From ‘Appointment with Sophie Calle’ by Paula Green (a taster)

Young Girl’s Dream When I was seven I believed in God when I was eleven I

believed in the difficult ease of words when I was fifteen I believed I would

always paint when I was twenty-one I painted myself half dressed by my

bedroom mirror in a range of browns a few years later I shut my eyes on my

brushes I opened them years later when I saw Van Gogh’s Starry Night and

so I fell in love again

…

The Break-up You hear all kinds of stories about love discoveries that lead to

love break-ups but I have never reached my hand in a coat pocket nor under

a car seat to find a bundle of letters nor a strange receipt I cannot open my

own break-ups and share the details these were grey areas is this over where

does that part end where does this part begin if I dig hard enough I might 

find grey pain although the last exit was a sharp and sudden jolt as I left with

only my car keys then a few days later S bumped into me in a record store

and followed me around the shop with his own way of ending ‘I will follow

you to the end of the earth and kill you’ I was out of his life

…

The Erection You have the habit of catching me out with your confessions

I have never written about sex in my poetry invented or otherwise I have

erected all kinds of walls around these things I withhold in other words my 

autobiography is always selective

…

The Rival Thérèse Lloyd has started a trend last night I dreamt a James

Brown dream James Brown the poet not the singer a few weeks ago I 

heard Chris Knox talking on the radio to Kim Hill about his stage antics

with a razor blade and so in my dream James Brown decided to step out of

character and do some stage tricks too before he started doing his poems he

ate excrement and drank Coca-Cola when he had finished he kissed the air

with his fingers he then went into a great performance of a long poem that

he knew by heart he kept looking at me in the audience as if to say I know

you are behind this so watch it I blushed and blamed Julia Morison for using

excrement in her paintings when I woke in the dark I realised I had to have

composed the poem coming out of his mouth but I couldn’t remember any

of the words Wystan Curnow was tucked in the dark at the back of a room

with a lectern light he was giving a lecture on the futility of confessions this

became the dream of the poem I have never received

...

                                            Editor, Helen Rickerby

One of the cool things about the Tuesday Poem, and having your turn at being the editor of tis hub blog especially, is having the opportunity to share your favourite poems with other people. ‘Appointment with Sophie Calle’ is one of my favourite poems, and I would love to have shared the whole thing with you, but it’s a very long poem. So I’ve just chosen four little pieces, which are poems in themselves, to act as a taster. I hope you’ll go and seek it out and read the whole thing. You’ll find it in Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins, which was published by Auckland University Press in 2007.

It's a wonderful book, but this poem (or poem sequence - with long poems divided into sections like this, there is always that dilemma of whether it's a poem or a sequence, or both) is a stand out for me, and one I've returned to over and over. The Sophie Calle of the title is a French conceptual artist - I hadn't heard of her before reading this poem, but her artwork is worth reading about. She is someone who weaves lives - her own and other people's - into art. One project involved getting her mother to hire a private investigator to follow Calle around and take photographs of her. He didn't know she knew he was following her, and she led him around places that meant something to her. The aim was an attempt 'to provide photographic evidence of my own existence'.

In Making Lists for Frances Hodgkins Green was doing something analogous I think - weaving bits of her own life into art. She says of this book 'as I lay in bed for months recovering from an illness I decided to write an autobiography in the light of art'. In this and other poems in the book she is responding the work of other artists - painters and writers. Each piece in 'Appointment with Sophie Calle' takes the title of an artwork by Calle as its beginning and jumping-off point for a little nugget of story, which I am assuming to be autobiographical, but who can be sure. The little stories are charming, quirky, serious and funny by turns - sometimes all at once.

I chose these four pieces because they were some of my favourites, because I think they show a bit of the range of the whole, and because I think they express one of the themes of the poem, and the collection: the tension in self revelation, especially for this poet. As she says in 'The Erection': 'I have erected all kinds of walls around these things I withhold in other words my autobiography is always selective'.

One of the most striking things about this poem is the lack of punctuation - and the fact that its still perfectly comprehensible. Without the usual restraints of commas and fullstops, the words tumble out, flow out, gush out. Wonderful!

Paula Green is the author of five collections of  poetry, most recently Slip Stream (AUP 2010). She's also published a number of children's books, and co-wrote 99 Ways into New Zealand Poetry (Random House, 2010) with Harry Ricketts. She has recently edited a book of New Zealand love poetry, Dear Heart, which will be published in April. There's an interesting interview with her online here: http://lumiere.net.nz/reader/arts.php/item/1615, and you can view her reading some poems from Making Lists for Francis Hodgkins, including 'The Rival', here on the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre website: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/green/index.asp.

And I hope some of the other Tuesday Poems in the right sidebar will catch your fancy - do click on some.


Helen Rickerby is a poet from Wellington, where she works a day job as web editor. In what's left of her time she also publishes books as Seraph Press and is co-managing editor of JAAM magazine. She's published two collections of poetry and a handbound chapbook Heading North. She blogs at http://wingedink.blogspot.com/.

Two Poems by Dorianne Laux

DARK CHARMS

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:

burly summers and unslept nights in deep

lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.

Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,

the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,

the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail

no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.

The clear water we drank as thirsty children

still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then

we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.

The old tunes play and continue to move us

in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,

lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.

We continue to speak, if only in whispers,

to something inside us that longs to be named.

We name it the past and drag it behind us,

bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,

dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

CHER

I wanted to be Cher, tall

as a glass of iced tea,

her bony shoulders draped

with a curtain of dark hair

that plunged straight down,

the cut tips brushing

her non-existent butt.

I wanted to wear a lantern

for a hat, a cabbage, a piñata

and walk in thigh high boots

with six inch heels that buttoned

up the back. I wanted her

rouged cheek bones and her

throaty panache, her voice

of gravel and clover, the hokum

of her clothes: black fishnet

and pink pom-poms, frilled

halter tops, fringed bells

and her thin strip of waist

with the bullet hole navel.

Cher standing with her skinny arm

slung around Sonny’s thick neck,

posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,

The Leaning Tower of Pisa,

The Great Wall of China,

The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling

for the camera with her crooked

teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun

bouncing off the bump on her nose.

Give me back the old Cher,

the gangly, imperfect girl

before the shaving knife

took her, before they shoved

pillows in her tits, injected

the lumpy gel into her lips.

Take me back to the woman

I wanted to be, stalwart

and silly, smart as her lion

tamer’s whip, my body a torch

stretched the length of the polished

piano, legs bent at the knee, hair

cascading down over Sonny’s blunt

fingers as he pummeled the keys,

singing in a sloppy alto

the oldest, saddest songs.

                                                                                        Editor: Eileen Moeller

Dorianne Laux’s poems bring a gravitas and solidity to the ordinary aspects of American life, transforming and making them numinous, instructive, cause for celebration. Her work is brutally honest, and yet full of a compassion that can transform the difficult aspects of our daily lives, make them seem more beautiful, funny, lyrical, deeply human, clearly meaningful. 

I love that she writes about Cher and Mick Jagger, about waitressing in the 60’s, about old boyfriends, about being a strong woman growing up in the 60's, about surviving in the millennium, working through the existential issues that plague us all. Laux is a poet beloved to many of us in the U.S., and one of our most generous, most effective teachers. 

Dorianne Laux

Her most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Oregon Book Award and The Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

This week's editor, Eileen Moeller, lives in Philadelphia, PA. Her poetry blog, titled, And So I Sing: Poems and Iconography is at http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com

Check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar. 

Haiku by Kobayashi Issa translated and read by Robert Hass

                                                  Editor Mary McCallum

Kobayashi Issa June 15, 1763 - November 19, 1827


Love them! A deliciously irreverent way to kick off 2012 - and they feel so fresh and contemporary, and yet the poet died over 180 years ago.

According to Wikipedia, Kobayashi Issa wrote over 20,000 haiku - compared with the more famous Basho's 2,000 - and of those he wrote 54 haiku on the snail, 15 on the toad, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on the firefly, more than 150 on the mosquito, 90 on flies, over 100 on fleas and nearly 90 on the cicada, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures alone.

Robert Hass is himself a celebrated American poet. I carry this poem of his in my wallet.

Haiku: 'the perfect poetic form for our time'? Check out the video below and then try the other Tuesday poems in the sidebar posted by our 30 poets, written by themselves or by poets they admire. We're here every Tuesday. Happy New Year.



This week's editor Mary McCallum is a poet and novelist who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the curator of Tuesday Poem with Claire Beynon (Dunedin). Mary also teaches creative writing, reviews books and works in a bookshop. She is currently working on poems for a Fringe Festival exhibition Translucent Landscapes and blogs at O Audacious Book.  

Christmas with Dylan Thomas!

Wherever you are and whatever you believe, Christmas has become a kind of universal festival for sharing with friends, giving gifts and remembering those who aren't quite so fortunate.

In the Middle East, our Muslim neighbours celebrated with us (and we celebrated Eidd with them), and this year we're invited to share the day with Israeli friends in Italy (it's Hannukkah at the moment).  There are also Scandinavian and Dutch communities in Pietrasanta and they celebrate different things on different days and, back home in northern England, the Solstice festival will be in full swing because the 21st is the day when the sun begins its long journey back towards summer.

So it was very important to me to find a piece of poetry both gloriously festive and also inclusive.  Much rummaging about in books and Google!  Then, suddenly, it became clear. One of  my great childhood memories is listening to Dylan Thomas's 'A Child's Christmas in Wales'.  As an adult I loved reading it to my own children, and I thought that it would be nice to share it with you all.   Poetry as story-telling, language as music, rooted in the old Welsh oral tradition.

                                                                    Editor: Kathleen Jones



If the video doesn't work, please follow this link.

Whatever your beliefs, and whatever you're doing this week, we in the Tuesday Poem community wish you peace, health, wealth, creativity and happiness - oh!  and the very best of luck -  for the coming year.
Thank you to our regular readers and supporters and those who just stop by.

For more Tuesday Poems, please click on the sidebar.

Edited this week by UK author and poet Kathleen Jones who also lives in Italy.  You can find her Tuesday Poem at www.kathleenjonesauthor.blogspot.com and one of her poems is featured on Helen Lowe's blog this week. 

My Life by Lyn Hejinian

Extract 

You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon. My father had filled an old apothecary jar with what he called "sea glass," bits of old bottles rounded and textured by the sea, so abundant on beaches. There is no solitude. It buries itself in veracity. It is as if one splashed in the water lost by one's tears. My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don't mind, or I won't mind, where the verb "to care" might multiply. The pilot of the little airplane had forgotten to notify the airport of his approach, so that when the lights of the plane in the night were first spotted, the air raid sirens went off, and the entire city on that coast went dark. He was taking a drink of water and the light was growing dim. My mother stood at the window watching the only lights that were visible, circling over the darkened city in search of the hidden airport. Unhappily, time seems more normative than place. Whether breathing or holding the breath, it was the same thing, driving through the tunnel from one sun to the next under a hot brown hill. She sunned the baby for sixty seconds, leaving him naked except for a blue cotton sunbonnet. At night, to close off the windows from view of the street, my grandmother pulled down the window shades, never loosening the curtains, a gauze starched too stiff to hang properly down. I sat on the windowsill singing sunny lunny teena, ding-dang-dong. Out there is an aging magician who needs a tray of ice in order to turn his bristling breath into steam. He broke the radio silence. Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy. What one passes in the Plymouth. It is the wind slamming the doors. All that is nearly incommunicable to my friends. Velocity and throat verisimilitude. Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay, floating at such a distance from the hill that they appeared to be making no progress. And for once to a country that did not speak another language. To follow the progress of ideas, or that particular line of reasoning, so full of surprises and unexpected correlations, was somehow to take a vacation. Still, you had to wonder where they had gone, since you could speak of reappearance. A blue room is always dark. Everything on the boardwalk was shooting toward the sky. It was not specific to any year, but very early.

                                         Editor: Bernadette Keating

The first time I had the pleasure of hearing Lyn Hejinian was her lecture ‘The quest for knowledge in the western poem,' (free under the Naropa University Archive Project and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets) which introduced me to her particularness about language.

The copy I have of Hejinian's My Life esteems both its wide readership by 'hundreds of colleges and university courses around the world', as well as status: a 'great work of contemporary literature.' Some are obviously convinced as to its merit, and searching the work's title reveals pleas from confused students who fail to discern its worth.

Yet, the more I read of My Life, the more I'm convinced it is a praiseworthy attempt at documenting the vagaries of memory, thought and nostalgia, which necessitates experimentation and a commitment to language. Hejinian talks about being 'in place', and the self awareness such a statement relies on. As an autobiography, the reader is allowed into much of Hejinian's personal life through these frank phrases, however one really only ends up with a small sense of her way of thinking, less tangible events, people or places.

Originally thirty-eight stanzas of thirty-eight lines—Hejinian’s age in 1980—the updated work is forty-five stanzas of forty-five lines. What I sense from this work is that perhaps to characterize a life by its beginning, middle and end, is to restrain the multiple possibilities of thought and action that occur every second and our ability to reference both past and future without reference to structure or according to entertainment value.

With that in mind, this poem as an autobiography works in a way that I could not have expected until reading it and seeking to understand the poet's purpose.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor, Bernadette Keating, has just completed a postgraduate diploma in art history at Victoria University. She also writes poetry and occasionally blogs about writing and art. Bernadette lives in Wellington, New Zealand.

"The Artist Knows—" by Helen Bascand

how Leda must sit: how she will pick
feathers from her breast: how
the frame of an hour waits for more –
a soft whistle, chill of shadow, dark kite –
he comes.


Sky wraps itself in the wing-span of storm-
brilliance. And the cold whirr of myth turns her hot.
Smell of grass and mute desire, trap her under
rough wings, grasping for the soft down of his belly.
Even a Sun turns aside.


The artist knows the hard ground they lie on: how
a god wraps lust in beautiful places, how trees bend,
flowers lend fragrance. And how she will fool herself,
whisper phrases for him – he will peck
the words from her throat.
Who can deny a god?


Leda un-twines his neck, her legs, his wings. He sleeps
as she holds him, and she clutches crushed
tenderness in a raw cleft, beneath an arched sky –
She’s a woman –
a sackcloth of afterwards – hanging her
crumpled garments like plucked purple skins, broken
eggshells already spilling.
At the river,
his shadow dips, the bony keel
of disguise shrinks, the bastard wing becomes
a god’s hand, raised to bless the empty
hollow where he took her. Feathers
take a last spiral flight –


and he is gone.
Lust remains.


*


Leda lies
back in the marital bed
under the soiled covers – a haze
of white rain falling, sinking
into soft easy ground.

                                      Editor: Joanna Preston

Helen Bascand is a Christchurch poet, and stalwart of the Canterbury haiku scene. Her first collection, Windows on the Morning Side, was published by Sudden Valley Press in 2001. Her second, Into the Vanishing Point, was published by Steele Roberts in 2007.


Plenty of poets have written about Leda and the swan, with varying levels of success and/or misogyny (surely I’m not the only one who wants to slap Yeats for the “feathered glory” line?). What I love about Helen’s poem is that we see Leda as Leda, not just victim, or vessel, or mother-to-be (of Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor and Pollux). She is a woman and a wife, and someone with thoughts and desires of her very own.

I love the way this poem opens up the question of what Leda did afterwards, how she went back to her husband, literally as well as metaphorically. (Just imagine the conversation – ‘so, my love, what did you do today while I was out Kinging?’) And I love the ambiguity of the first two lines in the last stanza, and the way that last line could be simple factual description, or a hint of how and why the wife of a king might take a little walk on the wild side …


“The Artist Knows—” is published on Tuesday Poem with Helen’s permission.


Joanna Preston is a poet, editor and freelance creative writing tutor from New Zealand. Her first collection, The Summer King, won both the 2009 Kathleen Grattan Award and the 2010 Mary Gilmore Award. Visit her Tuesday Poem at A Dark Feathered Art and the other Tuesday Poets using our blog list.

Polonius: Old Poet by Harry Ricketts

everything seems disconnected

mottled hands mischievous eyes
rough frosted hair and disobedient brown shoes
cheeks with the blush of mulled wine
your soft-vowelled Scottish blur

you shuffle frailly inside your suit
the blood must move so slowly now
your mind still moving in worlds not realised
you shared the air that Eliot breathed

you know we all tell stories
in coffee-rooms and corridors
ironically envious of your eccentricity
how once you said:
‘Which way was I going?
Ah, thank you, that way
– then I have had lunch.’
but Polonius
you are so far out
you’re on your own
way back

though it’s true you stalk dead minotaurs
in labyrinths where we lack the clue
and Hamlet is dead, Polonius,
and Ophelia too
and maybe you’ll never write
all those poems you promised to
you did once live in Elsinore
and for that
                  we envy you



                                        Editor: Keith Westwater

Harry Ricketts teaches English Literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. He has published eight collections of poems; his next, Just Then, will appear from Victoria University Press in March.

‘Polonius: Old Poet’ appeared in Nothing To Declare (HeadworX, 1998). I like the picture it paints of an aged poet, George Fraser, who in turn has likened himself to Hamlet’s Polonius. I also like the layered references to Hamlet and the respectful tone of the poem.

The poem is the first of a suite entitled Three Poems for George Fraser. Harry prefaced the poems with the following note:

‘GS Fraser, the Scottish poet and critic died in 1980. In one of his last poems ‘Older’, he cast himself as a kind of latter-day Polonius figure. ‘Polonius: Old Poet’ (written while George was still alive) was intended as a reply to ‘Older’. The other two poems were written shortly after his death.’

Harry’s poem is posted on Tuesday Poem with his permission.

Keith Westwater is a poet from Welington, New Zealand, whose debut prize-winning collection Tongues of Ash was recently published by Brisbane-based Interactive Publications. Visit Keith Westwater's Writing and the other Tuesday Poets in our sidebar.

pidgin peace meal by Iain Britton

the man

in feathers

shuts his eyes          squats

amongst jacaranda fallout

drinks cold tea /

forgets to speak up /        as if his beginning

had its faults in a syllabic nod

in the screwed-up mechanism of a missing tomorrow

#

he spills daylight

steps on bones

washes his feet / my feet

blackens my shoes / whitens my face

for the photographer
at the gate

#

I tick all the right boxes

check names              tickets      

the red and blue ribbons
the winners of categories

I cross out others          with heads tucked into chests

convinced every fast-food supper is their last /  every scrap of blue sky/
field of lupins /    every girl washed by the sea /       

#

the man

paints a tree

a hot pool of mud

a gap where  molecules breed


he pushes me into blurred possibilities

where cargo-cult customers line up

to dismember old myths


flying nuns grab at wasted prayers

the city

exists

on the edge of a steaming oven


I read a book

see for myself how characters are hung out to dry

and how they live


the heat
is in the language
in the breathing fragments

#

my favourite pastime

is watching my neighbour

through a hole in the fence

dance       birdlike

into a thanksgiving heap


he offers cold tea

to whoever he thinks is thirsty

whoever’s hungry


he speaks to a snapshot

a face in a face

he’s cracked and marred

by three score years

of  sucking

on the smell

of an oily rag


he lives in a drought-stricken room

shifts occasionally

a collage of grafted hybrids

sends out mixed signals

of what branch

what fruit

what tugs the belly


why wait for this flawed human product

to track amongst last year’s residue



I bypass today’s callers

meeting outside



staring in

                                                       Editor: Orchid Tierney

Born and educated in Palmerston North, and now teaching in Auckland, Iain Britton is a prolific poet of work with (what I consider) a philosophical-real world engagement. His debut collection, Hauled Head First Into A Leviathan, was published by the esteemed Cinnamon Press in 2008, followed by Liquefaction (Interactive Publications, 2009), Cravings (Oystercatcher Press, 2009) and Punctuated Experimental (Kilmog Press, 2010).

Iain's work is published with permission.

Orchid Tierney is a New Zealand poet who runs Rem Magazine: a NZ Journal of Experimental Writing, and was involved with the Mapping Me anthology of women's writing, although her primary focus at the moment is trying to secure a placement in an MA programme. Visit her at www.orchidtierney.com. 


Please check out the sidebar for other offerings from our Tuesday Poets.

Fortified by David Vincent Smith

There's a stone wall around this heart.
A moat, a marsh, various misleading traps.
The finest model of modern man
I've become. If you wish to touch me

you'll need the skills to siege a castle,

use the backs of alligators as a bridge
to cross the moat. If you want my love
you'll need to navigate past towers. Do this
and perhaps

I'll let you know my name.

There's a drawbridge to this soul, shut and bolted.
I even check the locks twice a day.

My father gave me a shovel at twelve,
and I've been burying my emotions ever since.
So if you leap over the holes, fill them as fast
as they're made, maybe you and I
could hold hands.

I am man, mute of all emotion.

I'd like to think I've done rather well.

I am emotionless, hoping this stone wall won't erode in this forum of openness. I take the truth and start choking it, coping with the slope that leads to a lone abyss. I'd rather have my throat slit than phone home and be open with my folks and shit. I'm speaking the truth. Every man will start quoting it, and every woman will nod her head because they've all grown with it. These broken lips are a growing cyst reflecting the neglected cancer, constantly provoking it. And you'd best believe that I know that it's

the WHOLE damn reason THIS fucking MOAT EXISTS.
The modern man wears his suit like a protective shield
assassinating emotions 'til he forgets to feel.
And yes, [raise fist] this is a weapon I wield.

Men use it to stop
any relationship from getting real.
If those who know me could actually get to know me
I'd deal with the blows dealt then left to fade slowly.

There's a drawbridge to this soul, shut and bolted.
I even check the locks twice a day.

I am man, mute of all emotion.
I'd like to think I've done rather well.


                 Guest Editor: Janet Jackson

David Vincent Smith, or DVS, is a performance poet, emcee, screenwriter and film director from Perth. David's performance of this poem won him the 2010 WA championship of the Australian Poetry Slam. You can watch a rough video of David's performance here.

David's poem is used with permission. Note stanza 9 'I am emotionless...' is supposed to be one long line, but we're not wide enough for that, so five lines it is. 



Tuesday Poem thanks Australian poet Janet Jackson for being our guest editor this week and bringing a performance poet along with her! Janet says she writes poems, songs and prose, performs poetry and music, teaches poetry and creative writing, coordinates Perth Poetry Club, parents and sometimes sleeps. Her publications include 'Coracle' (2009), ‘q finger’ (PressPress 2011), her website Proximity and poems in Fremantle Press's forthcoming eleven-poet volume 'Performance Poets'. Janet was the editor of David Barnes's collection 'Prayers Waiting for God' (Mulla Mulla Press 2011).  


After you've enjoyed David's poem here at the TP hub - visit the sidebar where up to 30 poets from NZ, Australian, the UK and US post poems by themselves or other poets they admire. 

Bookcase Full Of Closed Books Wants To Sing by Joan Fleming

The books are all commuters pressed together on a crowded five o’clock train. Every commuter has a bird, trying to beat its wings, inside their chest. No one talks. No one talks about the furled flock of story harboured by the hard spine, the clamouring dusk chorus, suppressed inside the travelling body. Which hardbacks will open up, tonight? Releasing a piteousness of song, a murmuration, an exaltation, a flight.

                                                  Editor: Helen Heath

This poem is from Joan's debut book of poetry, The Same As Yes, which will be launched on November 17. The whole collection is a series of conversations, beautiful and strange. Everyday things take on their own life, if only we can stop and notice them. I love these mysterious and strange little gems.

Joan Fleming won the Biggs Poetry Prize in 2007, and her work has appeared in Landfall, the Listener, Sport, Turbine and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. She and US poet Emily Toder paired up to produce a chapbook which featured on Tuesday Poem last year. She lives and works between Wellington and Golden Bay.

Joan says:

The poem came about because I have a beautiful, huge, hardback OED thesaurus, and while I hardly ever use it for it's proper purpose (that is, finding better words than the ones I usually choose), I love to read the middle section of the thesaurus which has all kinds of lists: lists of every different sort of hat, lists of the names of diseases, lists of dances, lists of crimes, lists of architectural terms. 

One of the lists is a list of the collective nouns for birds. So, that list, combined with an impulse to imagine the stacked books in a bookshelf as something else entirely, is how this poem was born.

Poem published with permission.

Helen Heath is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Helen's book of poetry, Graft, will be published in May 2012 by VUP. You can read more at her website helenheath.com . Sadly, Helen is leaving Tuesday Poem to go on sabbatical for a little while. She's been an enthusiastic Tuesday Poet since we began in April 2010 - posting all sorts of marvellous poets and poems -- and with Claire Beynon's image, she created our Quill logo. Helen is also so reassuring with her advice on blogging.  We'll miss you, Helen, come back soon. 

Have a look to your right at the sidebar to see all the other wonderful Tuesday Poems this week.

Country Life by David Howard

1)


If things tarnish allegory
if the picture puzzle becomes
commodity, a fruitful but useless
woman marking her birthday
obsessively on friends’ calendars, then

what? You want to object to objects;
a shy child, retire hurt to the countryside
as if it was tabula rasa. The dark –
that’s centuries of varnish.
Get your knife ready.



2)


You think the root is silent
but it grumbles: holding the bank,
that’s harder than dancing
like the leaf – even when frost is expected
and that leaf wants to trade places, to

drop the non-sense of God’s love
which warms beyond knowledge. The leaf
falls silent before the root’s warning:
Yours is the light but mine is the glory…
Cold, the farmer starts his chainsaw.



3)


The wasp that knocks on your windowpane
represented conscience for a younger man –
now it demonstrates partial knowledge,
the limits of will. It is also a wasp
being a wasp.

The wasp never expected to be born
either. When you open
the window it does not come
in, redoubling its efforts to crack
the mystery of what’s clear.



4)


Everything gets burnt: picture perfect
landscape and the figure that moves
across, from left to right
if you’re watching – but you’re not
because you, too, burn

like the shy child who tries to hide,
the wasp that wants to come
through the glass clarified by a kiln
when you were little
and things appeared to be… symbols.



5)


Love isn’t so much an angel as the stump
where a wing used to be. Come middle age
it’s a curiosity, abandoned
like the tractor in a fallow field,
where there were tracks… forget-me-nots.

What confuses you is the clarity of loss.
So many abstracts as you
twist your ankle in a rut, swearing
there is a God. Why are your shoulders
sore? You thought the root was silent.



6)


If allegory tarnishes things
if a puzzle’s the right picture, then
it’s child’s play. Why try to name it?
A name is neither transparent nor opaque –
it clears up nothing.

Nothing is what most of us live on.
Nothing is what most of us live for.
Yours is the glory but mine is the light…
Leaf to root. Such lovely
serrations! This glossy finish.

                                                                      Editor: Catherine Fitchett

Born in Christchurch in 1959, David Howard co-founded Takahe magazine (1989) and the Canterbury Poets Collective (1990). He spent his professional life as a pyrotechnics supervisor whose clients included the All Blacks, Janet Jackson and Metallica. In 2003 he retired to Purakanui in order to write.

David was the inaugural recipient of the New Zealand Society of Authors Mid-Career Writer's Award (2009) for a body of poetry that has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish. In September 2011 he was joint winner of the poetry section of the international literary competition to mark the launching of the USP Press by the University of the South Pacific.

David comments that "For me the making of poetry is inherently private, while the poem itself is inherently public."

Country Life appears in David's new collection the incomplete poems, published by Cold Hub Press, which will be launched in Christchurch on Wednesday November 2nd at 5.30 pm at the CPIT Students Association Hall, 5 Madras St. More of his poems here. 

This week's Tuesday Poem editor, Catherine Fitchett,  lives in Christchurch NZ.  She wrote poems in high school but studied chemistry at university which led to several careers as a forensic scientist/toxicologist, and work in accounting. She returned to writing in 1999 and is the member of a poetry group, The Poetry Chooks, which has published The Chook Book, and Flap, The Chook Book 2. Vist her blog Still Standing on her Head.



When you've got to grips with Country Life, there are more poems waiting in the sidebar where up to 30 Tuesday Poets post poems by themselves or other poets they admire. 

A Birthday Poem by Kendrick Smithyman

This

rather small goat was kneedeep in a paddock.

The paddock entirely was fescue/rye/and clover green.

Also, bushes were there, which are good

for nibbling. Also, for hiding behind.

This small goat was white, like nothing but promise.

She didn't always come when they called her

home, she had her reasons. Families

are like that. Sometimes she came - not announced

through a fence or over a fence - just to see

what was going on. She was, after all, family.

So, I make her, this little ivory would-be nanny,

stand out in a falling dark, twitching her ears,

pricking her lively scut,

at sounds of party

and whether or no she is

at the table she's with them otherwise,

wishing most birthday wishes and that

all manner of things (as surely they will) go well.

This poem is found within the highly recommended pages of Kendrick Smithyman's Selected Poems, published in 1989 by Auckland University Press. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the copyright holder, Margaret Edgcumbe.

Editor: Elizabeth Welsh.

I first encountered New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman's writing five years ago when I enrolled in a 'New Zealand poetry' paper, taught by Peter Simpson, during my Masters at Auckland University. I had no clue who Kendrick Smithyman was, or what his poetry was like, but I did that thing that students often do (and which, incidentally, has driven me crazy since, teaching at University myself) - I liked the sound of it and so committed six months of my year and my degree to learning about him.

It feels rather foolish now to admit such a 'stumbling upon' an author, but I often find, particularly with poets, that this haphazard way is often the best. I found a poet that I loved, such is the way. I spent weeks in the special collections part of the Auckland University library looking over Smithyman's visions and revisions of his work (constant editor and tinker, that he was), intrigued by his dedication and constant belief in Paul Valery's dictum, 'A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned'.

As you can imagine, it took me some time to decide which poem to post this week as the lucky Editor of the Tuesday Poem hub. I was sorely tempted to post 'Communicating' or 'Walk Past Those Houses on a Sunday Morning' - both iconic pieces of New Zealand verse - but instead I opted for a slightly less well known, but, to me, infinitely endearing poem about birthdays and a goat. I must admit, I had a slightly selfish aim in mind, given that this lucky Tuesday is my birthday.

Please click on this link provided and visit the incredible online resource of Kendrick Smithyman's works - Smithyman Online. It boasts the Collected Works 1943-1995, edited and with notes from Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson, as well as a chronology, reviews, etc. It is a veritable treasure trove!

Elizabeth Welsh the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Elizabeth is an academic editor, Katherine Mansfield scholar and poet. For more information about her, please visit her blog.

For more Tuesday Poems, please check out the other blogs in the sidebar where Tuesday Poets post poems by others they admire or poems by themselves. Either way, it's a treasure trove.