Aotearoa's longest running live poetry event, Auckland's Poetry Live! is celebrating 40 eventful, often rowdy and always entertaining years, with a publication launched today called This Twilight Menagerie.
Poets - both old-school and boundary-busting and experimental - still rock up to the microphone on Tuesday nights. And the roll call over those four decades has included luminaries like Alistair Campbell, John Pule and Maurice Shadbolt, not to mention past and present Poet Laureates C.K. Stead, Ian Wedde and David Eggleton.
Poetry Live! was founded by the late David Mitchell and its first home - the first of many, as it happens - was the Globe Tavern on Wakefield Street.
Lynn Freeman speaks with performance poet Genevieve McLean - who's also David Mitchell's daughter - and to the anthology's co-editor Sam Clements who explains the event's nomadic history.
This Twilight Menagerie A Whakanui of 40 years of Poetry Live! is co-edited by Sam Clements, and can be ordered at poetryanthology40@gmail.com
