David Howard

David Howard (born 1959) is a New Zealand poet, writer and editor. His works have been widely published and translated into a variety of European languages. Howard was the co-founder of the literary magazine takahē in 1989 the Otago Wallace Residency, in Auckland in 2014, and the Ursula Bethell Residency in Christchurch, in 2016. In more recent years he has been the recipient of a number of UNESCO City of Literature Residencies.

Life David Howard was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1959. He worked for many years as a pyrotechnic and special effects supervisor. His clientele included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica.

In 1989, Howard co-founded the literary magazine takahē, named after the threatened New Zealand bird. takahē appears three times a year, publishing the short stories, poetry and art. He left the editorial board in 1993. In 1990, he co-founded the Canterbury Poets Collective. The collective organises poetry readings, open-mic evenings, and publications for young poets, all within the Christchurch area.

In 1999 Howard retired from his role as a SFX technician to live and write in Pūrākaunui, a small settlement north of Dunedin. At Pūrākaunui he lived in a purpose-built shed; his house "overlooks farmland and the blue screen of the South Pacific, onto which I can project my fantasies."

Though Howard has lived primarily in New Zealand, his work has taken him to many different countries. In February 2009, he attended the International Poetry Festival in Granada, Nicaragua as the recipient of a grant from the International Writers' Program. David Eggleton, writing in the Otago Daily Times, described his poetry as "energetic, winningly acrobatic in the way it leaps from reference to reference, engagingly robust in the way it juggles ideas." "Like John Ashbery," wrote Eggleton, Howard "celebrates the technique of indeterminacy – open-endedness; unlike Ashbery, he doesn't do riddles or frustrate the exchange of poetic commonplaces to subvert meaning. His poems promote affirmative action – we can have a dialogue, we can connect – and they wear their eroticism on their collective sleeve." Eggleton concluded by predicting that "as [Howard's] body of work continues to grow, we may confidently expect his vision to deepen and grow ever more original."

Howard's next volume, Shebang: Collected Poems 1980-2000 (2000), brought together most of the poems from In the First Place and Holding Company, along with a selection of new and previously uncollected work. A series of images by New Zealand artist Jason Greig accompany the poems. Harriet Zinnes reviewed the collection for the Denver Quarterly: "Let him write. Let him take on – the whole shebang. And he tries, this important New Zealand poet who, in short stanzas and incisively written lines, actually looks at his world of choice, and writes." "What is extraordinary about this writing," wrote Terry Locke, "is the number of tensions it sustains without quite resolving, between the foreign (defamiliarised) and familiar, the present and the remembered, the soft and the hard, the fleeting and the permanent." He declared it "a difficult book to review," because "it simply doesn't allow one to feel that one has settled into a confirmed reading."

Howard's edition A Place To Go On From: The Collected Poems of Iain Lonie appeared in 2015. Howard compiled and edited the works of the late Cambridge scholar and Dunedin poet, Iain Lonie (1932–1988). The 2013–2015 New Zealand Poet Laureate, Vincent O'Sullivan, declared the volume a "superb edition of Iain Lonie's poems." Auckland author Peter Simpson named the volume as one of the best books of 2015: "In a brilliant act of literary resuscitation, Howard has brought together more than 200 poems, published and unpublished by Lonie, revealing him as important and unjustly neglected." A Place To Go On From demonstrated Howard's important role in ensuring that Lonie's works were not left to fade from memory.

Howard remains an active poet, with his most recent collection, The Ones Who Keep Quiet, published in 2017.