Selina Tusitala Marsh was New Zealand's Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. Photo / Jinki Cambronero
While 74 nations compete for medals in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games, Selina Tusitala Marsh steps out to show the world that poetry belongs in every space. Even sport. Words by Angela Barnett.
Today in Glasgow, while athletes run along the banks of the River Clyde competing in the Commonwealth Mile race, Selina Tusitala Marsh is stepping onto the stage at The Briggait to perform her poem, Two Rivers Walk Into A Bar.
Lively and challenging, the poem is a conversation between a pair of rivers, performed by the inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate alongside Scottish actor, Tam Dean Burn. Beneath the wit lies a question: Why the Whanganui River/Te Awa Tupua in Aotearoa is legally recognised – since 2017, thanks to 160 years of iwi advocacy – yet the River Clyde running through the middle of Glasgow, and the games, is not.
Athletes sprint for a moment of glory outside, while Marsh asks listeners to slow down and think about what flows under their feet.
On Saturday the Clyde opened its mouth
and three thousand athletes
without looking down.
The former New Zealand Poet Laureate, 2024 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow, Ahorangi/Professor of English at the University of Auckland/Waipapa Taumata Rau hopes the poem will land. “It’s playful, it’s funny – hopefully,” she tells me from her home in Waiheke.
Two Rivers Walk Into A Bar was commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library and will be published in an anthology of poems themed on the Rights of Rivers for the 2026 Commonwealth Games. Ten other poets have contributed, many of them indigenous voices from across the Commonwealth: Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Jamaica, and beyond. Burn (Taggart, War Horse), recently wrote to Marsh, telling her that his family name means “by the river”. “He said, ‘this is meant to be’, and you know, us artists, we go with the synchronicity,” says Marsh.
Because of industrial pollution, the Clyde was fishless from the mid-1800s. Then, in the early 80s, Atlantic salmon returned. Now otters, herons, cormorants - all in Marsh’s poem - kingfishers and sea trout have returned. It’s called a “recovering river”. Marsh was inspired by a story of a dolphin swimming up the Clyde in 2008. A photo from the time shows the cityscape visible among grey fog and the smooth-headed dolphin casting a lonely figure in the wide river. “How sad is that? That’s where that poem sprang from.” Her poem ends with the porpoise “that swam into the city, like a dare”.
Poetry has carried the 55-year-old into unlikely places. She is the only poet to perform for two reigning British monarchs, her “claim to fame”, she jokes. The 2026 Commonwealth Games is the first since Queen Elizabeth II’s death, after years of almost comedic tossing between countries about who would host it, and a year into Marsh’s Commonwealth role. She’s using the opportunity to bring Pacific and climate voices into an arena built for sport and to the head of the Commonwealth. She sees her job as stirring the imagination and yes, sometimes stirring things up. But solving anything, she says, requires “collective action”.
The mother of three doesn’t think of herself as an activist or environmentalist; she is an artist through and through and holds closely to Maya Angelou’s line: “A bird doesn’t sing because it has the answer. A bird sings because it has a song.” She explains, “I try not to hang my sense of self on outcomes I can’t control – that’s a heavy weight to carry, and I’ve watched people I love carry it until it wears them down. Maya takes me back to the supreme act of creating and finding our own song, and one by one, we can create a whole singing forest. We can’t determine the output, but I don’t think we’re meant to as artists. We’re meant to put it out there.”
Sporting arenas aren’t traditionally known to court poets. Still, art and sport have increasingly converged, from the hotly debated Fifa World Cup halftime show featuring singers, dancers and Tom Cruise’s much-memed motivational message. With so many eyeballs on sport, it’s an ideal stage for important issues. Yet because sport is also a form of escapism, it’s not where audiences expect conversations about climate change, making a poem about river rights a clever Trojan horse.
Marsh uses metaphor rather than doomsday plots to open people’s hearts. Climate change in the Pacific is particularly close to Marsh’s heart as her whakapapa spans England, Scotland, France, Samoa and Tuvalu: the Pacific Island nation most under threat, with its highest point only 4.6m above sea level. After she performed her poem, Unity, in 2016 at Westminster Abbey for Queen Elizabeth II and other royals, Prince William said to Marsh, “They say Tuvalu will disappear in less than 30 years. It’s a very serious situation. Lovely to meet you. Lovely poem.”
After Scotland, she will visit Tuvalu for the first time. “It’s a significant trip to one of my bloodline homes.” There, she’s helping with a cultural festival and has offered to run writing workshops. The organiser recently emailed to say a few more students from the outer islands are interested. How many, Marsh asked. “Oh, about 800,” came the reply.
Marsh says she’s evangelistic about the power of writing and is proud of never having taken a formal creative writing class before being published. “I’m firmly in the lane that everyone has the right to write.” Another initiative in her role as Commonwealth Poet Laureate is Uncommonly You, a book that demystifies her creative process and provides writing prompts for aspiring poets.
“I love insight into the draft process of writers, from TS Eliot’s manuscripts to Kurt Cobain’s journals,” she said. The book will detail how her poems take shape from “very messing writing” often inspired by her daily journaling practice and launch in November during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm), where she’ll perform for King Charles III for the second time this year.
A sense of belonging
The first time Marsh saw King Charles’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth, was in her Avondale home. A portrait of the 21-year-old monarch hung above one of the doors, placed there by Marsh’s mother who had emigrated from Samoa with no English and a dream. “When she became a citizen, the Queen symbolised her sense of belonging in this new place,” Marsh explains. “We’re all meaning-making machines, and she extracted what she needed to find the strength to belong in a society that saw her as different, that rejected her for not speaking with a clear English accent. I love how she made her own story out of that.”
Now, like the dolphin that swam into the city like a dare, the daughter has swum straight into the heart of the Commonwealth, not to belong on its terms, but to make it listen to the Commonwealth people, particularly indigenous, in its realm.
As the inaugural Commonwealth Poet Laureate, she sees the opportunity to create a space for talanoa (conversation) rather than endorse the institution of colonisation, to be “a bridge, not a wall”. She walks into royal spaces, slipping important messages between her stanzas. In March this year, she was commissioned by the Royal Commonwealth Society to perform – again – at Westminster Abbey in front of royals and world dignitaries. Her poem, How to Make a Commonwealth Quilt, originally talked about sewing together “gilt-edged patches”, reflecting on how many cultures, histories and voices of the Commonwealth are stitched together, like pieces of a quilt. The Royal Society questioned the word “gilt” wondering if the poet realised it sounded like “guilt” when spoken, she tells me, a mischievous expression on her face.
Marsh told them it was a homonym – two words that sound the same but carry different meanings – but agreed to change it, staying true to her sense of herself as a bridge. “I thought: there’s more than one way in, and I’ll find it in time.” She believes everyone is doing their best with what they’ve got, including the Royal Commonwealth Society.
One topic that has been broached during the games is climate change, with King Charles III opening the event with a plea to prevent plastic pollution in oceans and waterways. “We have these human events, but collectively there is a race against time if we’re to believe the timetable that many of the leading-edge scientists have given us,” she says. Rather than feeling like we’re all racing against the clock, which gives no one daily peace, she prefers to open her eyes. “It’s more empowering for me to believe that if we honour the earth, if we see it, if we look down, rather than treat places as mere spaces for our human activities, that change will happen.”
Marsh’s trip to Scotland is funded by the British Council New Zealand and the Pacific, who have worked with Marsh since the creation of Trouble in Paradise: Climate Change in the Pacific, an exhibition and book that toured Aotearoa and Samoa in 2024. “They’ve been pushing the climate conversation along,” she says.
Since landing in Glasgow, she’s had courtside seats for the 3x3 basketball, spoken on a podcast with Peter Mackay, Scotland’s poet laureate (called a makar), embarked on a walking tour of the city, and watched Glasgow swell with athletes. “The runners fly past, all that hurry, all that hope. The river just keeps its own time underneath. My work is to kneel, not run – to get people to look down and see what’s flowing here before us, and what outlasts us.”
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Source: New Zealand Herald
