Cool, candid and sometimes angry, New Zealand’s laureate wants to make poetry pop

Chris Tse, New Zealand’s new poet laureate, fell in love with poetry after his high school friends started bringing ‘terrible, angsty’ poems about their crushes to read to each other at lunchtime. Photograph: Supplied

Fan of Taylor Swift, lover of glam-rock fashion – Chris Tse isn’t your typical poet laureate.

At 39, he is the youngest New Zealander to hold the title. When Tse reads the list of poetry greats who have received the honour and spies his own name at the bottom, he feels “a little bit ill”.