ISSUE 04

It feels like it was a long time ago that we sat down with a few friends with the gall and ambition of starting a literary magazine. From the start, we knew that Symposia’s concept would be lodged in these relationships, these friendships; and as we refined the magazine’s style over its now-four issues, we’ve learned what exactly that means: pairing a small number of quality poems with accompanying illustrations, cover art, and eloquent typography, bringing together visual and literary languages, assembling community on the page. In this, Kata Brown and Natasha Kerridge reprise their roles from Issue 3 as illustrator and designer, respectively, and Anneke Westra provides stunning cover art, creating a visual look that lets the poems shine only because it is itself so thoughtfully polished. We editors remain grateful for all these visual artists bring to our magazine. (And, as an aside, it’s been a real thrill to see these visual and literary worlds collide IRL, too — Cadence’s curated Salon series adds music to the mix in poetry/performance nights that began in early 2025. More to come later this year!)

Some things remain constant while others change: we are so pleased to present in Issue 4 a number of voices new to the pages of Symposia, alongside familiar faces. This issue has range — from the flowing, conversational sprawl of Elizabeth Ayrey’s ‘In Which the Longfin Eels Lament My Lesbian Situationship’ to the curt, lightly surreal pulse of Jordan Irvine’s ‘tall buildings’, all the way to the montage-monologue-essay-poem hybrid form of Ethan Christensen’s ‘What Do You Want?’ Like Christensen’s titular refrain, these poets are asking questions, and then sketching out that particular gap — the moment in which ideas are held in superposition — before an answer arrives with a thud. Some of these poets overwhelm us with language, as in Tim Wilson’s rollicking, riffing ‘Error 404’, in which a prayer becomes corrupted by the demeaning demands of working life. Others ‘[knock] off work’ and turn back to a kind of purity of speech, as in Bob van Beek’s formal delight ‘My Poem About Love’. Across his two poems, Tony DiCarlo’s twin visions have it both — both the consumer’s frenzy and the miniaturist’s touch — but it’s the clipped, quiet tones of the perfectly understated ‘Slow Dance Eulogies’ that bring things to a point: ‘If I told you / of the sorrow / it would matter / very much.’

Well, these poets are sad because our times are sad; these poets ascribe illness, situationships, faltering or missed connections, and glitches to a world that is ill, conditional, awash with disembodied voices, and malfunctioning. But these poets are also funny, in love, nostalgic, and open-hearted because our world is all of those things, too — it has to be, because we live in it. Ella Quarmby is the poet who both wants to ‘spit back / on all the things you still say’ to someone who has left us and yet must admit ‘I think you have made me’. These poets, this range, and more in Issue 4: we hope that this issue stands in all its contradiction spectacularly alive.

Our thanks are again and always to the Wellington City Council Creative Communities fund for their support of our mahi.

Maia, Cadence, Amelia, and Jackson