In New Zealand, we celebrate National Poetry Day on a Friday in August each year.

Established in 1997, it’s driven by the cultishly cool street poster brand Phantom Billstickers. Between promoting music gigs and running poster campaigns for multinational brands, Phantom Billstickers print poetry on posters and in a magazine that gets well-thumbed in cafes throughout the country.

Friday 26th August 2022 will be the 25th National Poetry Day. Last year’s event went online after Covid tried to spoil the fun and the nation went into lockdown. Undeterred, poets and poetry fans joined the fun from their homes, thanks to the powers of the interwebs!

This year, there’ll be virtual and in-person events happening around Aotearoa. Here in Queenstown, we’ve got quite over-excited and are running events throughout the month.

But National Poetry Day isn’t the only reason I’m hyped up about poetry this month. I’ve recently been involved in a collaboration with some friends and fellow adventurous creatives to create a short film poem about swimming.

Poetry for swimming

I’m an avid swimmer. And as a poet and short story writer, I find swimming the perfect meditative space to dream up new ideas. Face-down in the water, my senses are both heightened and deprived. The smells, the sounds, the whole experience is distinctive. But it’s literally immersive too – I can’t start chatting to a friend about a cool book I’ve read recently.

When you’re swimming, you have to be present and in the moment… but you’ve also got mental space to drift off and daydream. It’s this dichotomy that I’ve always loved about swimming.

If you’re a swimmer too, I’m sure you’ll know what I mean.

Being lucky enough to swim in the glacial waters of Lake Whakatipu in Queenstown has only exacerbated my love for swimming.

So when a talented friend from the Southern Lakes Open Water Swimming Club told me he wanted a swimming-themed poem to go with a film he was making, I dove into the task. In the poem, I aimed to capture not just how I feel about open water swimming, but how my friends feel about it too, and to capture our experience of swimming as a group. So while the poem is meditative and relaxing, I’ve also tried to squeeze in some fun. For example, a nod to our various swimming techniques (good and ugly), and the endless discussions about whether you want to see the lake bottom or not.

Marijn Wouters put together the film using footage he’d taken of missions our open water swimming group had tackled together over the summer. Fellow swimmer Steve McCallion then stepped in with his wonderful voice to read the poem.

The resulting short film (2 minutes 50 seconds) premiered at the NZ Mountain Film Festival. It was thrilling to see it on the BIG screen.

Check it out on YouTube. I’ve posted a written version of the poem below.