O Audacious Book

Tuesday Poem: Tuesday, Ferry Road, a southerly

2013-05-21T09:02:00.003+12:00

Back from a walk to the ridge,

and all the way we watched the weather

coming in across the harbour

and by weather, I mean

a breath like a peppermint-eating cyclist,

nothing, and then suddenly something

fresh and light at your shoulder, and all

the way up Ferry Road we’d turn

and turn again to see it coming

its line drawn and redrawn in the water

closer each time

and how fast we walked

to be ahead – to the top of the road

and onto the track through the new

growing spindly things and the knitted

spider webs and the splashes of rata

and into the suck of green and the soft

of the beech leaves on the rise and fall –

up and

up –

‘Down there,’ I said, as we stood

looking again at the weather, half

the water crinkled now as if smiling,

‘is where the pa of Te Hiha stood –

he could see the whole

harbour.’

We left the beach in stillness

and returned to a sweet breeze.

Mary McCallum

Tuesdays are my poem days and my bush-walking days, but not today (sadly) for the walking - I have a meeting to get to. Poems, yes. Tuesday is always Tuesday Poem day for me and has been for three years. After you've read 'me' - do go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a wonderful poem by a poet who is UK born to Guyanese parents - Fred D'Aguiar. I read his poem before I started on my poem again last night (written a couple of weeks ago and left to brew) - I think my poem is talking to D'Aguiar's don't you? The title especially.

Tuesday Poem: The Summer Day by Mary Oliver [a reading]

2013-05-06T21:29:00.004+12:00

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

These two wonderful lines - the last two lines of Oliver's 'The Summer Day' - are the perfect preface to a novel I just reviewed today for Radio NZ: Isabel Allende's Maya's Notebook. Which is why it's on my mind.

What better question could there be? In fact, the whole of the poem is a wonderful thing. It's about the art of paying attention - showing 'love', in effect - and thereby transforming both the thing we pay attention to and ourselves. Which is what Isabel Allende believes and is in evidence, in all its glory, in her most recent novel.

Tuesday Poem: Leaving by Andrew Johnston

2013-04-23T00:00:00.003+12:00

Taupata scrapes the house all night,
a madman brushing off spiders. You try

to fold the map small enough
to find a place to live, but

the wind prevails, fraying the sky,
making it hard to

read the directions. Outside
the day is ceramic, brittle --

a bright hood: its
crumbs of light.

*

Your belongings --
as if you belonged to them --

vanish as the funnel narrows:
you want to weigh down

a few precious things,
open the doors,

let the wind take the rest.
Days of boxes, allegorical days:

the sky turns its huge puzzled face towards you,
and then it turns away.

from Birds of Europe (VUP, 2000). Posted with permission.

Andrew's poem looks simple on the face of it -- in shape and message (couplets, another leaving poem), but in fact it's packed with arresting images -- aural and visual -- that wrestle with each other as the speaker of the poem wrestles to understand, or live with, what is happening.

The taupata (a plant also known as the mirror plant for its shiny leaves) scraping the house like a madman brushing off spiders is an image of irritation that morphs into nightmare. The folding and folding to get a map small enough, the wind, the belongings vanishing, the boxes - all evoke the internal mayhem in the poem. The final puzzled face of the sky is like the speaker of the poem - a still sad image.

For some reason I keep thinking of songs by the Mountain Goats like Belgian Things and Woke up New which have that same surface lightness and underlying deep sadness of parting. On first reading, I took the poem to be about a departing lover, but now - and after a brief communication with Andrew on Facebook - I think it is about someone who is leaving what he knows.

I am a big fan of Andrew's work and have posted it before - not least his brilliant double sestina The Sunflower - but this past week saw me run into his work again. Propitiously, I think. You see, I have started a new job working as a new publisher in association with another established publisher who just happens to have his office right near the wonderful secondhand bookshop Pegasus Books in Cuba Street's The Left Bank. On my first lunch hour I popped in and bought Andrew's Birds of Europe - a very nice copy that was handed to me in a brown paper bag (I think the best things come in brown paper bags) - and I glanced through it back at the office, then spent the evening reading it from cover to cover. A thoughtful and sensual collection - including a captivating series of poems about the French tightrope walker who walked between the twin towers in NY which I'd love to post another time.

Andrew lives in Paris and we communicate via Facebook, so I asked him via message if I could post Leaving and he said, yes I could. So I did. Lovely.

Now please please please click HERE to go to Tuesday Poem's communal birthday poem - 18 stanzas posted by 18 different poets around the world over three weeks, and it's finished!! It is quite astonishing - clever, jazzy, fun. Hard to believe it's not all from the same brain. Such a blast. Happy Birthday to us. Happy Birthday to us...

Tuesday Poem: Cloud walking

2013-04-16T12:38:00.002+12:00

across the harbour

the city melts into the morning

over it a sky the pale end of blue

and improbable clouds all hues

of white and grey heaped

in heavy shapes

a hat a dog a bird in flight

on the Promenade

a woman hoves

into view blue shirt strains

over an improbable bosom

hair springs from

an improbable white hat

who would have thought it?

the sky down here to say

gidday

Mary McCallum

This is fun and from a long time ago (10 years?) when I was getting back into my poetry again. My subject became what was outside my door and where I walked. I've polished this poem up, though, in the past week, because I'm working as co-editor on an Eastbourne Anthology of writing and thought I should go back to some of my Eastbourne poems and pop them into the mix for consideration. Why not?

Please check out the Tuesday Poem Third Birthday Poem which is in its third week now - 11 poets have posted 11 stanzas and there are more to come. I love the way it's going...

Tuesday Poem: my stanza's up for the 3rd birthday poem

2013-04-09T00:30:00.000+12:00

I've just added my stanza to the Tuesday Poem communal birthday poem - am rather pleased I am number 7. We're doing a kind of jazzy thing there ... so I've picked up sounds and stretched and repeated them - tried some syncopation. Before me is Keith Westwater of Lower Hutt and after me is T Clear of Seattle Washington. How cool is that?

here's my verse...

7.
catch the
(whispers)
it's time to
(latch the window)
catch the
grab it! the tail oh boy

find the rest here.

And here's a fabulous poem Death of a Bee by Tuesday Poet Kathleen Jones.

Tuesday Poem: Curtains by Helen Rickerby

2013-04-02T00:19:00.003+13:00

I believe my parents are immortal
They will live forever
in the same house
they have lived in
for the whole of my life
they will stay
at the end
of a phoneline
answer when I call
to ask them questions
to which they will always
know the answers

I believe my parents will never get sick
I mean of course
that they might get
the odd cold maybe
a stomach bug once
in a while but they will always
be able to walk further
and faster
than I can
they'll never be slowed
or stymied by dodgy
hips or feet or hearts

I believe my parents will always be able to look after themselves
They'll stay in the house
up the long steep driveway
with their lifetime of treasures
they'll eat what they like
go to sleep and wake up
as late as they want

I believe my parents will always be together
like a pair of curtains
that overlap
at their edges

First of all - it's the 3rd birthday of the Tuesday Poem! Three years we've been going with Claire Beynon (Dunedin) and me curating. What a ride it's been! So many many poems, so many many poets. As with other years we're celebrating with a communal poem which has already started and goes over three weeks. Do check it out.

Now, I promised my blog readers Curtains last week when I posted Just Fine to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary. I explained I'd been casting around for the ideal poem and that Curtains leapt into view - or rather, opened in front of me. But then I found my way into an old file of poems and there it was: Just Fine. A low-key poem about an ordinary family Saturday, my ordinary family Saturday, and it did the job, and I posted it.

I saved Curtains (My Iron Spine, Headworx 2008) for this week, and people have been asking...

Curtains is a poem about the everydayness and longevity of love -- love in a relationship (of 25 years or more or less), love we have for our parents, and they for each other. There is the feel of a fairytale about it. The house with the steep driveway and treasures evokes a castle to me - and there is immortality here and a type of perfection and an absence of rules. But the curtains are vintage rule-bound time-locked imperfect suburbia!

I love the line: 'like a pair of curtains that overlap at their edges.' It evokes the way people who are together for a while lose their edges, and how they hang out day and night (what better than curtains to show clearly when it's night and day). 'Overlap at their edges' also brings to my mind lapping in a running race and water lapping, both of which feel like the stuff of long term relationships.

Now my silver wedding has come and gone, I dedicate this poem to my parents, of whom I believe the same.

Curtains is published with permission (thanks Helen!)

Helen Rickerby is a Tuesday Poet, publisher at Seraph Press, and co-managing editor of the JAAM literary journal. She also has a cool day job working on the Encyclopaedia of NZ Te Ara. Abstract Internal Furniture, was published by HeadworX in 2001 and her second collection, My Iron Spine, followed in 2008. More on Helen on last week's blog and another poem from My Iron Spine, here.

Tuesday Poem: Just Fine

2013-03-26T00:13:00.001+13:00

Saturday will be fine. We’ll start the day with coffee. The tennis club will have a working bee which we’ll forget about. A friend will ride over on her bike. The boys will jam in our boatshed. Our next-door neighbours will finally start on their deck. The fire brigade will be called out to the lighthouse. My husband will buy butterfish for dinner. Amy will look beautiful in her grandmother’s wedding dress. I’ll walk with my daughter in Days Bay to get a glimpse of it. We’ll eat kiwifruit gelato on the beach. That sort of thing.

Mary McCallum

Eastbourne 2006

It's our 25th wedding anniversary today and I have been very uncertain about what to post here to celebrate that fact. My husband hates hates hates cheesiness and PDAs (public displays of affection), and is a bit suspicious of poetry and likes his privacy, so no love poems then ... (and I do have them.) I wrote a poem once about him in his olive grove during a storm but what I found wasn't the poem I thought it was. He's very happy in the olive grove, my husband, tending things, picking olives, building stone walls.

I've already posted a number of poems here that I wrote about the grove around when my chapbook was published last year ... so what to do? Last night, I trawled through old poetry folders - astonished by the sheer number of dashed-off 'drafts' and finished poems I'd forgotten about - and feeling it wasn't going to get any easier, I emailed my friend Helen Rickerby asking if I could use her poem Curtains from My Iron Spine. Helen's a Tuesday Poet like me - a very good poet, in fact, but also someone with a very good heart, and this shines through her work. Curtains is about a couple (her parents) who are always together in the same house and never sick and are 'like a pair of curtains that overlap at their edges'.

I love this love poem for so many reasons. It is of course a wish, not real at all, but the description of the longlastingness and everydayness of true love is the thing that felt so right to me today of all days... So, girded with Helen's permission, I started writing her poem up on my blog and was finished, when I remembered some more old folders of mine from another computer. I couldn't resist a flick through ... and found Just Fine, and it felt just right.

It's about being happy together - those ordinary family moments on an ordinary day here, at our place, by the beach. At first I had no idea when I wrote it - but I realise that it must have been 2006, with Amy's wedding. The poem is also about looking forward to things and the potential inherent in the work we do and lives we lead and promises we make. I like that there's a wedding there.

Anyway, that's us. Twenty-five years together since our wedding in Wellington on March 26 1988. Three children. One dog. One house. One Barn. Thousands of olive trees and books. Countless family meals and perfect Christmasses. Friends we've kept and friends we've found and people, large and small, who've come into our family. Lots and lots of Saturdays and Sundays like this one in the poem. Happy.

Happy Anniversary to us.

Tuesday Poem: Predictive

2013-03-19T00:30:00.000+13:00

How quickly friend becomes frenetic,

Christmas - crisis, singing - pining,

darling - dialing.

Mary McCallum

Just a fragment, really. But somehow, found like this in my draft pile of poems, it seems to work. Reading it - and seeing all my drafts and all my folders of poems deemed finished - makes me feel sad. I haven't been writing much poetry lately because fiction has taken centre stage. I can't sustain both at the same time. I will need to make some time soon - perhaps a week - or longer - to pull together what I have into something I could call a collection.

Meanwhile, please check out our hub poem this week by a fascinating Australian, chosen by PS Cottier in Canberra. I love these introductions to Australian poets via Tuesday Poem. A whole new world over there... have a lovely week, especially on Thursday - World Poetry Day.

Tuesday Poem: Composed upon Westminster Bridge September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth (with notes)

2013-03-12T21:43:00.002+13:00

Written on the roof of a coach, on my way to France.

EARTH has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

The above poem can found in:

Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1932

Construction of the original Westminster Bridge in London was begun in 1739 and completed in 1750. Construction of the current bridge began in 1854 and was completed in 1862.
_________________________________________________________________
I found this post on a website called PotW.org - I love the bit about Wordsworth writing the poem on the roof of a coach - not on a bridge at all! I never knew that! Unless he composed the poem in his head on the bridge and later wrote it while travelling ... My guess is he lied as one does in poems all the time in favour of the emotional truth. Go William.

I wanted to post this poem here today because it's in my Faber diary this week, and reading it again, I realised afresh how marvellous it is in its evocation of a new day dawning, and the hugeness of a beloved city and its beating heart.

I also can't help thinking of London and its river and bridges and going to work in the morning on the tube and walking those bricked streets to work. The glory of it on the best days.

This week at the TP hub is a poem that couldn't be further from London or Wordsworth - check out the post by editor Robert Sullivan.

Tuesday Poem: The Edge by Rethabile Masilo

2013-03-05T14:59:00.000+13:00

I walk into light
in a straight line,
I am warmth
when I lick myself
with this tongue;
it's been a hard day
but I'm back now,
I am new earth
for country, brother,
for another swing
at the thing gotten
off thought's edge.
No face, no head,
no tail. Just you, I,
and a need to save us
from the wrong done
to books. A dog leg
caught in a trap
is sawed off. Who
knows what words
were said to the girl
at the well, the edge
of what thought,
before she dove in?
I been trained by
the turn of this century
to be cuss words,
the central insult
in four-letter instants.
If I stop now, short
of the final thrill,
the definitive answer,
if I draw to one side
away from your path,
a curtain under cover
of night, a season
will go without me
in the helix of rebirths.
If I doubt the power
vested in me through
this colour, this tongue
click, mountains
that look at the sides
with the bronze pity
of joy, then all is lost.

Rethabile is our newest Tuesday Poet - born in Lesotho the same year as me, and - in fact - in the same continent. I was born in Zambia but my only connection with that place is via my parents' memories. Rethabile is disconnected physically - for he lives now in Paris - but his heart is still there.

Rethabile's blog Poefrika celebrates African-inspired writing and writers, and personal heroes in the worlds of music and literature and politics. It's inspiring to see these names and faces, their stories, their poetry, and to read Rethabile's own work. In this poem, I like the way he talks to himself, asks questions, suggests different ways the story could go, describes an edge where - perhaps - he resides or could go (over), and returns to the main question of identity. I love 'I am warmth when I lick myself with this tongue', I love - but don't fully understand - 'the bronze pity of joy'. I like the way the poem drives forward in its short-linked lines, like a tongue, a path, an arrow, confident in its shape, not breaking out of the edge the poet has set himself, and as such suggests all is indeed not lost.

Thank you for permission to post your poem, Rethabile.

Please check out the hub for a post from Zireaux - At Melville's Tomb by Hart Crane - and such a commentary! Read to believe.

Tuesday Poem: Alice Spider (extract) by Janis Freegard

2013-02-26T14:13:00.002+13:00

From Alice sings

she's a nightchild baby, daughter of the city, she's part of these neon lights, she walks so fast and looks so cool, you know that she's got it right, she's a citygirl, sugar, and she's so clever, she knows the quick way home, she's a moonbeam baby ...
____

Gorgeous huh? You can see more of Alice Spider and hear her read out loud on the Anomalous website. This exciting US press is publishing Alice Spider by kiwi Tuesday Poet Janis Freegard - she posts on it here and you'll notice that Anomalous has been drumming up some funding on Kickstarter. It's a great way to support a poet and a press and you get a beautiful book (and all sorts of extras) for your troubles. I've signed up, and there's 16 hours left to go from... now... click here.

And over on Tuesday Poem there's a terrific brand new poem by Fleur Adcock and a lovely piece of writing by this week's editor Helen Rickerby explaining why she chose it. Then there's the sidebar - 30 poets and 30 poems... why not?

Tuesday Poem: A Song on the End of the World by Czesław Miłosz

2013-02-19T00:01:00.000+13:00

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

more here...

Thanks to Melissa Green - my lovely poet friend for posting this poem on her blog once and thus alerting me to it. It's perfect for the week when we think of the Canterbury earthquake that hit two years ago delivering such horrors to that beautiful city ... I also direct you to Fault by Joanna Preston which is on the Tuesday Poem hub.

My thoughts will be with the people of Christchurch on February 22.

Back to Melissa Green who lives in Boston and is a Tuesday Poem alumni and someone I correspond with - not enough, not nearly enough. Just this evening, I suddenly wanted to see what she was up to - to see she was still writing poems and blogging. She is a quite extraordinary poet.

Melissa Green

So yes, she's blogging (now and again), but more importantly, I discovered (I must have heard something on the wind) that she's publishing her memoir The Linen Way as an e-book with Rosa Mira Books. I have had the privilege of reading this memoir and the images it left me with are burnt into my memory.

Such brilliant news... bravo Penelope Todd of Rosa Mira! Bravo Melissa!

Do please check out the TP hub - not only is there Joanna Preston's poem but also, in the sidebar, you'll find poets posting their own work and work by others they admire. Lovely stuff.

Tuesday Poem: The Gift by C.K. Stead

2013-02-12T09:31:00.002+13:00

I'm editor of the Tuesday Poem hub this week, so I'll send you there in a single click - faster than Dorothy and the magic slippers - to read C.K. Stead's The Gift. See you there...

Tuesday Poem: Wild Iron by Allen Curnow

2013-02-04T23:56:00.001+13:00

Yes, this is us in Wellington at the moment - I am listening now to the foundering shrieks of the gale. Allen Curnow wrote the poem in 1941 and it's a stunning piece of writing - the sounds and the repetition of those sounds (which he delighted in) slowly but surely hammering home the reality of the winds on settler roofs in Canterbury.

I'm rather taken up with Curnow's mate Denis Glover at the moment because, over the summer, I found a terrific first edition (only edition?) copy of his collection Wellington Harbour - a collection of funny, rude, satirical sort of poems (I think he called them 'funniosities') about the place where I live - many of which were published in the Dominion Post.

Googling around, I found an indepth write-up on Glover here , and included in it is the story behind his most famous poem The Magpies which is, it seems, inextricably linked with Curnow's Wild Iron. Seems they were heading off to a bach together through a dark and stormy night ... which brings me to this post, I guess -- and the poem. Unavoidable, really.

Here's the full story of Glover and Curnow and the poems they wrote (thanks to Sarah Shieff):

Glover’s friendship with Curnow played a coincidental but crucial role in the composition of Glover’s most famous poem. One weekend late in 1941 Glover had driven up to visit the Curnow family at a holiday bach at Leithfield, north of Christchurch.

On the way up, Curnow recalled, ‘Glover… got out of his little tin baby Austin in the middle of a wild nor’wester to have a pee by the roadside. There were magpies squawking everywhere. And when Denis arrived and came to the door of the bach he didn’t say anything at all except “quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle” - just like that.’ (Curnow in the New Zealand Herald, 29 July 1987). Before Glover’s arrival that day, Curnow had begun work on his own poem about the storm, prompted by the sound of a piece of roofing iron blowing in the wind. So as not to disturb him, Glover sat down to write. Curnow’s short, brooding lyric ‘Wild Iron’ has achieved almost the same iconic status, and is almost as frequently anthologised, as Glover’s ‘The Magpies’.

Both poems frequently find their way into anthologies for children – Curnow’s for its Stevensonian evocation of a storm at night, Glover’s for its ingenuous tone and simple rhyme scheme, and its apparently cheerful chorus:

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm

The bracken made their bed,

And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle

The magpies said.

(Selected Poems 31)

Please check out the poem at our Tuesday Poem hub - it's by the unmatchable Joan Fleming and posted by Orchid Tierney.

The Hill by Rupert Brooke 1887 - 1915

2013-01-29T08:25:00.003+13:00

Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, "Though glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old...." And when we die
All's over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
-- "Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won."

"We are earth's best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said;
"We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
-- And then suddenly you cried, and turned away.

Welcome back to Tuesday Poem after our summer break. This poem is one of my favourite in the world - with that first line - we too are breathless and flung. The brave language. The stuff of youth. The realisation that it ends and perhaps too soon ... added to by our knowing Brooke himself died young during WWI.

I am near the end of Pat Barker's novel Toby's Room and have Harry Rickett's Strange Meetings lined up after that. Both about WWI soldiers/poets/artists. A coincidence, the two books - but I am well and truly submerged in this sad, aching, brave, terrible world.

Please do take a minute to go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a poem by David Howard and the questions a group of poets pose him. Wonderful post by Claire Beynon, my TP co-curator, whose enthusiasm for poetry and art and life leaves me breathless. Read on!

Whales to trees and tattoos: the fun of researching a novel

2013-01-07T10:13:00.000+13:00

It's a rolling ball - there you are at the top of the hill - and yeeha! you're off - hurtling down one path and then the other - and crossing back again - and along that one, geez it's bumpy -- no, this one is fantastic, feel that roll -- look! - there! who would have thought? - and you grab at things and roll them one on the other - and

soon there are layers and the ball is bigger and fatter - and lumpy in parts and thin in others - smooth there, rough there - and stray bits come off - oh, see that go, no loss really ... and that too, bugger, all that work but...

got to keep rolling.... and then there are those dips where it stalls, the ball, kind of rocking back and forth uncertain about where to go next - and sometimes there are abysses where it's dark and frightening and no way out ...

no - no - there it is - out again and rolling - and the joy of it - the real joy

And why? For authenticity, first off - to give the details that make the novel feel true - and to gather the writer's most important tool: language, that is also about authenticity, but is more than that too. All those words and phrases a writer gathers in his/her research help shape characters and settings and plot. It can show where to go - what is needed.

For example, when I was researching whaling and went up on a hill with former whalers and Department of Conservation people whale watching for a week, I was surprised to find how much the whalers (who'd stopped work over 40 years before in 1964) appreciated the beauty and wonder of the whales and the setting - and how succinctly and often poetically they could express it.

One day, when I asked what I was looking for out there on the mass of blue water that is Cook Strait, I was told that the spout of a whale was like 'your breath on a cold morning' - which actually took my breath away. I gave it to one of my whalers in The Blue, but more than that, it gave me a sudden understanding of what these men felt and saw and knew about their jobs.

There we were gathered so early on that cold slope under a tarpaulin - our breath white, stamping our feet to keep warm - and there were the whales, out there somewhere, so hard to spot, but ah! the breath - the breath... and once, those men would chase that breathing creature down in two-man fast boats and explosive harpoon guns - it was a fight, a battle - and like any good battle there was admiration for the creature - its size and strength and beauty - but the whalers needed the money for their families, their own white breaths -

but in time, now, they are conservationists these whalers - they've seen how the factory killing wrecks everything - no longer a battle - just carnage.... and there, those breaths again across the water, our breaths watching ... stamping our feet...

'Like your breath on a cold morning' was one of those phrases I pinned to my noticeboard for my eyes rest upon.

At the moment, I'm researching both trees - for my children's novel rewrite - and tattooing for my adult novel. Trees: I am reading The Secret Life of Trees by Colin Tudge - fantastic book - and I am doing a lot of gardening - especially around trees and hedges. Tattooing - the Tattoo Museum in Abel Smith Street calls. You could say I'm on a roll....

Waves by Katherine Mansfield

2012-12-18T23:41:00.000+13:00

I saw a tiny God
Sitting
Under a bright blue umbrella
That had white tassels
And forked ribs of gold.
Below him His little world
Lay open to the sun.
The shadow of His hat
Lay upon a city.
When he stretched forth His hand
A lake became a dark tremble.
When he kicked up His foot
It became night in the mountain passes.

But thou art small!
There are gods far greater than thou.
They rise and fall,
The tumbling gods of the sea.
Can thy heart heave such sighs,
Such hollow savage cries,
Such windy breath,
Such groaning death?
And can thy arm enfold
The old,
The cold,
The changeless dreadful places
Where the herds
Of horned sea-monsters
And the screaming birds
Gather together?
From those silent men
That lie in the pen
Of our pearly prisons,
Canst thou hunt thy prey?
Like us canst thou stay
Awaiting thine hour,
And then rise like a tower
And crash and shatter?

There are neither trees nor bushes
In my country,
Said the tiny God.
But there are streams
And waterfalls
And mountain-peaks
Covered with lovely weed.
There are little shores and safe harbours,
Caves for cool and plains for sun and wind.
Lovely is the sound of the rivers,
Lovely the flashing brightness
Of the lovely peaks.
I am content.

But Thy kingdom is small,
Said the God of the Sea.
Thy kingdom shall fall;
I shall not let thee be.
Thou art proud!
With a loud
Pealing of laughter,
He rose and covered
The tiny God's land
With the tip of his hand,
With the curl of his fingers:
And after--

The tiny God
Began to cry

____________________ I don't know much about KM's poetry - it's a revelation to me. This feels more fable than poem, really, although the rhythms and the excellent language are the stuff of poems. These lines will send me off now into Xmas and Summer Holidays - a time of family and food and countryside and reading and writing and relaxation: Lovely is the sound of the rivers,/Lovely the flashing brightness/Of the lovely peaks./I am content.

Merry Christmas to all the talented and generous Tuesday Poets who continue to amaze me each week - especially my kind and creative co-curator Claire Beynon - and to all my wider group of blog-readers who visit here.

I have been so lucky to have been part of a longstanding book club and a brand new writing group this year (both of which I find necessary and stimulating), and to have met with many wonderful writers via Randell Cottage (of which I'm a trustee), Massey University (where I teach) and other writer events, and to have taught/mentored some talented up-and-coming writers - one of whom is only 16. I have published a chapbook of poems (and been part of an art exhibition) and am looking at publishing other writers; I have finished my children's book and am awaiting publisher feedback, and I continue to work on my adult novel This Seagull Heart of Mine.

I also continue to ponder a possible poetry collection and work as an anthologist on a collection of Eastbourne writing. I work every Friday at the local bookshop and next year I'm the NZ Post Book Awards Festival Co-ordinator.

I'm also a wife and mother, daughter, sister, sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, friend, neighbour, and dog-owner, and I live by the sea and walk in the bush, and sometimes I go inland to sit under olive trees. Nga Mihi Nui.

Tuesday Poem: Supplication to Our Lady of the Dumpster by T Clear

2012-12-11T08:22:00.001+13:00

~ for Rachael Maxi

O lid of clang & wheels of clatter,
O collector of rubbish & swill, O Holy Mother
of great pickings, of dreck & slop: Hear our prayer.

O saint of litter & scrap, protect us
from the banana peel, the Styrofoam chunk,
from all that defies reduce/reuse/recycle.

O divine casting off, O sacred decay!
Hallelujah to the Hefty Ultra-Flex 33 Gallon,
the drawstring, the twist-tie.

You hold dear everything
everyone never wanted or wanted once,
a sack or a heap tossed & tumbled.

Praise to those who dive into the belly
of your dump — the urban foragers, the hungry,
scraping a meal of crust & bone.

Consecrate them, O Queen of rubble
robed in graffiti. Watch over them,
that they may not themselves become waste

to be managed, a cubic yard of flesh
primed for front-loading. Now,
and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

© T. Clear 2010

This poem is by fellow Tuesday Poet T Clear who lives in Seattle and who blogs here. She's an Irish-Catholic American who works with glass and who has a fine eye for the glory in the ordinary. This poem is published with her permission. One day I plan to go to Seattle and say kia ora to this amazing woman.

I've had another dumpster poem on this blog - NZ poet Airini Beautrais' poem called A Good Story which starts: 'My friend likes to find things in skip bins...'

After reading these two fine poems please pop to the Tuesday Poem hub for a wonderful Sam Hunt poem - thrilled to have him there.

Tuesday Poem: The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem

2012-12-03T09:15:00.001+13:00

Electronic Bard.output

I'm up and off to Auckland tomorrow - so my Tuesday Poem post is up early. Click on the link above to hear it.

I have just discovered a stack of poems on Soundcloud via a Twitter Poetry Night - and it says this one is the first poem composed by Trurl's Electronic Bard. So, not human? It's posted by a human though - Travis Cottreau. Now I'm intrigued....

UPDATE....Okay, this is what I found online - Trurl and his inventions including a poetry machine that writes poems!

Meanwhile check out the Tuesday Poem hub where you'll find 30 poets in the sidebar posting poems written by themselves or others - all to date, as far as I know, human.

Tuesday Poem: Afterwards by Thomas Hardy

2012-11-27T00:01:00.000+13:00

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight."

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,

"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?

____________________________

How perfect this, from Thomas Hardy, gifted to me this week by Facebook friend Jeanne Walker after she read my poem The Landscape. The Landscape was chosen by Jen Compton for her Tuesday Poem blog last week, and here's what Jeanne said:

It is amazing how much detail we notice and savour when we realise how temporary everything is, when we see how the encoded shadows of ultrasounds, cat scans and x ray have real implications. You might enjoy Thomas Hardy's poem Afterwards - your leaves & observations reminded me of Hardy's May month leaves & observations.

So thanks Jeanne and Thomas! And here's Jeremy Irons reading the poem....

Tuesday Poem: W B Yeats reading his poems and talking about them - a recording

2012-11-19T23:57:00.000+13:00

Ever wondered why it is a 'purple glow'? Hear Yeats reading and talking about Lake Isle of Innisfree and other poems in this wonderful recording.

What amazes me is that he wrote Innisfree when he was 23 and living in London. He was walking along the Strand and was inspired by something to write about his home (listen to the recording to hear what the inspiration was....).

Well, I was living in London when I was 23, working on Shoe Lane off Fleet Street not too far from the Strand, and writing poems about New Zealand. I was a bit homesick, most especially for the sea. And I was reading Yeats - a favourite at university. I somehow thought he would have been older than me writing one of his great poems, though. I don't know why.

After you've had a listen, pop along to Tuesday Poem for Robert Creeley and poems he wrote about New Zealand.

Soaring like a great whale: the stuff of creativity

2012-11-17T20:12:00.002+13:00

Some days I'm watching people and it's as if my skin is looser, the bones softer, my eyes more elastic. The man with the limp, the chubby girl with the pink stained t-shirt saying 'Pretty', the enormous pale woman with the enormous pale muffin, the girl with freckles and the staccato way of being helpful without being too helpful because she doesn't know where to stop -- I watch and in watching I lose the edges of me and start to absorb the edges of them. I feel a feeling close to love for them for all their differences and oddities, their disabilities and abilities, their joys and miseries. Like the girl with freckles, I get a sense that if I keep going I might not stop, I might start to absorb all the other people on the street, in the town, the city, the country. Love the world, the universe.

These sorts of moments I think of as deeply creative ones, because they are about empathy, climbing into other skin and eyes and brains and ways of being, and understanding what's there, writing it.

It reminds me of the way Jill Bolte Taylor described the stroke she had in the left side of her brain, and how, left with only the right ('creative') side of the brain functioning properly, she felt unmoored, without the usual sense of the limits of self. Her spirit soared like a great whale, she said, in a sea of euphoria.

So creativity -- the ordinary stuff without the left-brain stroke -- is, surely, a version of that cosmic thing Bolte Taylor experienced. The soaring, the openness to all, the euphoria. Groovy.

The Starlings by Tim Upperton

2012-10-30T00:49:00.002+13:00

Anger sang in that house until the scrim walls thrummed.
The clamour rang the window panes, dizzying up chimneys.
Get on, get on, the wide rooms cried, until it seemed our unease
as we passed on the stairs or chewed our meals in dimmed

light were all an attending to that voice. And so we got on,
and to muffle that sound we gibbed and plastered, built
shelves for all our good books. What we sometimes felt
is hard to say. We replaced what we thought was rotten.

I remember the starlings, the pair that returned to that gap
above the purple hydrangeas, between weatherboard and eaves.
The same birds, we thought, not knowing how long a starling lives.
For twenty years they came and went, flit and pause and up

into that hidden place. A dry rustle at night, fidgeting, calling,
a murmuration: bird business. The vastness and splendour
of their piecemeal activity, their lives' long labour,
we discovered at last; blinking, in the murk of the ceiling,

at that whole cavernous space filled, stuffed like a haybarn.
It was like gold, except it was more like shit and straw,
jumbled with their own young, dead, desiccated, sinew
and bone, fledgling and newborn. Starlings only learn

a little thing, made big from not knowing when to leave off:
gone past all need except need, enough never enough.

This is a favourite poem of mine by Palmerston North poet, Tim Upperton, who is also at the Tuesday Poem hub this week. It is from his collection A House on Fire. I love the craftedness of it, the sounds of birds and people - soft and maddening at once - evoked with words like 'thrummed' 'chimneys' 'dimmed' and the blissful 'murmuration', the secrets in rooms and eaves and hearts, the gold and the murk, the unwinding emotional centre. Fabulously fairytale and sadly real at once. Thanks Tim for letting me use your poem here.

You can hear it read.

The Starlings was selected for the Best NZ Poems 2009 and Tim explained it there:"The starlings" was originally an informal epithalamion, a poem to commemorate the wedding of my sister, Katrina, and her husband, Steve. That version was, appropriately enough, a lot more celebratory than the final version you see here. The poem includes details my sister would remember, such as the immense starlings' nest in the ceiling of our family home.

I kept revisiting and revising this poem following its first publication in the NZ Poetry Society's anthology, tiny gaps (2006), and each time it got a little darker than before – notes of elegy seeped in. A last-minute change before my first book of poems, A House on Fire, went to print last year was the addition of the word 'murmuration' – a lovely old collective noun for starlings.'

Now see Tim's poem at the Tuesday Poem hub.

Tuesday Poem: Wind by Madeleine Slavick

2012-10-23T12:50:00.002+13:00

all night the wind
changes its mind

_____________

This delicious snippet of a poem was dropped around Greytown by 'guerrilla' poet Madeleine Slavick as part of the Greytown Arts Festival over the weekend -- and she persuaded a bunch of other poets, including myself, to do the same. She's like that: likes poetry to walk around on legs rather than let it quietly sit in the corner embroidering. Madeleine's from the States but has lived in Hong Kong for some time; now she lives near Masterton.

So we poets walked the streets rolling poems like cigarettes and sliding them into hedges, slipping them flat and upright between bottles on shop shelves, sticking them with cellotape to maps and onto shop signs. Madeleine's best 'drop' was down the front of poet Pat White's artist wife Catherine Day. It was this very poem on a small square of blue paper and it sat there on Catherine's chest for the rest of the afternoon.

Madeleine took delight in saying to the locals gathered at cafes, 'Short blue or long white?' And they chose either this little wind poem on blue or a longer poem on white. Sometimes she started reciting. I think Featherston-poet-formerly-of-Belfast Simon Fleck might have recited some too.

I was proud of my 'drops' -- especially the one between the feathers of a metal moa (following Madeleine's lead) and one slid into a summer top on a posh shop mannequin. The shop owner looked a little startled but said it would be fine for now. When I passed by five minutes later, it had gone. Taken or binned? I only posted one poem all over the place - Translucent which is about crossing the Rimutakas - you can see it in the post before this one. But I made it nice - used an old tin box of paints and painted white lightly over the poem (for the clouds) with a dash of blue where it talks about the blue sheep truck. Very, um playcentre.

John Horrocks didn't print off his poems off like the rest of us, let alone apply paint, he simply took a pair of scissors to one of his books of poetry. Very Dada. Madeleine was disappointed he didn't do it in front of people on the Main Street of Greytown. There's a poem -- hack! -- and there's another one -- snip! What he did do was stick a poem about slaughtering a pig onto the butcher's sign, which made Madeleine laugh a lot.

Saradha Koirala slipped a poem called Amsterdam, printed on white, into a hedge -- and a mother with a pram stopped, read it, and carefully put it back. I saw and said, 'take it!' She said, 'Oh it's so Amsterdam' and took it. The poems in the hedge went quickly. Somewhere I have a picture of them that I'll post here. Tim Jones marched manfully around Greytown distributing what looked like over 100 poems. He seemed more proactive about pushing them into people's hands. It must be the way he does it, he's got a large and friendly smile, I didn't see any being binned.

After we'd been guerrilla poets for an afternoon, we gathered at the Town Hall with other poets and did what poets normally do: read poems.

I love to think about where our 'guerrilla' poems have gone. I'm guessing some are still sitting there, on maps or statues or between bottles of chutney in the deli. Others might be on people's fridges at home or tucked inside a baby's pram. I'm not sure if Catherine's still wearing hers. I'll have to ask.

Madeleine Slavick's poem is published in Something Beautiful Might Happen ~ poetry by Madeleine Slavick, photography by Shimao Shinzo (Tokyon: Ushimaoda 2010)

Tuesday Poem: Translucent

2012-10-17T11:36:00.004+13:00

Crossing the Rimutakas, going home,

and the scraped landscape is in the thick

of it – although thick isn’t the word, really

– tender the cloud stroking the cut earth,

tender the light as it feels its way through.

All is gauzy. Filtered. The blue

of the sheep truck we lose on the bends

the only colour. See, Helen, you can

touch clouds. Live in them, even. Tenderly,

we make our way up and over. So

light, so lit, we’re luminous. It’s like flying,

and all we talk about on the way down.

Mary McCallum

Yes I have posted this poem before but I am doing it again because I'll be going over the Rimutakas this Saturday with fellow poet John Horrocks in my speedy Suzuki Swift to take part in the Greytown Arts Festival.

When we get there, I'll be leaving this poem in unexpected places as part of a groovy little event called Free Delivery. John and Saradha and Pat and Madeleine and a bunch of other poets will join me. A great idea by Wairarapa local Madeleine Slavick who has also organised a poetry reading at 5 pm on Saturday in the Village Art Shop for us all. Believe me, it will be fun. Wairarapa poetry gigs always are.