Paul Martin performs at the Poetry Slam NZ Southern Lakes regional finals.

LAURA WILLIAMSON

When it comes to poetry, Paul Martin has some advice: "If you’re ever stuck writing poetry, listen to poetry.”

Good point, Paul, and he should know. The 23-year-old recently won the Poetry Slam NZ Southern Lakes regional finals, and will be travelling to Hamilton in November to represent our district at the poetry slam national finals.

Slam is a competitive poetry event, at which poets perform spoken works and are judged by audience members in knock-out rounds. It was started by construction worker and poet Marc Smith in 1986 at a reading series in a Chicago jazz club, and is now contested all over the world.

A recent arrival in our region (he is currently living in Luggate), Paul grew up in Landing, New Jersey and moved to New York to study Psychology and Italian at Fordham University. The language came from his mother, who is Italian.

"We had family members who would visit; I spent a lot time time on Google translate with my cousins. I thought, let’s make this easier, so I took Italian in high school and university, and became fluent. You get to know people so much more without the language barrier.”

Before coming to New Zealand this winter, Paul was based in Brooklyn, where he was a full-time volunteer with Boys Hope Girls Hope of New York, a non-profit organisation that helps low-income students with housing and tuition; he worked with the kids in the evening and as a barista during the day to supplement his income.

He said working with youth was a "tremendous” experience, but the double shifts were definitely wearing him down. When the chance came to visit the Southern Hemisphere for three weeks this year, he decided to take it. And then he decided to stay for a while.

Paul’s father, Larry, lost his sight as an adult due to retinitis pigmentosa, and six years ago he took up visually-impaired ski racing. He’d trained alongside some of Wanaka’s well-known para-athletes in Colorado, including Paralympians Adam Hall and Corey Peters, and he decided to come to Wanaka to train - Paul, a former junior ski racer, came along as his guide.

Paul had only been here a week when he emailed his boss at the cafe back in Brooklyn to tell him he wasn’t coming back, at least not for while.

"It was the lifestyle. I’m much happier and healthier here than I was living at home. I wake up and I drive down the street, and I can look at the mountains. I looked at the Brooklyn Bridge every day and it got old on day three – the mountains will never get old,” he said.

"One of my favorite things to do here, is to go to a place we found on Lake Wanaka and just go and sit. You’d never do that in New York. Everyone would be like, ‘why are you just sitting?’”

As for the poetry, it’s all connected. "Something I don’t share face to face much is my struggle with mental health, but I do in my poetry,” Paul said. He was diagnosed with depression and anxiety in 2015, though he says now he can retrospectively see the signs emerging two or three years before that. And while our region’s beauty has been a balm, so have words.

He said he wrote his first poem in sixth grade ("to my girlfriend”), but that he really started writing in his first year at university. He got a journal and initially wrote only in Italian, to keep the language up.

"After that one was full I got another one, which got filled with a lot of dark thoughts,” he said. After his diagnosis he said he got a lot of inspiration from the depression and anxiety he was facing; one of the last pages of that second diary is where he put down his first spoken word poem.

He wrote the poem in September of 2015 and performed it in November at an Open Slam event. He won, and got to perform with the Open Slam group on campus at one of their shows. "Then I auditioned for the group and I made it,” he said.

Paul said he was inspired early on by the hip hop artist, author and poet George Watsky (he performs as Watsky). "He was the only poet I knew, so tried to write to sound like him. But when I became part of the Open Slam group, I started observing all these people with different styles – I was just a sponge.”

His works delves often into issues around mental health, but there are moments of lighter observation too, such as in his work ‘Starbucks 9th St and 3rd Ave’:

I can’t even decipher the menu with

cafe-mocha frappe smoothies and

caramel iced pumpkin lattes,

I’m forced to use Google to translate

and

where did all the beauty go?

He said competing in, and winning, the Southern Lakes slam event made his decision to stay feel even more right: "Everything just fell into place.”

As for the poems, it’s about more than just the words.

"Writing was a selfish thing, because I benefitted from it and I benefit from getting up there and speaking, but if there’s one person in the room who connects … I’m starting to realise I can help people with my poetry,” he said.

"Something that helps me but can also help other people – that is perfect.”

PHOTO: Wanaka App