Ali Jacs - or Alina Siegfried as she is known off stage - is the godmother of spoken word poetry in Wellington.
A slender, tomboyish persona with deep soulful eyes and a bold voice, when Ali enters a room, she commands attention.
I first read about Ali in a piece by Radio New Zealand’s Youth website, “The Wireless” in 2013. I met her when I signed up for a slam poetry workshop in 2014, looking for a creative outlet after being inspired by watching a now famous TED Talk by poet Sarah Kay. Ali got me inspired enough to compete in the regional poetry slam that year. Indeed, Ali has done inspiring things for Wellington as a whole, establishing a community of die-hard poetry enthusiasts. People gather at the flagship event, Poetry in Motion, on the first Wednesday of the month and share heartbreak, laughter and gut-wrenching stories in a safe community, expressing themselves through the spoken word. Spoken word poetry has taken off in Wellington. But it was Ali who planted the seed of the most recent revolution.
Rural Born Girl
Ali was born in Whakatane in 1981. Ali’s mum is a true blue Kiwi.
“Sixth, seventh generation? I lose count – but she’s a multi-generational New Zealander from Kaiapoi in Christchurch. My Poppa’s ancestors came over in one of the first ships of settlers in 1850.
Her father is Swiss. He worked in the forestry sector and her mother stayed at home for the children’s younger years, and then studied information management to go on to be a librarian.
Ali remembers being in the bush a lot as a child and climbing trees, and also international travel.
“I had my fifth birthday in Switzerland. We also travelled back via Disneyland which was amazing. At a young age, I had an understanding of the world as a really global place.”
Ali particularly loved when her father would make up stories for her and her sister about the Fraggles of Fraggle Rock - a memory she credits with filling her with a love of stories and storytelling.
Ali’s family stayed in Whakatane until she was eight. They then moved to Tokoroa, which she calls “her character building years”, before moving to Rotorua for her high school years.
“Tokoroa’s a bit of a rough town. It’s a mill town subject to boom and bust forestry cycles, and there’s a lot of poverty. On my first day of Intermediate, my bike seat was slashed with a knife!”.
School and University
I ask whether Ali enjoyed English growing up.
“I don’t know if I enjoyed it. I was good at it. As I’ve said before to others, I got into poetry in my later life but I kind of hated it at high school. It was all very theoretical, academic and dull. Poetry was a love I found later in life” Ali explains.
At school, Ali describes her friends as “Not really the cool kids, we were somewhere in the middle of the ridiculous high school popularity hierarchy, but we still had our fun. I wasn’t really badly behaved - but I was good girl badly behaved sometimes. I played in a band. Some of my teachers would have described me as a bit disruptive. I was always the class clown - the entertainer.”
After school ended, Ali went to university in Canterbury.
“I went to university straight away but in retrospect, I shouldn’t have. I had a vague notion I wanted to study geology because I liked volcanoes, but I hated rocks”
Ali also experimented with a few classes of computer science.
”After three lectures I knew there was no way in hell I was going to pass this course.”
“I went to university straight away but in retrospect, I shouldn’t have. I had a vague notion I wanted to study geology because I liked volcanoes, but I hated rocks”
Ali switched to Geology and Geography and ended up with a BSc(Hons) Geography major after four years. She also completed a Post-Graduate Certificate in Antarctic studies which allowed her to visit Antarctica for 17 days on a field trip, a highlight in her studies.
Post-Uni, Ali went to work at the Department of Conservation in Tongariro National Park.
“My hands-down favourite place in the world.”
She spent six months “wandering the hills” before heading overseas to Canada with a boy who she’d met. When they returned to Palmerston North she worked at Rangitikei District Council in Marton before moving to Canada more permanently with him.
Twenties and travels of Canada
“We travelled from the Yukon to the northern tip of Newfoundland.”
Ali also spent a ski season being a ski instructor in the Rocky Mountains, five months living in Switzerland while she waited to get her Canadian residency and the three years in the prairies of Saskatoon, where she encountered slam poetry.
“My final year of living in Saskatoon proved to be very formative,” Ali says, stirring her coffee.
“I’d come over to Canada with this man who I was in a relationship with. But after a series of life occurrences came together and I spent a lot of time reflecting, I realised I was gay so I ended my relationship with this guy. It was the year after that I found slam poetry. It was a tumultuous time: I was meeting new people and trying to figure myself out, so poetry was a massive aid to me for making sense of who I was.”
Ali admits she’s surprised when she looks back that she spent so little time in the poetry community in Canada, when it felt like longer, possibly because gatherings took place every week.
“On my final night at Tonight It’s Poetry, I stood up to a room full of a hundred or so people and told them that if I don’t find this kind of poetry scene, wherever I end up when I move back to New Zealand, I’ll start one. It was the public commitment that solidified it for me” Ali says.
Ali arrives in Wellington: “I’d never lived in Wellington but I had always loved it”
After four years away, Ali decided to move back home to New Zealand.
“I’d never lived in Wellington but I had always loved it,” Ali explains. “I got a really clear signal from a Shapeshifter video,” she says laughing.
“Shapeshifter has long been a favourite Kiwi band. I listened to them lots with a group of friends from Palmerston North - we’d go out dancing a lot. I had a real connection to the band. I saw this Shapeshifter video for ‘Twin Galaxies’ - the video starts with this CGI-animated rock monster – actually, he was Ruaumoko, the Māori god of earthquakes mourning the death of his mother Papatūānuku and father Ranginui.”
“Anyhow, he starts off in Tongariro National Park (exactly where my relationship started with this guy who took me to Canada), and goes rampaging through the North Island with grief, past Mount Tarawera near Rotorua, another hill near Tokoroa, and ends up in Wellington. It was like he had gone on this tumultuous journey to all the places dear to me in Aotearoa New Zealand, and ended up in Wellington Harbour. So I took that as my sign I needed to move to Wellington - from Shapeshifter,” Ali laughs again.
On arriving in Wellington, Ali spent the greater part of the year going to different venues and checking out poetry events around the city. Although there were interesting poetry readings going on, there was no slam poetry per se.
“There wasn’t the energy I had witnessed in Saskatoon” Ali explains.
Getting the Spoken Word Out
To find something, Ali had to travel to Auckland to compete in the Going West Poetry Slam in 2011. She came second in the Slam and made new connections in the New Zealand poetry scene. Ali then was asked whether she would like to host a show featuring two travelling international poets, Carrie Rudzinski and Ken Arkind. She said yes and the show attracted around 40 people. From this, it was clear the interest in slam poetry was alive in Wellington. Ali decided to start Poetry in Motion, once a month, at Heaven Pizza on Cuba Street.
Most of all, Ali has enjoyed seeing people share their stories with each other.
“Diverse people will get up onstage for the first time, and speak about personal life experiences and share their lens on the world” she explains.
Over the years, Poetry in Motion grew - up to 130 people trying to squeeze into a pizza restaurant. The stage was a shipping pallet with a bit of plywood that Ali had screwed on top. Now Poetry in Motion is housed in Meow and the cafe is packed to bursting on the first Wednesday of every month, brimming with new ideas, new poets and new stories to be shared.
“Diverse people will get up onstage for the first time, and speak about personal life experiences and share their lens on the world”
Poetry in Motion is not the first iteration of poetry or even spoken word poetry in Wellington. An event called Howltearoa used to run at the Southern Cross, while poetry slams happened in the 90’s and early 2000’s in the old Bluenote Bar, now Bad Grannies. However, Ali’s community has taken on a life of its own and grown into its own beast.
Wellingtonians love spoken word poetry - it appeals to our creativity, writers and our artistic senses and the student population.
“Wellington has all the right ingredients that make it a perfect base for this type of poetry” Ali explains.
New beginnings
Ali took a step back from Poetry in Motion 18 months ago. She says she is lucky that right from the start she has been surrounded with hard working and committed co-organisers, who have helped shape the community.
“It really is a community-held event. It’s the people involved that give it so much life.”
Now Travis Cottreau has the reigns and is steering the ship of poetry.
“Personally, I’ve shied away from competing in slams for the past couple of years - I had come to know the right techniques and devices so it didn’t feel authentic anymore. It felt formulaic. But slam is just one tool in the toolbox. I love spoken word. Spoken word is much more than just slam.”
“If I do one thing as a parent, it will be to encourage my child to always keep telling stories.”
Ali also uses spoken word in her day job at Kiwi Connect where her employers had seen her work and admired her ability to communicate.
Ali admits she’s been doing a lot of stuff over the last 10 years - and she is looking forward to the next chapter as a mother to a baby son, along with her wife Mandy. I ask Ali what she will teach her child about stories.
“Stories are everything. They’re vehicles. They’re how we make sense of the world. Story will feature heavily in my child’s life, whether it’s making up stories to him like my father used to do with the Fraggles, reading stories, and particularly encouraging him to tell his own stories. Children are amazing storytellers and it's something we tend to lose as adults.”
“If I do one thing as a parent, it will be to encourage my child to always keep telling stories.”
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