Set out along that dark porch they would talk
about which was meaner a rooster
dairy bull coon hound or rattlesnake
one would say leastways a rooster will warn you
the way he crows and struts likewise a rattler
if he don’t get stepped on sound asleep
unlike your copperhead or cottonmouth
another allowed he’d worked around one bull
ol Twitch that once he got his growth
and a taste of what he was after
was mean clear through sundown to sunup
laying to get you don’t come anywhere close
took three bullets to drop him had to grind
every bit for hamburger talk about tough
though we had that one sneaky rooster
would jump you out of the blue
if he’d been the size of ol Twitch
woulda been nothing left alive around for miles
well what about coon hounds that one Lacey has
he calls the Prince of Darkness
had to keep him chained up once he treed his first
else he’d hunt every night to exhaustion
bite anything walked past even Lacey himself
finally the storekeep who needed his rest
chimed in to try and end it said
when old Hennemeyer got word he had
the cancer tried to drink himself to death
then woke up still alive he went to check
himself in the mirror what do you think
he saw there staring back
meaner than him by a long shot
Editor: T Clear
I know few poets who can deliver a poem with more eloquence and presence than Paul Hunter. When he takes out his "come to Jesus" voice, there's nothing to be done but to submit to listening.
Paul has the kind of voice where I often don't know where the conversation ends and the poem begins. When I met with him recently, we were standing in his study, and he showed me a Farm Journal periodical where he was a featured poet, and all of a sudden I realized he was several lines into his poem, standing close enough so that I could hear the poem itself breathe. And we were no longer in his built-in-1912 Seattle house -- surrounded by stacks of books, guitars and mandolins, windows looking west to the Olympic Mountains -- but on a hillside in rural Indiana, years earlier in the 20th century, surrounded by cows.
In this short video, he's standing out on the hillside of his back yard, on a March afternoon that began with snow and ended in brilliant sunshine and this poem — Paul Hunter indeed "talking mean" —
Paul Hunter has lent a hand where it was needed—as teacher, performer, grassroots arts activist, worker on the land, and shade-tree mechanic. For the past 18 years he has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, currently including 26 books and over 60 broadsides.
His poems have appeared in Alaska Fisherman's Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, The Small Farmer's Journal, The Southern Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in six full-length books and three chapbooks His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in The New York Times and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, and a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, appeared in 2008. He has been a featured poem on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. His recent prose book, One Seed To Another: The New Small Farming, was published by the Small Farmer's Journal in 2010. A fourth collection of faring poems, Stubble Field, is due out from Silverfish Review Press, in May 2012.
---
This week's editor T. Clear is a Seattle poet whose work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry Northwest, Atlanta Review, Seattle Review, Slipstream, Calyx and Hobble Creek Review. Her poem "Holy Goose" is forthcoming in the new anthology Pacific Poetry Project, and she is a founding board member of Floating Bridge Press. She works overseeing production and shipping for a Seattle glass artist, and can be found online here.
Please do check the right-hand sidebar for other Tuesday Poems selected by our line-up of 30 poets from NZ, Australia, US and UK!
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Return to the Ferry Hotel by Ross Donlon
I got news of his death around five. He was at the Ferry Hotel. He’d been there on and off
for a year. The rest of the time you wouldn’t know where he was. Likely you’d see him an alley next to a restaurant. Or on a park bench, looking at the grass with a pint in his pocket. Destitute is a nice word for where Red had got. His red hair had about turned white. He’d been a medium built man with a thick strong neck and set of shoulders that would fill a uniform. Lately he’d had trouble holding up a suit.
I wondered where he got the money for lodgings. Maybe he panhandled or got some welfare. He was an enlisted man. He was particular about that. Not drafted. He hadn’t
waited to be called from the motor production line. But at thirty four he was eligible for nothing. Truth is I don’t know how he lived those last years. I only know he had been in Vets’ hospital for liver damage. Jaundiced is nice word for the yellow tinge that had seeped into his skin and made abrasions hard to heal.
I hailed a cab and when I said Ferry Hotel, Embarcadero Street, the cabbie shot me a sideways look. The Ferry is down the end of the Embaracadero. The deep end. It’s a long street that curves the length of the dock. In the centre is the Y.M.C.A. with flags on top. It was built in the twenties before the crash. It looks like a bank. Red stayed there when he first came from Louisville. But the rooms still cost, even for an ex serviceman, and there was no work, or not enough to live on, straight after the war
The Ferry Hotel goes back to an older time in San Francisco, a three story box
of rat traps with a fire escape out back. A ferry still took short trip commuters
to work from across the bay but most ferries used the main terminal across from the Y.
The Ferry had been a squat red brick building but now it was black. Windows once picked out in white were grey. On the front the windows were the opaque bubble type that makes what happens on the other side look like it’s underwater.
This would have suited anyone looking in or out. Over the street there was a set of medium sized buildings like broken teeth. A post war recession in property meant the wrecking ball hadn’t got to them yet. But it was swinging. Inside, most denizens of the Ferry Hotel would have been happy not to be seen there. Occasionally an out of towner would book by mistake for a few days. Or a salesman would cut budget on a quick trip. Otherwise the Ferry catered for short-timers or men who had managed to get a break from streets, parks and alleys.
During the post-war recession all big cities hosted a small colony of ex-servicemen who had made it back from war but not made it into civilian life. You felt both sorry and scared if you saw one. They were usually alone as they rifled through a garbage bin, or came towards you with everything they owned on their back.
I paid the cabbie and booked him to come back in twenty minutes. That would be long enough for what I had to do. The foyer had once had a piece of light patterned carpet down to the door, but that was long ago. Green linoleum slid from what was left. The desk was empty. The sound of a blues song was coming from the office behind a half closed door. It could have been Billie and I Cover the Waterfront. That would have been cute, but I didn’t wait to hear.
I knew where he was.
I took the stairs. They’re faster than the lifts in these joints, and probably safer. On each
floor a john and bathroom waited on one end of the hall, fire escape on the other. On the
third floor I turned right.
I wanted to check on Fred Lovell who had the room next to Red. Lovell had called Emergency that morning but Emergency hadn’t come for another sick rheumy at the Ferry. Lovell must have been a good egg because he had called in later to see how Red had been getting along when he came home. By then Red was too late for Emergency. Lovell told the clerk and called help again. They were still in no hurry to get to the Ferry.
Then it occurred to me he might be waiting down in the office now with the clerk, taking a shot or two while he waited. He’d have a few questions to answer when they arrived, not
that he done anything but try to be a Samaritan.
In some ways, this made it easier. I knew Red had the next door room. Forty-five. Old locks like these don’t need a science degree to get in. I could leave the door open and hear the elevator crank up the floors and be on the stairs before it arrived.
The room was on a corner and the first thing I noticed was the light. There were windows back and side with the bed head on the back wall. He had pulled all the curtains back hard, one even rucked up on itself to let more light in. It had been a cool day in August, blue, cold and still. An early autumn after a hot summer. But the room was flooded with late afternoon light. A window was open. You could hear the sounds of the waterfront. Gulls and shipping. A horn echoed, warning someone. Seagulls propped on windowsills like trapeze artists waiting to fly.
The room was neat. I thought it might be the way a soldier had been trained to keep his kit and bed in the barracks.
And there he was.
In a sitting position, as I’d been told, fully dressed with his back against a dresser, looking, more or less, toward the window. He’d taken some care. His shirt and pants were clean and so was his light jacket. He had a loafer on one foot. The other shoe was nearby, as though he’d been trying to get it on when he fell. There was an abrasion on his forehead and some other marks on his face, as though he’d had trouble shaving. His face was a Van Gogh yellow.
I stood in front for him for a few minutes, then crouched down and looked closely at his
face. I smelt a musky odour coming both from him and his clothing. Stale booze, maybe.
But something else. From the liver, probably. If he weren’t dead you would say he was in a kind of trance, as though Death had hypnotized him before making final arrangements.
I got up and walked over to the windows. One looked into the damp brick wall of the warehouse next door. The few windows were barred. The window looking out back was a different story. From there you could see a slab of San Francisco Bay and spans of the Golden Gate Bridge. It looked the way it does in some stamps, from an angle underneath. Now, nearing nightfall, a parade of coloured lights was heading out of the city. I suspected that he’d stayed in the shadow of the Bridge, drinking, as the ships he could never take pulled out.
I didn’t touch him. I could see all I needed to. I felt the way you do sometimes do when you see a statue you want to touch, but something makes you stop. He was the man I’d seen in photographs; his wedding with Peg, skylarking with army buddies and the last one, taken when he left Louisville for San Francisco.
He had changed a lot since then. The red hair that gave him his nickname, thinning, almost white, his body wasted, as though he’d disappeared into himself in the five years he’d been in ‘Frisco.
I wondered if he’d kept photographs of us, Peg and me. I knew she’d sent them from
Sydney. His mother and seen them and commented on how healthy I was. But there was nothing on the bureau. Maybe somewhere else.
I’d seen what I came to see. It wasn’t making peace. There’d been no war between us. I couldn’t blame him for something I didn’t know. And I didn’t know a lot of things. Why
didn’t he go home to Kentucky? Was he sick with something else he brought home from New Guinea? Had he fought it? The last question was important.
The elevator started clanking, like something out of a horror movie. But it wasn’t like that. Although he’d been dead for sixty years and I’d thought a bit about it, I’d never tried to see him face to face before and this was the closest I was going to get.
From The Blue Dressing Gown & Other Poems by Ross Donlon published by Profile Poetry
Editor: Jennifer Compton
Ross Donlon is an Australian and he lives in Castlemaine in Victoria. He convenes the wonderful Castlemaine Readings in the Guildford Hotel. The title poem of his collection was a winner of the Arvon International Poetry Competition (the Wenlock Poetry Festival category.)
The cover photo on the book shows a picture of Ross’s American father whom he never met, and who died while he was a baby. Return To The Ferry Hotel is a very powerful imagining of a strange meeting.
You can find more about Ross Donlon at http://www.rossdonlon.com/
Remember to check out the poets and poems in the sidebar.
Jennifer Compton is an award-winning New Zealand-born playwright and poet who lives in Australia but has had two recent writers' residencies in New Zealand at the Randell Cottage in Wellington and Massey University, Palmerston North. Jen also won the Kathleen Grattan Prize (2010) in NZ for an unpublished collection, which was published as 'This City' (OUP 2011).
for a year. The rest of the time you wouldn’t know where he was. Likely you’d see him an alley next to a restaurant. Or on a park bench, looking at the grass with a pint in his pocket. Destitute is a nice word for where Red had got. His red hair had about turned white. He’d been a medium built man with a thick strong neck and set of shoulders that would fill a uniform. Lately he’d had trouble holding up a suit.
I wondered where he got the money for lodgings. Maybe he panhandled or got some welfare. He was an enlisted man. He was particular about that. Not drafted. He hadn’t
waited to be called from the motor production line. But at thirty four he was eligible for nothing. Truth is I don’t know how he lived those last years. I only know he had been in Vets’ hospital for liver damage. Jaundiced is nice word for the yellow tinge that had seeped into his skin and made abrasions hard to heal.
I hailed a cab and when I said Ferry Hotel, Embarcadero Street, the cabbie shot me a sideways look. The Ferry is down the end of the Embaracadero. The deep end. It’s a long street that curves the length of the dock. In the centre is the Y.M.C.A. with flags on top. It was built in the twenties before the crash. It looks like a bank. Red stayed there when he first came from Louisville. But the rooms still cost, even for an ex serviceman, and there was no work, or not enough to live on, straight after the war
The Ferry Hotel goes back to an older time in San Francisco, a three story box
of rat traps with a fire escape out back. A ferry still took short trip commuters
to work from across the bay but most ferries used the main terminal across from the Y.
The Ferry had been a squat red brick building but now it was black. Windows once picked out in white were grey. On the front the windows were the opaque bubble type that makes what happens on the other side look like it’s underwater.
This would have suited anyone looking in or out. Over the street there was a set of medium sized buildings like broken teeth. A post war recession in property meant the wrecking ball hadn’t got to them yet. But it was swinging. Inside, most denizens of the Ferry Hotel would have been happy not to be seen there. Occasionally an out of towner would book by mistake for a few days. Or a salesman would cut budget on a quick trip. Otherwise the Ferry catered for short-timers or men who had managed to get a break from streets, parks and alleys.
During the post-war recession all big cities hosted a small colony of ex-servicemen who had made it back from war but not made it into civilian life. You felt both sorry and scared if you saw one. They were usually alone as they rifled through a garbage bin, or came towards you with everything they owned on their back.
I paid the cabbie and booked him to come back in twenty minutes. That would be long enough for what I had to do. The foyer had once had a piece of light patterned carpet down to the door, but that was long ago. Green linoleum slid from what was left. The desk was empty. The sound of a blues song was coming from the office behind a half closed door. It could have been Billie and I Cover the Waterfront. That would have been cute, but I didn’t wait to hear.
I knew where he was.
I took the stairs. They’re faster than the lifts in these joints, and probably safer. On each
floor a john and bathroom waited on one end of the hall, fire escape on the other. On the
third floor I turned right.
I wanted to check on Fred Lovell who had the room next to Red. Lovell had called Emergency that morning but Emergency hadn’t come for another sick rheumy at the Ferry. Lovell must have been a good egg because he had called in later to see how Red had been getting along when he came home. By then Red was too late for Emergency. Lovell told the clerk and called help again. They were still in no hurry to get to the Ferry.
Then it occurred to me he might be waiting down in the office now with the clerk, taking a shot or two while he waited. He’d have a few questions to answer when they arrived, not
that he done anything but try to be a Samaritan.
In some ways, this made it easier. I knew Red had the next door room. Forty-five. Old locks like these don’t need a science degree to get in. I could leave the door open and hear the elevator crank up the floors and be on the stairs before it arrived.
The room was on a corner and the first thing I noticed was the light. There were windows back and side with the bed head on the back wall. He had pulled all the curtains back hard, one even rucked up on itself to let more light in. It had been a cool day in August, blue, cold and still. An early autumn after a hot summer. But the room was flooded with late afternoon light. A window was open. You could hear the sounds of the waterfront. Gulls and shipping. A horn echoed, warning someone. Seagulls propped on windowsills like trapeze artists waiting to fly.
The room was neat. I thought it might be the way a soldier had been trained to keep his kit and bed in the barracks.
And there he was.
In a sitting position, as I’d been told, fully dressed with his back against a dresser, looking, more or less, toward the window. He’d taken some care. His shirt and pants were clean and so was his light jacket. He had a loafer on one foot. The other shoe was nearby, as though he’d been trying to get it on when he fell. There was an abrasion on his forehead and some other marks on his face, as though he’d had trouble shaving. His face was a Van Gogh yellow.
I stood in front for him for a few minutes, then crouched down and looked closely at his
face. I smelt a musky odour coming both from him and his clothing. Stale booze, maybe.
But something else. From the liver, probably. If he weren’t dead you would say he was in a kind of trance, as though Death had hypnotized him before making final arrangements.
I got up and walked over to the windows. One looked into the damp brick wall of the warehouse next door. The few windows were barred. The window looking out back was a different story. From there you could see a slab of San Francisco Bay and spans of the Golden Gate Bridge. It looked the way it does in some stamps, from an angle underneath. Now, nearing nightfall, a parade of coloured lights was heading out of the city. I suspected that he’d stayed in the shadow of the Bridge, drinking, as the ships he could never take pulled out.
I didn’t touch him. I could see all I needed to. I felt the way you do sometimes do when you see a statue you want to touch, but something makes you stop. He was the man I’d seen in photographs; his wedding with Peg, skylarking with army buddies and the last one, taken when he left Louisville for San Francisco.
He had changed a lot since then. The red hair that gave him his nickname, thinning, almost white, his body wasted, as though he’d disappeared into himself in the five years he’d been in ‘Frisco.
I wondered if he’d kept photographs of us, Peg and me. I knew she’d sent them from
Sydney. His mother and seen them and commented on how healthy I was. But there was nothing on the bureau. Maybe somewhere else.
I’d seen what I came to see. It wasn’t making peace. There’d been no war between us. I couldn’t blame him for something I didn’t know. And I didn’t know a lot of things. Why
didn’t he go home to Kentucky? Was he sick with something else he brought home from New Guinea? Had he fought it? The last question was important.
The elevator started clanking, like something out of a horror movie. But it wasn’t like that. Although he’d been dead for sixty years and I’d thought a bit about it, I’d never tried to see him face to face before and this was the closest I was going to get.
From The Blue Dressing Gown & Other Poems by Ross Donlon published by Profile Poetry
Editor: Jennifer Compton
Ross Donlon is an Australian and he lives in Castlemaine in Victoria. He convenes the wonderful Castlemaine Readings in the Guildford Hotel. The title poem of his collection was a winner of the Arvon International Poetry Competition (the Wenlock Poetry Festival category.) The cover photo on the book shows a picture of Ross’s American father whom he never met, and who died while he was a baby. Return To The Ferry Hotel is a very powerful imagining of a strange meeting.You can find more about Ross Donlon at http://www.rossdonlon.com/
Remember to check out the poets and poems in the sidebar.
Jennifer Compton is an award-winning New Zealand-born playwright and poet who lives in Australia but has had two recent writers' residencies in New Zealand at the Randell Cottage in Wellington and Massey University, Palmerston North. Jen also won the Kathleen Grattan Prize (2010) in NZ for an unpublished collection, which was published as 'This City' (OUP 2011).
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Five Quartets by John Tranter
1
All might have been speculation.
John Tranter says, “This poem is T.S. Eliot's Five Quartets with most of the words removed,” so you can tell he has a good sense of humour as well as of poetry. I love this poem's wit, intelligence and structure, and the way it forms a dance with Eliot's poem: that reminds me of Leonard Cohen's line about 'our steps will always rhyme'.
All might have been speculation.
What might have been opened?
I do not inhabit the garden.
There they were dignified, invisible,
over the dead bird, in response to
the flowers that are our guests,
in the drained pool.
Dry water, bird children,
garlic and mud in the blood
dance along the sodden floor.
Below, the practical "Erhebung" without
elimination, its partial ecstasy,
its horror. Yet the body cannot
allow a little dim light: neither
rotation nor strained fancies
with no men. Bits of wind in unwholesome
eructation, the torpid gloomy hills of Putney,
twittering into inoperancy and the other.
Abstention from its metalled bell
carries the cling wing.
2
Words move the Chinese violin, while
the words between the foliage
waste a factory, or a by-pass.
There is a time for the wind to break
and to shake the field-mouse with a silent motto.
You lean against a van
and the deep village, the sultry dahlias,
wait for the early pipe.
3
And the little man and woman
round and round the fire
leaping through the laughter
lifting the milking and the coupling
of man and woman of dung and wrinkles.
I am here in heat, and writhing high
into grey roses filled with thunder.
The rolling cars weep and hunt the ice.
That was not very worn-out.
Poetical fashion, wrestle with poetry.
Calm and wisdom deceived us, the dead secrets
into which they turned their every moment
and shocking monsters, fancy old men,
can hope to acquire houses under the Stock Exchange.
4
The Directory of cold lost the funeral.
I said to the dark, the lights are hollow,
with a bold rolled train in the tube
and the conversation fades into the mental ether,
the mind is in the garden, pointing and repeating
‘there is no ecstasy!’ The wounded steel,
the fever chart, is the disease,
the dying nurse our hospital.
The millionaire ascends from feet to mental wires.
I must quake in our only drink, blood.
Trying to use a failure, because one has
shabby equipment in the mess of emotion,
and to conquer men, is no competition.
Home is older, stranger, intense.
But the old lamplight is nearly here,
with the explorers.
5
I think that the patient is forgotten.
Men choose the machine, but the nursery bedroom
in the winter gaslight is within us,
also, the algae and the dead men.
The sea has the water,
the groaner and the women.
Where is there an end of it?
Where is the end of the wastage?
We have to think of them,
while the money is ineffable:
we appreciate the agony of others,
covered by dead negroes.
Editor: Belinda Hollyer
John Tranter says, “This poem is T.S. Eliot's Five Quartets with most of the words removed,” so you can tell he has a good sense of humour as well as of poetry. I love this poem's wit, intelligence and structure, and the way it forms a dance with Eliot's poem: that reminds me of Leonard Cohen's line about 'our steps will always rhyme'.
John Tranter is an Australian poet who has published more than twenty collections of verse. His collection Urban Myths: 210 Poems: New and Selected won a number of major prizes. His latest book is Starlight: 150 Poems published by the University of Queensland Press in 2010, from which this poem is taken. Recently he also edited The Best Australian Poems 2011, published by Black Inc. He is the founding editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket, and has a homepage at http://johntranter.net
Do check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar.
This week’s Tuesday Poem editor is Belinda Hollyer, a New Zealand writer and anthologist living in London. She doesn’t write poetry – she thinks it’s far too difficult – but details of her other publications can be found on her website, and also on her blog (where her Tuesday Poems reside.)
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Conceptual Art by Holly Iglesias
An act of recovery, they say in curatorial tones, archiving the mundane, rooting through the baggage of inmates deposited long ago for safekeeping, anonymity the new caché, a hunger for narrative free of consequence. Within a small strapped case, the single shirt, carefully starched, his winter drawers and the geography text once memorized to win a ribbon that Mother tacked to the parlor wall, boasting of her genius boy. Before he began drooling in church, tweezing the hairs from his forearm, singing to himself as he walked to the foundry after a breakfast of oats and beans and splashing his cheeks with her cologne. Before he began seeing things that weren't there and begged her for stories in Polish to soothe his fears, his grief for uncles buried in an old world and the clumsy name no one in town could pronounce. He lived out the balance of his days in gray pants and black shoes, took meals at six, twelve and six and dug graves when told to. His single pleasure, if you dare call it that, the school book, a quiet, solid thing upon his lap each afternoon, his fingers as smooth as the pages, patting it, stroking it, to calm the seas roiling between its covers.
"Conceptual Art" was written after Holly Iglesias heard a radio report about an exhibit of suitcases and other belongings of patients, objects that remained behind in a mental institution that was being demolished.
Susan T. Landry, of the United States, writes poetry and prose with a particular interest in memoir. She lives in Maine, works from home as a medical manuscript editor, and writes in her blog, Twisted Knickers, as part of her ongoing quest to explore all available avenues of procrastination. Please do visit our other Tuesday Poets, listed in the column on the right.
Editor: Susan T. Landry
I am drawn to prose poetry. I am not sure why; maybe it is because I trust that the linear configuration will deliver me a story in a tidy package. Surely, a story lies inside, as surely as a fortune resides within a fortune cookie. Other cookies may have their rewards, it is true; but, reliably, it is the fortune cookie that will divulge a treasure. Like prose.
I know better; I've read some supremely fine story telling in traditional skittering-all-over-the-page poems. But push comes to shove, I'll take a prose poem. I discovered Holly Iglesias on a prose poem ramble, and just in case you haven't had the pleasure, I'm here to introduce you to her.
"Conceptual Art" was written after Holly Iglesias heard a radio report about an exhibit of suitcases and other belongings of patients, objects that remained behind in a mental institution that was being demolished.It is not necessary to know the historical stimulus for this prose poem. When I first read this poem, I was completely engaged by the clean visual language, and imagined a stark stage setting against which a mysterious and sad story unfolded. It was only later, when I corresponded with Holly, that I realized I had seen the traveling version of this show, at a branch of the NY Public Library, when I lived in the city, in 2007.
Holly Iglesias, PhD, teaches at University of North Carolina-Asheville and has published several books of her own poems as well as a critical study of prose poems, Boxing Inside the Box: Women's Prose Poetry. She received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, for 2011.
"Conceptual Art" was first published in the journal Bloom, vol. 1, no.2, Summer 2004, and subsequently in Iglesias' book Angles of Approach, by White Pine Press, 2010. Holly Iglesias has graciously permitted Tuesday Poem to publish her poem here.
Susan T. Landry, of the United States, writes poetry and prose with a particular interest in memoir. She lives in Maine, works from home as a medical manuscript editor, and writes in her blog, Twisted Knickers, as part of her ongoing quest to explore all available avenues of procrastination. Please do visit our other Tuesday Poets, listed in the column on the right.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
To a Cockroach, Aotearoa 2011 by Siobhan Harvey
I imagine you brighter than butterfly, winged
dancer of Indian summer, or lodestar, death-
headed dazzler of rainforest. But here,
you’re more dull fabric, threading together,
interstitially, brown Porchester Street staties
and sienna walled Princes Wharf apartments.
Great leveller wherever, you carry your whakapapa
like an exoskeleton: head, thorax, abdomen, memories
of ancestors who fought for Gaba Tepe, landed at
Poverty Bay, navigated Kupe’s constellations and,
with tuatara- and weta-like fortitude, felt earth made
electric by Carnosaurs voracious dash. Now, at twilight,
you’ve turned to us, ravening, antediluvian, bone fractured us,
who tend you with aerosols or rolled-up newspapers
even when you’re sharing your wardrobe, food, home.
But there are moments when light falls upon you,
perhaps during December’s late afternoons,
the breath of the land reaching out to us across
the ledges of open windows, when we pause, remember,
feel the heavy weight of our spines, the lethargy in
our skeletons, our psyches’ loneliness and doubts,
and so we stop, release our grip upon the fine-print
or liberate index fingers from the aerosol nozzle
and allow you and your mokopuna to carry on.
© Siobhan Harvey
Editor: Harvey Molloy
Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011), the book of literary criticism Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010), aand is editor of the anthology, Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009).
Her poems have been published in magazines in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Europe and US, and anthologies in New Zealand and the UK. She's the poetry editor of Takahe, Coordinator of National Poetry Day in New Zealand, was runner up in the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems (NZ), and nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize for poetry (US). More here and here
In this poem, Siobhan begins with her imagination—it’s not the cockroach itself or even her experience of the cockroach but rather how she imagines the cockroach: not as a pest or a repugnant bug but as a glorious dancer. When you think about it we never leave the poet’s head—this is all an act of imagination.
I love that Siobhan explores the consequences of action without reflection—an automatic, unthinking, speedy grab for the bug spray with no pause for reverie or contemplation. The poem ends with empathy: all animals have a family and an ancestry; all animals want to live. We really do share that in common with cockroaches.
Whose world is it anyway? We humans think it's all ours—but look at the strange unexpected reversal of conventional thinking in “who tend you with aerosols or rolled-up newspapers/ even when you’re sharing your wardrobe, food, home.” It’s their world too; their house, their home. A good poem can shake how we frame our world.
For more Tuesday Poems, enter the sidebar. If a post says 'Tuesday Poem' click to read - we are a community of thirty poets from NZ, Australia, the UK and the US.
This week's editor, Harvey Molloy, is a Wellington teacher who has published poems in a range of NZ journals and periodicals, and overseas. His first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008, and he is working on his second. Harvey is also the co-author of the book Asperger Syndrome, Adolescence, and Identity: Looking Beyond the Label. He blogs here.
dancer of Indian summer, or lodestar, death-
headed dazzler of rainforest. But here,
you’re more dull fabric, threading together,
interstitially, brown Porchester Street staties
and sienna walled Princes Wharf apartments.
Great leveller wherever, you carry your whakapapa
like an exoskeleton: head, thorax, abdomen, memories
of ancestors who fought for Gaba Tepe, landed at
Poverty Bay, navigated Kupe’s constellations and,
with tuatara- and weta-like fortitude, felt earth made
electric by Carnosaurs voracious dash. Now, at twilight,
you’ve turned to us, ravening, antediluvian, bone fractured us,
who tend you with aerosols or rolled-up newspapers
even when you’re sharing your wardrobe, food, home.
But there are moments when light falls upon you,
perhaps during December’s late afternoons,
the breath of the land reaching out to us across
the ledges of open windows, when we pause, remember,
feel the heavy weight of our spines, the lethargy in
our skeletons, our psyches’ loneliness and doubts,
and so we stop, release our grip upon the fine-print
or liberate index fingers from the aerosol nozzle
and allow you and your mokopuna to carry on.
© Siobhan Harvey
Editor: Harvey Molloy
Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011), the book of literary criticism Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010), aand is editor of the anthology, Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House NZ, 2009).
Her poems have been published in magazines in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Europe and US, and anthologies in New Zealand and the UK. She's the poetry editor of Takahe, Coordinator of National Poetry Day in New Zealand, was runner up in the 2011 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems (NZ), and nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize for poetry (US). More here and here
In this poem, Siobhan begins with her imagination—it’s not the cockroach itself or even her experience of the cockroach but rather how she imagines the cockroach: not as a pest or a repugnant bug but as a glorious dancer. When you think about it we never leave the poet’s head—this is all an act of imagination.
I love that Siobhan explores the consequences of action without reflection—an automatic, unthinking, speedy grab for the bug spray with no pause for reverie or contemplation. The poem ends with empathy: all animals have a family and an ancestry; all animals want to live. We really do share that in common with cockroaches.
Whose world is it anyway? We humans think it's all ours—but look at the strange unexpected reversal of conventional thinking in “who tend you with aerosols or rolled-up newspapers/ even when you’re sharing your wardrobe, food, home.” It’s their world too; their house, their home. A good poem can shake how we frame our world.
For more Tuesday Poems, enter the sidebar. If a post says 'Tuesday Poem' click to read - we are a community of thirty poets from NZ, Australia, the UK and the US.
This week's editor, Harvey Molloy, is a Wellington teacher who has published poems in a range of NZ journals and periodicals, and overseas. His first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008, and he is working on his second. Harvey is also the co-author of the book Asperger Syndrome, Adolescence, and Identity: Looking Beyond the Label. He blogs here.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Yippee by James Norcliffe
When the podiatrists escaped we immediately set up roadblocks. But they were apparently wise to us and kept to the footpaths. Somewhat unfairly, too, they must have been wearing orthotics with rich crepes soles, which allowed them, well after dark, to ripple right past our defences in a distinctly crepuscular manner and make for the safety of the park.
In this way the podiatrists taught us the meaning of frustration.
There was no way, especially in the darkness, that we could retrieve the podiatrists from the park. The powerful sequoias hid and comforted even the bravest of them in a scent of turpentine, made sharp by the moonlight, whereas the more timid lay pressed into the gaultheria where they were wrapped about with wintergreen.
We could do nothing. We did joke that the iron railings around the park meant that the podiatrists had simply caged themselves in, but we were equally aware that the railings with their fearsome spikes kept us out just as effectively.
In this way the podiatrists taught us the meaning of irony.
All night the podiatrists hid there, out of sight, out of reach, but not out of hearing, and eventually safety overcame them and they grew cocky and footloose and realising our powerlessness began to cry Yippee! Yippee!
Thus the podiatrists taught us the meaning of scorn.
We could almost have tolerated this had it not been for the uncomfortable realisation that somehow in the night tinea had been set loose. We could feel it burning and insinuating itself all over our feet, between our toes. Burning and burning. Itching fearsomely.
And all the while the podiatrists, behind the iron rails and hidden in the dangling embrace of the redwoods, cried Yippee! Yippee!
As the burning sensation all but overcame us it seemed almost as though we could hear the tinea joining in the chorus: Yippee! Yippee! in tiny subsonic harmonies.
When dawn broke we were in a really bad way, jumping from foot to itchy foot. The light, perversely, had made the podiatrists even cockier, more sure of themselves. They broke free of the shaggy trunks, the perfumed ground cover and sported, gambolled. They flaunted their tubes of fungicide. They played touch rugby with them, flinging the crème of our desire from player to player, coming at times infuriatingly close to the railings. Every so often one would cry Yippee! as if unable to help it. Would leap into the air clapping his crepe soles.
In this way the podiatrists taught us the meaning of hate.
Editor: Andrew M. Bell
I heard James Norcliffe read this prose poem at a book launch organised by 'Gap Filler' a few months ago. 'Gap Filler' is a wonderful group that sprung up like a colourful, sweet-scented flower from the rubble and dust of the Christchurch earthquakes. Its members organise a wide variety of artistic events on the vacant sites of demolished buildings in order to boost the morale of the Christchurch citizenry.
James was one of the guest readers and, as the audience sat on wooden school chairs on the now rubble-strewn former site of 'The Herbal Dispensary', he read this poem from an improvised stage with a backdrop of a display refrigerator of the type found in dairies, now unplugged and filled with books to exchange. The tragi-comic setting seemed to match the Monty Pythonish absurdity of James' poem perfectly.
I have heard James read a number of times and I always enjoy the subversive, mischievous humour that runs through many of his poems. James is an experienced reader of his and other's poetry so his dry and droll delivery enlivens and enhances the poem. I love the way the poem is layered with a series of "punchlines" that build to a perfect ending.
James Norcliffe has published six collections of poetry, most recently Villon in Millerton (AUP 2007). A new collection, Shadow Play, is currently a finalist in the Proverse International Writing Prize. He has also written a number of fantasy novels for children including The Loblolly Boy which won the junior fiction award at the NZ Post Children's Book Awards in 2010, its sequel The Loblolly and the Sorcerer (2011) and a new novel The Enchanted Flute (2012).
James Norcliffe lives in Church Bay, Lyttelton Harbour, and teaches in the Foundation Studies Division of Lincoln University. “Yippee” was first published 2002 in Gargoyle 41 in the US and in Sport in NZ and collected in Along Blueskin Road (Canterbury University Press, 2004).
"Yippee" is published with permission.
The editor this week, Andrew M. Bell, lives in 'The City that Never Sleeps Soundly', Christchurch (NZ). He was chuffed when one of his short stories, 'It's Only Rock'n'Roll', was Highly Commended by judge, Owen Marshall, in the 2011 Katherine Mansfield Award. This helped to feed his delusion that literary fame and staggering riches must be just around the corner. His recent poetry collection is 'Clawed Rains', in which the title poem attempts the seemingly impossible task of marrying a litany of global disasters to the understated but sublime performance of actor, Claude Rains, in 'Casablanca'. He blogs here.
Do read the Tuesday Poem contributions in the right sidebar - our up to 30 poets post poems by themselves and others they admire. Some gems in there...
Editor: Andrew M. Bell
I heard James Norcliffe read this prose poem at a book launch organised by 'Gap Filler' a few months ago. 'Gap Filler' is a wonderful group that sprung up like a colourful, sweet-scented flower from the rubble and dust of the Christchurch earthquakes. Its members organise a wide variety of artistic events on the vacant sites of demolished buildings in order to boost the morale of the Christchurch citizenry.
James was one of the guest readers and, as the audience sat on wooden school chairs on the now rubble-strewn former site of 'The Herbal Dispensary', he read this poem from an improvised stage with a backdrop of a display refrigerator of the type found in dairies, now unplugged and filled with books to exchange. The tragi-comic setting seemed to match the Monty Pythonish absurdity of James' poem perfectly.
I have heard James read a number of times and I always enjoy the subversive, mischievous humour that runs through many of his poems. James is an experienced reader of his and other's poetry so his dry and droll delivery enlivens and enhances the poem. I love the way the poem is layered with a series of "punchlines" that build to a perfect ending.
James Norcliffe has published six collections of poetry, most recently Villon in Millerton (AUP 2007). A new collection, Shadow Play, is currently a finalist in the Proverse International Writing Prize. He has also written a number of fantasy novels for children including The Loblolly Boy which won the junior fiction award at the NZ Post Children's Book Awards in 2010, its sequel The Loblolly and the Sorcerer (2011) and a new novel The Enchanted Flute (2012). James Norcliffe lives in Church Bay, Lyttelton Harbour, and teaches in the Foundation Studies Division of Lincoln University. “Yippee” was first published 2002 in Gargoyle 41 in the US and in Sport in NZ and collected in Along Blueskin Road (Canterbury University Press, 2004).
"Yippee" is published with permission.
The editor this week, Andrew M. Bell, lives in 'The City that Never Sleeps Soundly', Christchurch (NZ). He was chuffed when one of his short stories, 'It's Only Rock'n'Roll', was Highly Commended by judge, Owen Marshall, in the 2011 Katherine Mansfield Award. This helped to feed his delusion that literary fame and staggering riches must be just around the corner. His recent poetry collection is 'Clawed Rains', in which the title poem attempts the seemingly impossible task of marrying a litany of global disasters to the understated but sublime performance of actor, Claude Rains, in 'Casablanca'. He blogs here.
Do read the Tuesday Poem contributions in the right sidebar - our up to 30 poets post poems by themselves and others they admire. Some gems in there...
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Wadestown, by Bill Nelson
There is a hand asleep
under a heavy hip bone.
There is memory of love,
a pip and soft bruises.
under a heavy hip bone.
There is memory of love,
a pip and soft bruises.
I'm not sure how we fit
but it seems this dead hand
is my hand, this angular
body is your body.
but it seems this dead hand
is my hand, this angular
body is your body.
All night we lie this way
and I am jerked awake
by a bird I can hardly
remember. I pull out
and I am jerked awake
by a bird I can hardly
remember. I pull out
my lifeless arm and drape it
over your shoulder. It’s okay,
you say, as if I have asked
an impossible question.
over your shoulder. It’s okay,
you say, as if I have asked
an impossible question.
In a few moments the numb
goes and you drift off
and I'm not sure you ever were
actually here. The blood returns
goes and you drift off
and I'm not sure you ever were
actually here. The blood returns
to my fingers, along with
the sticky branches of a
spring wind tapping
its slow code into the wall.
the sticky branches of a
spring wind tapping
its slow code into the wall.
Editor, Saradha Koirala
So much and so little happens in this poem. I love the mystery surrounding who is really present, played out in the dead hand coming back to life. Sleep and memory intermingle and I especially like the lines “I am jerked awake / by a bird I can hardly/ remember”, as they link so perfectly the two elements working together here: a definite, palpable physicality of body parts and the intangible, inexplicability of not quite speaking, not quite remembering; a “slow code” tapped out by something solid.
Bill Nelson seems to be a favourite of Tuesday Poets, having previously appeared here and here. In 2009 he won the Biggs Poetry Prize for best MA poetry portfolio at the IIML and has had writing published in Hue & Cry, Sport, The Lumière Reader, Blackmail Press, 4th Floor and Swamp.
I have only recently met Bill but look forward to reading more of his poetry, in which he seems to be able to turn the gritty truth into something much more surprising, more elusive.
Wadestown is published with permission.
Wadestown is published with permission.
This week's editor, Saradha Koirala, is a Wellington poet. Her first collection wit of the staircase was published by Steele Roberts in 2009. Her work has also appeared in literary magazines including Hue & Cry, Sport, broadsheet and The Listener. When she's not teaching at a local secondary school, Saradha is working on her second book.
For more Tuesday Poems from our Tuesday Poets and others they admire - look into the right hand sidebar. When it says 'Tuesday Poem' in the title, click to enter.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
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
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!
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/.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
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.
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.
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 |
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.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
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.
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