Mythos

Fresh off the printers at Wai-te-ata Press, MYTHOS is lovely to look at: Hannah Hitchcock’s cover art makes me feel as if I’m peering through a porthole into another world – a mysterious, fantastical world. The call to adventure comes on the third page, in the form of a QR code promising ‘the full audio experience’. This transports me to a playlist featuring readings of all the poetry in the anthology, recordings of all the music, and audio descriptions of some of the visual art. Musical pieces are represented in the book through sheet music, an accompanying reflection by the composer, and performance notes.

However a reader chooses to experience MYTHOS – predominantly on the page, or exclusively by ear – one thing is certain: this ambitious multidisciplinary anthology, skilfully curated by Cadence Chung with polished design by Erin Dailey and audio engineering by Kassandra Wang, is something truly unique.

While its title brings to mind the past, MYTHOS brims with an appreciation of this moment; both in its beauty and its hardship. The range and experimentation of these young New Zealanders’ work make for a thrilling, at times unpredictable journey (the unpredictability beginning, deliberately or not, with the lack of a table of contents).

A great deal of the pieces capture the ache of growing older, contemplating loss and longing, childhood and home, body and self. It’s always been part of the human experience to grapple with ephemerality: how do we try to make the most of our lives when nothing is permanent? Art is a way of achieving what immortality we can, through enshrining (indeed, ‘mythologising’) our experiences.

Zia Ravenscroft is one of many contributors to romanticise the everyday in “Home Run”. A portrait of the fervency of young love, Ravenscroft chronicles the stages of his relationship with his beloved. These progress from baking a pie together to enacting arcane rituals, which see the poet a willing sacrifice ‘laid out on a ceremonial altar, ritual knife cool against my skin’. In “Mahuika as a Boy”, named for the Māori goddess of fire, Cadence Chung adapts Jackson McCarthy’s intimate poem about ‘a cold night … waiting for takeaways’ into a piece of classical music with rich, soaring strings. The effect is that the poet’s longing observations about his companion (‘your mouth, / your lips, your nose’) are made as momentous to us as they are to him. And why shouldn’t they be?

With “Archaeology”, Aroha Witinitara argues in favour of reclaiming the canon, highlighting the stories the heteronormative Western tradition hasn’t considered worth telling. On learning the tale of Tūtānekai and Tiki, two men in Māori mythology who shared a romantic bond, Witinitara thinks of the centuries-long erasure of LGBTQIA+ people. ‘History has not been kind, and now we are excavating our stories / from where they’ve been buried’, they write, declaring: ‘I want a turn with the shovel’.

This theme of myth-making runs throughout MYTHOS in overt and less overt ways. “Beach House”, a lovely, airy song by Alice Burnett and Anna Praill, immerses us in moments that already feel like memories. ‘i don’t know how it ends but it ends and it ends // and i could walk it with you’, the two sing, accepting that though their connection won’t last forever they can still treasure the present. Pippi Jean’s effective “Eventually” is another spin on feeling your current self become part of the past. The poem starts conversationally, outlining a day looking after a young neighbour, before the boy’s father shows Jean photos of his own youth and she realises ‘I am that age I may have to take in pictures / out of the bookcase to show the babysitter.’ I admire the almost disquieting final line, ‘the light turns on me’, for what it says about ageing; about our helplessness in the face of time.

“Creation Myth”, composed and written by Xiaole Zhan, takes the idea of personal mythologies in a different direction. Stemming from Zhan’s childhood memory of being tricked into eating crocodile flesh as a Chinese folk remedy for asthma, the text is striking enough:

(having been lied to as a child)

(i mistrust the drenched / suburban)

(miasmic memory – / lands like water in my lungs)

But it’s the music that takes it to another level, featuring a soloist speaking the words above what sounds like a haunted Greek chorus. They underscore the words with wails, scoffs, and even a ‘somewhat offensive exaggeration’ of ‘‘nasal’ and ‘oriental’ vowels and inflections’ (as described in the performance notes), creating an atmosphere of unease. It’s a strange and captivating piece exploring cultural traditions, racism, and the ambivalent feelings we may harbour about our upbringing.

Other impactful pieces include “Celluloid” by Maia Armistead, a poem that might yield a number of interpretations about self-image and the discomfort of seeing yourself, or maybe only versions of yourself, on film. Reading it gives me the sensation of being in a hall of mirrors; I enjoy the vividness of ‘my body is a joke waiting to crack. My smile / holds an old fear of somebody bursting in on me’. In “The Burial / Decomposition”, Josh Toumu’a’ confides similar feelings of disconnection from his body, but mingles this with an irony that carries the poem to its playful close. Its opening lines have a masterful rhythm:

Wrap me in burial cloth and put me to bed! I cannot

afford the bones that hold me — cannot bear

the brunt of this language (or is it bare?)

The final section of MYTHOS is dominated by “Every Extinguished Light”, an urgent, beautiful piece with music and text by Kassandra Wang. It largely borrows words from a 2020 post by user @六日 on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. The post was deleted, and the user confronted by officials, but their plea to the world to remember the suffering of Chinese communities in Wuhan devastated by COVID-19 lingered with Wang. The result is a musical work in four movements that honours both the pain of those in tragic circumstances and the resilience of the human spirit. The piano and vocals switch between fluid and frenzied, combining in a lament for a city ‘unable to wail / unable to cry out’ – but whose people ‘will never be silent again’. This is a powerful work that should be shared widely. It’s a work to shake us from our inaction against injustice, and remind us of all the people in the world deprived of a voice.

MYTHOS is a highly innovative anthology. I wanted to both savour and take it in all at once. It collapses the boundaries typically drawn between poetry, music and art, and encourages us to consider our own mythologies and those of our society: through what we’ve inherited, who we are, and what we’ll leave behind.