a note from the editors
shania pablo (they/them):
For a long time, I underestimated the value of community. This changed when I went to high school. In year nine, I joined the creative writing club, sitting shoulder to shoulder with aspiring writers and listening to their stories. In year twelve, I met Lily at our school’s rainbow group, where we met other queer students from our school and learned from each other’s experiences. Being welcomed into these spaces changed me for the better. Rather than feeling anxious and isolated, these communities taught me what it means to belong and to be heard. Most of all, these communities gave me hope.
Reading the submissions for the first edition of eel mag reminded me of the hope I felt as a teenager. Witnessing poets from Aotearoa unite over their shared passion for poetry and their queer identity has been an incredibly uplifting experience. The poems in this edition are a testament to what it means to be queer in Aotearoa, and I am so excited to see them being published.
Thank you to all the poets who submitted to this edition and for trusting us with your words, and thank you to everyone who has waited so patiently for this first edition to come to life. It has been a great privilege working alongside Lily and Nathan to bring this edition together.
Nathan Joe (he/him):
We’ve all blamed early memories of being taught poetry in high school as the fundamental cause of poetry’s poor reputation in the cultural consciousness.
I like that these poems begin to correct that.
I like that these poems reflect a world that feels familiar to me. Aotearoa as I like to hope it is. An Aotearoa more familiar here than in any single TV show or novel. A very queer Aotearoa.
I like that this is a collection of poets I know and love doing what they do best (essa may ranapiri, Rebecca Hawkes) meeting ones I am excited to discover (Soma, Stacey Teague).
I like that when we say poem we create a category and genre that is capable of holding space for both the likes of Daniel Goodwin’s spoken word poetry to Josiah Morgan & Sarah Lawrence’s letter correspondence to Toyah Webb’s floor plans.
I like that these poems contend not just with form but also the act or writing itself, as in harold coutts’ writing poetry feels like a curse or Josiah Morgan & Sarah Lawrence’s correspondence Our Year of New Zealand Letters.
I like that these poems exacerbate my ongoing inability to define the difference between prose and poetry.
As Sarah Lawrence remarks:
I don't understand the line between
poetry and prose. If there is one, I suppose it's about
gaps
Lily (they/her): I’ve always been obsessed with eels. The river that runs through the hippy commune where my dad grew up—the Anatoki River—is full of them. Growing up, I was enchanted by the stories of eels slithering across wet paddocks when the rain was heavy and the clouds hung low across the valley. Even as I got older, the best part of visiting Willowbank in Ōtautahi for friends’ birthdays was feeding the eels meat out of a little pottle using one of those plastic straws with the spoon on the end—though remembering the sound of the eels’ gums crunching and scraping against the plastic still makes me cringe. I would love to be an eel—with their thick, sleek bodies and no emails to reply to.
Tuna kuwharuwharu (longfin eels) travel up freshwater streams as elvers and, once grown, return to the saltwater of the Pacific Ocean to breed and die. The ability to change your self and body to be able to survive, to be in a constant state of metamorphosis, to reject the binary of fresh and saltwater seems really queer to me—hence the title of this journal.
The poets within this first edition embody these ideas, navigating expansive networks of waters, transforming bodies of poetry in ways that are shining, mysterious, and glorious.
Searching for a way to categorise “queer poetry” as one true and unified type of writing is impossible (and a bit silly given the context), but I think that there is something to be gained from an honouring of the interlinking threads and spaces between different queer poetic works. Queer poetry (like queerness in general) doesn’t have to perform anything to deserve celebration.
It is such an honour to be able to celebrate with you as we release the first edition of eel mag into the world.
We would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone for the patience with this first edition—it’s been a long time coming! An even bigger thank you to our poets, our featured poet, and our cover artist—we are blown away by your skill and creativity. Another thank you to our shadow-editor, Angela Zhang, for doing a huge portion of the website design and formatting—you are a wonder.
eel mag would not be able to exist without the Mātātuhi Foundation and Blackbird Foundation. Thank you for having enough faith in our journal to fund its creation. This support ensures we can pay our contributors a fee for their work (an amount that we are looking to increase in the future).
lots of eely love,
the editors.