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/.