wanting to thank you again for Everything Talks. It does, certainly, in this instance; the work is a pleasure to experience all the way through. I was moved as well to see that entirely pertinent epigraph from Sobin's "Breath's Reflections."' (Michael Palmer, August 12, 2008).
'I can't think of another poet who writes quite like he does...' (Carrie Etter: Poet, Teacher & Critic). Read More…