Fast rhymes

Poet Selina Tusitala Marsh sees text and performance as equally important. Photo / Supplied

We may be in the midst of an economic recession, but there's still one thing booming ... poetry.

Thanks largely to the internet, this most traditional of literary forms is experiencing a huge surge in popularity. And riding the crest of the poetry wave are writers such as Aucklander Selina Tusitala Marsh, one of the new breed of urban Pasifika poets, whose bold, anthemic work borrows from rap rhythms and lends itself to performance.

Video and audio clips on the internet have exposed Marsh's poetry to people who may never have discovered it in book form.

"What might seem inaccessible on the page suddenly seems accessible for general consumption when you put a rhythm to it and you really speak it," she explains.

"Especially for Maori and Pacific Island communities, once you go into any kind of performance mode you've got them. I think it's connected to the centuries-old oral traditions that we come from and growing up always surrounded by performance, language and talk."

Now Marsh's first book, a collection of poems called Fast Talking PI (Auckland University Press, $29.99) has been released, with a CD of her reading her work. A vibrant mix of verse, the book is dedicated to her mother, Lina Tusitala Crosbie, who died of breast cancer in January.

"She was the original Fast Talking PI (Pacific Islander)," explains Marsh. "She migrated here from Samoa in the 60s and taught herself English from the television. She was rebellious, a rule breaker. She didn't raise us the traditional Samoan way."

Marsh recalls her mother driving around Auckland, a glamorous figure in an orange Fiat Spider, red scarf flying.

"She had a mortgage to pay and three children to raise but spent part of her divorce settlement on a two-seater sports car!"

Her mother's spirit seems to have been inherited by Marsh. She was the first Pacific Islander to graduate with a PhD in English from the University of Auckland where she's now a part-time lecturer. She is also a mother to three sons, and has a niece and nephew she's raising, yet she still finds time to write and perform.

"Poetry fits in perfectly with the typical, busy woman's life," she says. "You can write it in snatches and then come back to it. I write anywhere I can, even on Fuller's serviettes when I'm commuting to work from Waiheke."

For Marsh, poetry is an inclusive rather than an elitist art form. She's particularly enthusiastic about going into schools to perform and encourage students to find their own poetic voices.

"Recently I was at Southern Cross Campus in Mangere at the senior prize giving and honestly it was like a rock concert. I couldn't get through the second stanza of "Fast Talking PI" because they were screaming, and repeating PI after me. It was crazy and fantastic.

"The message behind that poem for schools is if you can name your identities then you can claim your destiny because you know who you are," she adds.

Marsh is of mixed parentage, with Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish and French blood. "In my late teens and early 20s I felt that I was in no-man's land," she says, "and then I started reading some mixed-blood theory and it talked about the borderlands and the power you get from existing between two worlds."

Marsh sees her poetry as a bridge between cultures, reflecting Auckland's diversity. Much of her work is strongly anti-colonial and reflective of the experience of growing up Polynesian in Aotearoa.

But Marsh's mischievous spirit shines through, especially in Fast Talking PI, which tackles a range of issues, preconceptions and identities in a catchy, high-energy style:

I'm a movin' PI
I'm a groovin' PI
I'm a nesian mystic stratospheric
whippin' it PI
To the health-challenged older
generation:
I'm a diabetic PI
I'm a heart-diseased PI
I'm a gout-inflated, incubated,
case study PI

This is poetry with wide appeal and Marsh gets a strong response from both Palangi and Pasifika audiences. "I was rehearsing for the Going West Festival," recalls Marsh, "and the organiser, Murray Gray, came up to me afterwards and said, 'I'm a slow-talkin' Palangi all the way from Titirangi.' And I've heard my own 6-year-old son chanting 'I'm a skateboarding PI'."

Although she considers her poetry as a living thing and loves to perform it, having a collection published as a book is still a thrill.

"I see text and performance as equally important," Marsh says. "One shouldn't outweigh the other. Performance is the rawest form of expression, but I quickly realised students need and want books. It's going to be really nice getting up to perform and not having to shuffle through all those bits of paper!"