Hera Lindsay Bird Takes Poetry Beyond the Bookstore

In New Zealand, poetry’s latest “it girl”, Hera Lindsay Bird, is amassing a semi-cult online following for her smart, sassy and explicit takes on everything from female sexuality to Friends. Bird, along with contemporaries Canadian Rupi Kaur and Briton Kate Tempest, is reclaiming poetry for the digital age. The Guardian’s Rebecca Slater reports.

With their playful and fluid approaches to the poetic form – fusing writing, music, art and technology – these are poets you’re just as likely to discover on your daily social media scroll as scouring the isles of a bookshop, Slater writes. They have looked around at a fractured world – at the issues facing women, queer communities, people of colour or socioeconomic disadvantage – and found new ways to project these concerns through poetry, into the spaces in which they will be noticed and shared.

In an online age overwhelmed with up-to-the-minute news, opinions, memes and videos, these young writers have returned to one of our most ancient literary forms as a way to cut through the noise and get their voices heard. If this is the direction poetry is moving in an increasingly technological era, the future is looking bright for a new canon of female poets.

Bird grew up in Thames. She now lives in Wellington.

Original article by Rebecca Slater, The Guardian, November 27, 2016.