A travelling street poet taking up residency at a recycling centre for a week epitomises the offbeat style of this year's Outspoken Festival in Wanaka.
Now in its second year, the festival celebrates the spoken word and promises ''intelligent entertainment'' through a series of performances, workshops and free events by comedians, storytellers, poets and local wordsmiths.
Among the line-up is former Dunedin resident David Merritt, whose week-long poet's residency at Wanaka Wastebusters culminates in a public reading of his work there on February 28.
Merritt, who is in his mid-50s, is a former ''academic geek'', racing subeditor, web pioneer and teacher at the Auckland University of Technology.
He gave it all up and six years ago started self-publishing poetry - using a letterpress or rubber stamp pad - bound inside cardboard scavenged from banana boxes, office folders, Reader's Digests, Jeffrey Archer novels or anything else ''destined for landfill''.
Merritt travels around a nationwide circuit of fringe, writers' and self-publishing (or ''zine'') festivals, markets and university gigs and also makes and sells books.
He rarely visits his home at Mangamahu, in the Wanganui hinterland, which was ''as far away from civilisation as I could find at the time'', and misses its simplicity.
''There I can live very cheaply. I can grow my own food, I've got hens and we farm old Land Rovers ... One day I woke up and I had a paddock with 18 Land Rovers in it, usual story for a man without a wife, and then we would just make one good one out of the three and stuff like that.''
Merritt considered it ''remarkable'' he could now earn a living as a poet.
''[But] there's no such thing as a rich poet ... poets that are driving round in Rolls-Royces with concubines licking their toes. No, that doesn't happen. I scrape by by having a lifestyle that suits not earning a lot of money and I'm perfectly happy with that.''
Others appearing at Outspoken include Olly Ohlson, Gary McCormick, Rose Matafeo, Brian Turner, Owen Marshall, Hinemoana Baker and members of the South Auckland Poets Collective.
Children's writer Joy Cowley will run a workshop on March 28, after the festival.
The shows would be largely unscripted and unpredictable, festival co-manager Liz Breslin said.
''We're about those raw edges as well ... because that's sometimes where the magic happens.''
Other venues on the festival calendar include a barn, two churches, a lavender farm, bars and restaurants, a village hall and a bike shop.
The first Outspoken Festival took place over six weeks early last year and was privately funded, but a charitable trust has been formed this year.
