Cadence Chung
When I was a little Year 9 in my Social Studies class, we went out on a trip to see the site where Chinese man Joe Kum Yung was killed in 1910. We’d been learning about Chinese New Zealand history, and despite being a Chinese-New Zealander myself, I hadn’t known any of these stories before being shown them in class. I’d just read How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes by Chris Tse, and I was alight. We all came with chalk and wrote poems on the concrete around the tiny metal plaque. I don’t remember the poem I wrote, but I remember the power that little piece of chalk wielded; the way that it could carry such a weight.
All emerging poets have their own journey in coming to poetry. However, for me, that class was a formative moment in both writing and reading poetry, especially contemporary New Zealand poetry, which was a deliciously new thing to me. I’d been a writer for as long as I could remember, writing short stories and attempting to write novels since I was a kid, but poetry came to me as a solution to never being able to tie those plots together. A poem is a bite-sized piece of language, packing the ultimate hit in a small package. It doesn’t move in a linear fashion, but instead pauses, contemplates, presents, muses, and demands attention. It’s a form I love working in, and have now worked in for around seven years, with my first publication being at age 15 in Starling Magazine.
I was so lucky that my first publication was Starling, one of the most welcoming literary journals for young writers out there. The mahi they do in uplifting the poets they publish is incredible, and once you’re a Starling ‘favourite’ (their lovely little name for everyone they publish!), you’re always going to feel supported by them. I remember nervously showing up to the launch with my mum, surrounded by all these poets and publishers who seemed endlessly cool — and they all welcomed me in, talked to me, and applauded loudly at my reading. I’m not saying that our industry is perfect, but having worked in the classical music industry too, something that strikes me about Aotearoa’s poetry scene is that everyone is truly supportive; it doesn’t feel like your publishers have jurisdiction or power over you. They just want to uplift your work.
After I was published in Starling, I was addicted to submitting to literary magazines and was lucky enough to be published in many major magazines when I was a teenager. I was young and pretty brash; I sent my work to just about anywhere that was open, regardless of how underqualified I was. Even though it now means I have a lot of my very early work out there (and I still sometimes cringe at my teenage poems), I don’t regret it at all. In fact, my biggest piece of advice for emerging writers is to submit to as many journals as you can. It can seem scary to send your work out to the mysterious people behind the screen, but really, they’re just people who want to love your work. Especially now that I edit two magazines, I realise how gratifying and special it is for an editor to be trusted with people’s writing.
Of course, when you send your work to journals, you will receive rejections. Probably quite a few! Even now, for every piece I get published, there are countless pieces that were rejected. It can be easy to feel hurt by these rejections, but they are also great learning experiences, and the more you receive, the more you accept them as a part of putting your work out there. If a magazine gives you feedback on a piece, try it out — even if you don’t agree with it, just tweaking your poem might reveal things about it that you hadn’t seen before. Also, a rejection from one magazine doesn’t mean that another place won’t love it. There have been many poems submitted to the magazines I edit that I’ve loved, but they just haven’t quite worked for the particular issue. There are so many reasons why an editor might reject a piece, and you should definitely take it through the rounds before retiring it.
I also recommend getting out into the community. Aotearoa’s literary community is great in that most events are free to attend. Try to find book launches, magazine launches, open mics, or poetry readings. Starling Magazine posts on Instagram quite a bit about events around the motu, and if you keep up to date with your local literary magazines, you’re likely to find out when their events are. Or, if you can’t find an event that works for you, it’s not that hard to find a willing small venue and put on your own poetry readings. I did something similar at the start of 2025, and now it’s a regular series where over sixty people regularly show up. And yes, it’s awkward at first. I experienced so many uncomfortable times at launches, underage and terrified to talk to anyone. Bring a friend if you can, and just go for it. Going to launches and readings was what got me into the literary community in Wellington when I was young, and how I got to know my first publishers, who published my chapbook, anomalia. All of my muddled teenage interactions were not in vain!
Hosting open mic events and reading the poems that people send me has made me feel very hopeful for the new generations of poets. Despite what some may say, poetry is certainly not dead. In my generation of poets, who are now beginning to release collections and larger-scale works, I’m seeing a big trend of lyricism and beauty. Younger people are starting to weave together the confessional, the historic, and the Romantic in a way that I’m finding really exciting. It is great to establish your own voice, but pulling from different influences, both historical and contemporary, can actually take your voice even further. It’s heartening to see that people are reading and living through poetry; you can see this in the work they are producing.
Lastly, one of my biggest philosophies is that you should take yourself seriously. I don’t mean that in the sense that things shouldn’t be fun, and that you should approach your art with a sense of sternness or gravity. I mean that if you are writing work and putting it out there for people to see, then you can’t be self-effacing. If you’re doing this, then you should really be doing this, you know? It’s easy to feel shy, to want to explain away your work, to laugh it off as if it’s not a big deal. But poetry is a big deal. Words are a huge deal. If you want people to read your work, then you can’t try to push them away from it in any capacity.
Taking it seriously means sending it to friends and getting their feedback. It means discussing writing with them, even if in someone’s lounge at 1 am. It means reading your local poets, reading international poets, finding books, stories and poems that you love. There is no room to be half-hearted in this era that needs words, needs poetry, needs passion, needs love. No, I don’t think that poets will save the city or rule the world. But in this age of inauthentic, artificially-generated content, endless manipulative algorithms and nightly news of conflict, we have to keep communicating with each other in meaningful, beautiful ways. To pick up the chalk and write a poem on the ground. To hope that someone will see it.
Cadence Chung is a poet, mezzo-soprano, and composer, currently one of the resident artists at Te Pae Kōkako - The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio. She has released three books: anomalia (Tender Press, 2022), Mythos: an Audio-Visual Anthology of Art by Young New Zealanders (ed.) (Wai-te-Ata Press, 2024), and Mad Diva (Otago University Press, 2025). She also edits Symposia Magazine and the New Zealand Poetry Society’s quarterly magazine, a fine line.