Pacific Islander Poetry: Pasifika Voices Across the Ocean
Quick answer: Pacific Islander poetry across Oceania: oral chant, Albert Wendt, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's climate verse, Craig Santos Perez, and the Pasifika spoken word wave.
The Tongan and Fijian scholar Epeli Hau'ofa reframed his region in one essay: not tiny islands lost in a vast ocean, but a sea of islands, connected by the water rather than divided by it. Pacific poetry works exactly that way. From Hawai'i to Samoa, Guam to the Marshall Islands, distinct island traditions share a poetics of ocean, genealogy, and voyage.
Each culture holds deep chant traditions, Hawaiian mele and the great Kumulipo creation chant, Samoan solo, Marshallese roro, and the written literature that emerged in the twentieth century grew directly from them, never quite agreeing to sit still on the page.
Founders of the written wave
The Samoan writer Albert Wendt did more than anyone to build a Pacific literature, publishing his own poems and novels and editing the anthologies that first gathered the region's voices, including Lali and Nuanua. Konai Helu Thaman of Tonga brought a teacher's clarity to poems about culture and change, and Grace Mera Molisa of Vanuatu turned verse into political instrument during her country's independence era. In Hawai'i, Haunani-Kay Trask fused aloha 'aina, love of the land, with unsparing anticolonial argument in Light in the Crevice Never Seen.
The climate frontline
No poetry on earth carries more immediate stakes. In 2014 Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner of the Marshall Islands stood before the United Nations Climate Summit and read a poem addressed to her infant daughter, promising that their atoll nation would not drown, and delegates wept on camera. Her work, alongside poets across Micronesia and Polynesia, has made verse a diplomatic force in the climate emergency: the poem as testimony from nations that may lose their ground while the world watches.
The craft: ocean, genealogy, and the unbound page
Craig Santos Perez, a Chamorro poet from Guam, writes a continuing series called from unincorporated territory, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2023; its fragmented pages map what empire did to his island, and his refusal of the closed, single poem teaches a bold structural lesson: a body of work can behave like an archipelago, separate pieces joined underwater.
Across the region, poems are built on genealogy and voyage. A Pacific poem often begins by placing the speaker in a line of ancestors and a web of islands, and treats the ocean as a road rather than a barrier. Any poet can borrow that: locate your speaker in lineage and geography before the first image arrives.
Pasifika energy now
The diaspora has built thriving scenes, above all in South Auckland, where the South Auckland Poets Collective grew a generation of performers, and Selina Tusitala Marsh and Tusiata Avia carried Pasifika poetry to laureateships and international stages. Festivals, university presses in Hawai'i and Fiji, and online journals keep the sea of islands talking to itself, and to everyone else.
What poets can take from this
- Open a poem by placing yourself in a genealogy of people and places before anything happens.
- Write the ocean as a road that connects, not a wall that isolates.
- Address a poem to a child about a threatened place, letting love carry the politics.
- Let a sequence of short poems behave like an archipelago: separate above the surface, joined beneath.
- Study chant: build momentum through parallel phrases rather than metaphor.
Try it yourself
Write a poem addressed to someone two generations younger than you, describing a place they may never see as it is now, and end with a promise you intend to keep.
Questions
What is Pasifika poetry?
Poetry by peoples of the Pacific Islands and their diaspora, from Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Hawai'i, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and beyond. It draws on deep oral chant traditions and today spans page, stage, and climate activism.
Who is Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner?
A Marshallese poet and climate activist whose 2014 performance at the United Nations Climate Summit, a poem addressed to her daughter, brought global attention to the plight of low lying island nations.
What is the Kumulipo?
The Kumulipo is the great Hawaiian creation chant, a genealogical poem of more than two thousand lines linking the ruling family to the origins of the cosmos. It is one of the monumental works of Pacific oral literature.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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