by Devon Webb
Slipping onto the scene with a voice equal parts original, audacious, colloquial & mesmerising, Aotearoa (New Zealand) poet Liam Jacobson is sure to carve an impactful niche in the scene with their debut poetry collection Neither, published in September by Dead Bird Books. This is the sort of wholly unique work you’ll want to explore with meticulous care like a K Road thrift store, like the crevices of the city you smoke up in when you’re sixteen. An urban landscape of language to be lingered in, it exhibits a profoundly creative use of imagery & mastery of rhythm that invites the reader along for the ride, the sort where you take your time to drink in the quirks of the world around you & aren’t in too much of a hurry to grow up. Jacobson’s style presents an alternative to the uniform traditions of the Institution, envisioning a certain ‘anti-gentrification’ of literature that pokes its tongue out at the rules, at the expectations, at the production line of the industry with its grammatical politeness. Disorderly, passionate, explorative & unapologetic, Jacobson’s work is sure to appeal to all poetry enthusiasts looking for something new, for a creative mind that hurls the genre off the rooftops just to see it fly. I spoke with Liam about Neither in this interview originally published on the Aotearoa-based literary platform bad apple, & reprinted here by Erato Magazine to bring this collection to an international audience.
The influence of Tāmaki Makaurau is very evident throughout the book. Did you grow up here? How has this environment impacted you & your writing? Are there any particular aspects of the city that inspire you?
yeah :) i was raised in Manurewa and went to a boarding school in the city, so i ended up having friends and whanau in lots of different crannies of Tāmaki and spent heaps of time wandering through its sparse wee pockets and on trains and buses. i love the distinctions between each spot – the slang, the laughs, the lore, the dress, the music.
it all talks here, and i s’pose i’m inspired by all the ways our noises/histories/atua/takata relate and play among each other – whispering, shining, slithering, weaving, screaming etc. the rot of cold colonial villas, the thickening Karanga-a-hape, ancient puna in car parks, Hina rising through fat puddles of rain, the volcanic scope of the watching mauka etc.
in Auckland you need to dig thru the swank and/or tedium to uncover the pretty. idk, there’s something about that that i love.
Where did your writing journey begin? Were there any defining moments or inspirations that led you down this path?
i remember writing “I LIKE POCKETS” when i was maybe 5 and being real proud of it. throughout primary school i’d write stories and plays. we used to do this thing once a year where you’d have to memorise a poem and present it to your class and i remember hunting for a couple of hours through the kids-poetry section of Manurewa library with Mum.
about 8 or 9 years ago, i read my own poems for the first time, at this spoken word event at Wine Cellar. Michelle Durey was there and she picked me up a couple times to take me to Poetry Live. i kept at it all in new ways.
You were involved in some spoken word poetry competitions early in your career, & I can see this style in several of your poems & their rhythmic patterns. Do you think this experience affected the direction of your writing? Do you have different processes for the spoken & written word?
yeah, i snuck in through the back door of the spoken word lol. i like the spoken word cause it’s ancient. and yeah, lots of my poetry comes from the rhythms of my mumbling and rambling. saying things out loud is a special sort of witching.
but there’re heaps of other rhythms i’m inspired by too, and the page brings many of those to light. i love the play between the spoken word, the written word, the sung word, the painted word, the danced word, the drunken word, the carved word etc. it takes whatever it takes to unravel.
Are there any other writers, performers or artists that you would cite as inspirations?
lightnin’ hopkins, pablo neruda, keiji haino, lily allen, albert wendt’s the book of the black star, whirimako black, marx, tiramōrehu, jonas mekas, cirie fields, sergei parajanov, james chance, hone tuwhare, paul laffoley, merata mita, that akofa akoussah album, that cardi b album, every Shiraz & LSJ album, videos of cirque du soleil clowns, Tāwhirimatea, all the sociology readings from uni that i forgot the names of, all of my friends x (to name just a few :P)
How did you become involved with Dead Bird Books? How have you found the publication process & experience?
i’ve known Dom(inic) for a while and he’d been on pressing for me to publish with him n Sam pretty early in the Dead Bird Books life-cycle. i finally pulled Neither together after a few false starts, lost work, and a broken laptop. they’ve let me be pretty particular with what i’ve wanted, they’ve made it look all flash and they’ve let me keep true to myself. it’s still kinda daunting for me though, to give my poems bodies like this and to be stood in the world. to accept Te Ao Mārama.
Tell us a little about the cover… it’s very surreal! Where did those ideas come from?
i’m just a chronic doodler tryna follow the tohu lol. idk, sometimes things arise and then you pursue them, and then you look back later and it either means something or it doesn’t. for the cover i wanted something cheeky and dreamy that would be fun to find at a second hand bookstore. i scribbled it up on a browser version of paint and some free bootleg version of photoshop and then my friends told me what looked good and what looked bad. and then Gabi Lardies helped to sharpen it all up :)
Any advice you’d like to impart to other writers & artists?
chat with everything. ask interesting people about interesting things. retain yourself. go digging. build a cute nest.
Is there anywhere in particular you’d like to take your career in its next steps?
yeah, i wanna write a sci-fi movie for the motion master ride at Rainbow’s End. and write a feature-length radio play. and make a christmas album called Die Hard 6. and get heaps of my friends together to design a mini-golf course. and do a podcast exposing the Les Mills sex-cult. and put together a prison concert. oh and me n stace n gabs are gonna open up a sexy-speak-easy-kinda-thing. i’m also keen to learn cpr and throw some gigs at the roller-rink. and i’m keen to do more books and maybe make brooches idk??? i know i’m gonna go get my reo Māori, and i reckon that’ll probably shake-up my trajectories.
& lastly, is there anything else you’d like to say about your book? If you had to sell it in a sentence, what would you say?
if you reckon you’ll like it, then u could buy it. it’d help me pay rent x
Neither is available to purchase online at deadbirdbooks.com Liam can be further perceived in pixelated form at @liamjacobson on Instagram.
Liam Jacobson's Anti-Gentrification of Poetry by Devon Webb previously published in bad apple (NZ)
About the Writer:
Devon Webb is a 25-year-old writer based in Aotearoa New Zealand. She writes full-time, exploring themes of femininity, vulnerability, anti-capitalism & neurodivergence. She shares her poetry online, through live performance, & has had her work included in over forty publications worldwide. She is an in-house writer for Erato Magazine, an editor for Prismatica Press, & is currently working on the final edits of her debut novel, The Acid Mile. She can be found on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok & Bluesky at @devonwebbnz.
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