Cloud Silence by Graham Lindsay

There has always been
someone

seated
under this tree, looking up

the harbour valley
over rush-studded
paddocks glistening

after rain.
And I’m the first

                           you want to say
you saw the hills

                            it seemed like home
ladders of sunlight leaned
against clouds, then the clouds marched
seawards like ranks of ghost soldiers.
The point is

to stop writing. Stop
using language to protect
yourself from the full

implications of the world – the world says
Look at me, I dare you to
I dare you to see.
                            You tilt your head

back and look up
at the tree.
A ray peers

into the room
of your eye….

          *

Why is our art so introverted?
It doesn’t mean a thing

to the seagull or sun
the clouds don’t understand
a word

their language is silence
and movement and colour.

Here on the face of it – there
behind a mask. This far
above ground

                          in 360^o cinemas
as the present rolls



                                          Guest Editor: David Howard

Graham Lindsay 
Portrait by Keith Nicolson 

‘One of the themes is communication, so there's hope after all.’ – New Zealand poet Graham Lindsay, 27 June 2011

Poets don’t come from nowhere; sometimes they stay there. Whatever critics think, if they think, the best poets wear their origins like hand-me-down clothes, comfortably. Michele Leggott has Susan Howe. Graham Lindsay has George Oppen, who wrote in his notebook: ‘…meaning is the instant of meaning – and this means that we write to find what we believe.’ 

I read to find what (but also who) I believe. My admiring reservations about ‘Cloud silence’ hold me in a vital dialogue with it. I still argue with the predictable if precise ringing of the pastoral Angelus (‘looking up/ the harbour valley/ over rush-studded/ paddocks glistening/ after rain’) and with the stand-up personification of ‘the world [that] says Look at me, I dare you to/ I dare you to see.’ 

I’ve heard these lines out loud. They take a leap of faith off the page. The audience doubles up as Graham foregrounds the implications of what is, after all, a wilful world before enquiring: ‘Why is our art so introverted?’ 

published by AUP

I’m grateful that he is not afraid to move through the register of a preacher – one with that childlike amalgam of curiosity and humour we usually call wonder. I suspect writers are either faint-hearted or excessively ironic, and possibly both, if they believe that readers don’t want to be preached to. Readers demonstrably want to be preached to; they don’t only want to be preached to. 

In an interview with Jack Ross (February 1998), Graham acknowledges: ‘I have this sense of people, and things generally, being manifestations of an eternal upwelling – and of writing as well being a manifestation of it. And I feel that if you are able to be in a place where you can achieve this coincidence between your self and that place, you can almost have something spoken through you. I don’t mean that literally; I mean it figuratively.’ 

When I hear this latter-day Alberto Caiero then I feel that his close reading of the world out there animates the world in here by means of a descriptive language so particular (‘rush-studded’) it seems antipathetic to rhetoric yet audaciously rehabilitates it. Juxtaposed, his fragments of apprehension generate. 

Still glowing twenty years after it was started, The Subject is one of the most charged poetry collections to appear in New Zealand; it holds bright sparks like ‘Context of words’, ‘’Voyeurs’, ‘Wave to the Image’, ‘Picnic on a clifftop’, ‘Backwater’ and ‘Cloud silence’. This far.


More on Graham Lindsay here. 

Born in Christchurch (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 was subsequently collected in The Incomplete Poems (Cold Hub Press, 2011). His poetry has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.

Tuesday Poem thanks David Howard for his contribution as guest editor. After you've read Cloud Silence, enter the right sidebar for more Tuesday Poems written and selected by poets from NZ, Australia, UK and US. Nau mai haere mai! Welcome!

Lorine Niedecker

                                                                      Editor Susan T. Landry
Lorine Niedecker was an American poet, an avant-garde poet, a poet of nature, a poet of ordinary life, a poet who lived under the roof of the sky and beside a river. She had what people with limited imagination might call a modest life, and yet wrote imagistic, crystalline poems that convey a rich intellect and an ability to see, really see, what was around her.

I first discovered the work of Niedecker after I wrote and submitted a poem to the bi-weekly, short-poem group I belong to, called Brevitas. I was still living in New York City, but I think buried within me, down where the words live that come out when I have a need to conjure up poetry, I had a yearning. The desire to leave, to move somewhere quiet, close to water and the woods was beginning to insist. I can’t remember what I wrote that conveyed this, but one of my fellow poets in the group e-mailed me and said that the poem I sent around made him think of Lorine Niedecker. He said, you will like her work: she has an intimacy with nature that you are seeking.

Niedecker rarely titled her poems. They light on the page like dragonflies or sprawl inside the book like stalks of dried grass, tucked away for later - here are two of them.


My life is hung up
in the flood
    a wave-blurred
                portrait

Don't fall in love
with this face—
     it no longer exists
                in water
                         we cannot fish



***


Spring
  stood there
      all body

Head
  blown off
       (war)

showed up
  downstream

October
  is the head
         of spring

Birch, sumac
  before
        the blast








Jenny Penberthy edited the definitive volume, Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, published by the University of California Press, in 2002. (It’s the book I bought when I wanted more.) The poems I quote here are from a Web page, also edited by Jenny Penberthy, at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/poems.html. Bob Arnold, literary executor for Lorine Niedecker, was kind enough to give me permission to reprint these poems.

The photograph is mine, of the Maine woods.

For more Tuesday Poems check out the poets in the sidebar - up to 30 of us from all over: the US, the UK, NZ and Australia.

Susan T. Landry is this week’s editor of Tuesday Poem. She lives in Maine, is a medical editor by trade, and also enjoys fine-tuning work for friends, other creative writers and artists. She belongs to Brevitas, an invitation-only short poem e-mail exchange that meets in person only once a year, for a gala evening at the Bowery Poetry Project, in New York City; writes and posts an occasional poem on her blog Twisted Knickers, where she also natters about whatever she fancies, or doesn’t.

Margo, or Margaux by Anna Jackson

I'd drink all night but stop at one glass
of syrah, aromas of pepper, tar,
black plum, and on the tongue
blueberry, licquorice, dark
chocolate, oh it is a dark wine
for us to drink before entering
the night in my cream and silver
car and driving, reeling,
not from the wine but from
the gypsy pirate Mexican music
on the CD (with an after-note, you
suggest, of Ukrainian folk), under
your canopy of silver stars.
Don't tell me their names, tracing
out constellations like
a dot to dot puzzle. Let me
see the sky in the sky, as magisterially
as the sea can be seen in the sea
and the man in the man – speaking
of which let's not meet your mother
with her photos of you as a boy.
Let's just keep driving to
somewhere we haven't looked up
on a map, some town without
any relatives to pin your features
down to theirs, where you can do
that silent thing you do at parties
in a party we'll throw
just for us two.
This cross made up of freckles
under my ribs (two brown, one
red and slightly raised, one beige)
might look like the Southern Cross
still flying like a kite in the chaos
I yearn to see in the sky,
but come closer, inhale,
tell me my after-notes
and under-tones,
and whether you think
I should call my car Margo or
Margaux, I can't decide.

----------
Editor, Helen Rickerby

This poem comes from Anna Jackson's upcoming new poetry collection Thicket. I chose this one because I really like the way the poem twists and turns, or maybe swirls, from wine to music, to the night sky, to mothers, to bodies, to cars, but it's all tied together by the silken sinew of wine. It becomes, almost surprisingly, a love poem, but then twists out of that sensuous seriousness, the way someone might awkwardly twist out of an embrace, to talk about what she should name her car.

I might be being fanciful, but this poem seems to me to have the dark, rich colour of red wine. Swish it around in your mouth. Give it a good taste.

Thicket, which will be coming out in July, is Jackson's fifth poetry collection (not counting her inclusion in AUP New Poets 1 and her collaborative collection Locating the Madonna, published by moi). I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Each of Jackson's previous collections have been a bit different from each other - trying different things or writing in different styles (something I feel I do too - once you finish a book, if you continue writing the same kinds of poetry you could end up becoming a parody of yourself) - and it sounds like Thicket will continue this. It sounds like it will be a bit more free-flowing, covering various styles and topics, compared to, for example, Anna's previous collection, The Gas Leak (also wonderful), which was quite highly structured and conceptual. This is what AUP says about Thicket:

In Anna Jackson’s fifth collection of poetry, a rich and leafy life is closing in on the poet. ‘These are our thicket days’, she writes, ‘and it does seem darker, / though the sun is at its peak / over the crown of leaves.’ But a thicket is also something to walk out of, and Jackson offers us fairytale bread-crumb tracks to follow, through poems that consider badminton at dusk, Virgil at bedtime, theory over wine; shimmering, multi-faceted poems of swans and puppets, sons and brothers, a woman who has become a tree. Thicket is an accomplished book from a poet of unease, who constantly turns her attention to the brambled path, the track-less-followed, the subterranean presences in everyday life.

Anna Jackson lectures in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. As well as being a poet, she also writes fiction from time to time, and her story 'When we were Bread' was recently highly commended in 'The Long and the Short of it' competition run by Sport and Unity Books, in the long (over 10,000 words) category, and was published in the competition book. You read more about her on the Book Council website: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/jacksonanna.html.

On my own blog I've posted another poem from Thicket, 'Hansel in the house', a dark, fairytale-ish look at the sometimes difficult relationship between parents and children: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2011/06/hansel-in-house-by-anna-jackson.html. And if you want still more, also another poem from Thicket, the much lighter and totally charming 'Frank O’Hara for Charles', was published on the Tui Talk blog last week: http://tuitalk.wordpress.com/2011/06/15/tuesday-poem-frank-ohara-for-charles-by-anna-jackson/. And of course check out the other Tuesday poems in the blogs on the sidebar.

This week's editor, Helen Rickerby, is a poet, publisher and public servant. Her most recent book was Heading North, a poetry sequence published last year in a hand-bound edition by Kilmog Press. She’s a co-managing editor of JAAM literary magazine, and runs Seraph Press, a boutique poetry publisher. She hopes she's nearly finished working on what she hopes will be her next poetry collection, but you never can be sure. She blogs, irregularly, at http://wingedink.blogspot.com/.

Zot and the Axolotls by Janis Freegard

          Earlier in the afternoon we had all admired
          the newly constructed axolotl tank, more of
          a complex really, with a glass bridge between
          chambers, a grand axolotl hotel, five stars with
          room service, porters and a parking attendant.
          It was still empty, its soon-to-be residents
          slumming it in temporary accommodation.

like other amphibians, the axolotl has a three-chambered heart
they are perennibranchiate, reaching sexual maturity in the larval stage
axolotls were a staple in the Aztec diet

          I was stoned, I remember that.

the axolotl is neotenous and rarely metamorphoses spontaneously
it can regenerate entire lost appendages in a matter of months
the days of the axolotl surviving in the wild are numbered

         Zot tripped and fell to the floor and lay there,
         unmoving, by the new de luxe tank. I was
         sitting next to him in an armchair thinking:
         Zot’s fallen over. Just that. It was someone
         else – Denise perhaps – who noticed the
         blood. Soon afterwards an ambulance arrived.

Lake Chalco has been drained (but see how they smile their wide amphibian smiles)
Lake Xochimilco is reduced to canals (oh, oh, those beady well-spaced eyes)
roll up, roll up, tasty axolotls

        Oh, see how their pretty gills flutter.


_______
Editor, Saradha Koirala

Axolotls are creepy. They're tricksy shapeshifters able to sneak their way out of the water and walk on land. Something about the tank's "soon-to-be residents /slumming it in temporary accommodation" worries me. Where are they hiding?


I love the way this poem plays with diction. The text-book language in italics has its own beauty: "a three-chambered heart" is magical and echoes the design of the "de luxe" accommodation built for this unique creature. On the other hand, the language is frank and immediate: "I was stoned, I remember that." And then of course that last line! Ah!


Janis Freegard is an award-winning Wellington writer whose work has been published in all the literary journals I can name, including Poetry NZ, JAAM, Turbine, Trout and brief. Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, is her first solo collection of poetry, published by AUP.




The poems "explore the various interactions between human beings and other animals, but also deals with wider subjects: love and loss, evolution and conservation, sex and death." Freegard has arranged the animal-themed poems according to eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus' classification system of the natural world.


You can read more about Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus at the book's webpage. For more on the poet herself read Janis Freegard's blog. And then check out the sidebar here where 30 Tuesday Poets from four different countries post poems by themselves or others they admire.

This week's editor, Saradha Koirala, teaches English at a Wellington Secondary school. Her first book of poetry Wit of the staircase was published by Steele Roberts in 2009. Her work has also appeared in various literary magazines, including Hue & Cry, broadsheet and The Listener. She is currently working on her second book in every spare moment she can find.

The Book of Equanimity Verses: Richard von Sturmer

Five verses from a hundred verse sequence,
inspired by The Book of Equanimity, a Zen Buddhist
collection of one hundred koans.

30.

The upper hand
lies forgotten
in a bottom drawer.
The lower hand is lost
gathering dust
somewhere in a basement.
Now that all conflict has ended
the roof tiles reflect the moonlight.

31.

It's in the space between
the pillar and the lattice windows.
It's drawn to scale
by a blind person in a dream.
Look — when the kingfisher flies
into a phoenix palm
all the colours of the Nile
carry you across the evening sky.

52.

The donkey looks at the well.
A bank of nasturtiums.
The well looks at the donkey.
A field of violets.
It’s mid-summer
and by the slowly moving river
blackberries are ripening
lobe by lobe.

53.

When the ancient scholar
retires for the night
rats come out
and eat his manuscript.
The most demanding passages—
those he had to write and rewrite
are also the most
difficult to digest.

54.

I divide my time
between High Street
and the Tang Dynasty.
This afternoon
half asleep
from one glass of wine
I allow a red bus to take me
down the road to Changan.

______

                                                Editor Harvey Molloy

Why do I enjoy Richard's poetry so? We have never met yet through his poetry I feel that I know something of him. The poems have an immediacy and energy which I immediately respond to. Nothing is wasted and there is no noise or redundancy. Richard's work fosters an expansion of awareness; the poems call us to pay attention to the sounds and splashes of colour around us. There's also a sense of play or surreal delight in his poems. Like a trapped djinn, Edison's last breath finds release under the stars not yet totally drowned by his lights.

The sparkling intelligence at work in these poems is shaped by Zen poetic forms and Zen practice. Richard's poems acknowledge a greater reality, an awareness of a spiritual power or energy that flashes through the poems and provides both the poet and the reader with a knowledge or insight that can only be expressed within the poem.

When I first started to read Richard's work I saw a certain tension between the poetic forms of the Zen tradition and the very vitality of experience offered by the poems. How much of all this awareness is a trick of language or poetic form? That tension comes from a misunderstanding of awareness: "For those who desire/the pure sky/it's a disappointment." In Richard's poetry, awareness and form are always tied together much in the same way that emptiness and form are tied together in Zen. He's a skilful poet whose crafted work has no bum notes.

Richard von Sturmer is a New Zealand writer and has published four books: We Xerox Your Zebras (Modern House, 1988), A Network of Dissolving Threads (Auckland University Press, 1991), Suchness: Zen Poetry and Prose (HeadworX, 2005) and On the Eve of Never Departing ( Titus Books, 2009).

More selections from Richard's The Book of Equanimity Verses are online at Trout and Interlitq.
His wonderful poem Gathering Clouds is available on Best New Zealand Poems 2003.

For more Tuesday Poems, enter the sidebar. If a post says 'Tuesday Poem' click to read - we are a community of up to thirty poets from NZ, Australia, the UK and the US.

This week's editor, Harvey Molloy has published poems in a number of journals including Enamel, International Literary Quarterly, Landfall, NZ Listener, and Poetry New Zealand. His first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008. He is the co-author of the book Asperger Syndrome, Adolescence, and Identity: Looking Beyond the Label. He is now working on his second book of poems.

Travelling at Night: Kathryn Hunt

Often I have stood under the falling sky
dark with its plentitude of stars
and listened as my father called them out,
Orion and the seven sisters of the Pleiades;
Antares, huge and crimson in its dying.

The only star I know for sure
from all my father's lessons
is the North Star, cardinal star of every wanderer,
and beyond that single blaze it's all a guess.

Now he shuffled between his frailties,
his sideways gimp from falling off a horse,
the raspy draw from years of smoking,
his stubborn, hillocked laborer's hands
still seeking out their tools. It's the simple bones
beneath the sun-burnt skin,
the missing finger on the right,
I'll miss the most among my
multitude of longings.

"Let's go outside," he says.
"I want to show you something."
We turn our faces toward the sky.



-----
Editor: T Clear


I've long enjoyed Kathryn Hunt's work, beginning ten+ years ago when she joined my writing group. There exists in her work an elegance and richness that defies her unadorned use of language. In this poem, especially, we are asked to examine the close-at-hand details of a life lived in intimate contact with the earth -- from "his sideways gimp" to "the missing finger" -- while at the same time standing in awe of the greater vault of the nighttime sky and the profound mysteries it offers. It's a modern and yet age old interpretation of Blake, where he impels us to "Hold infinity in the palm of your hand."

-----

Please visit my blog here for another poem by Kathryn Hunt.

Kathryn Hunt is an American writer and filmmaker and makes her home in Port Townsend, Washington. Her stories and poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sun, Willow Springs, Crab Orchard Review, and Open Spaces, among other magazines. She is a director and producer of documentary films, including Take This Heart, a feature-length documentary that was honored with the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism. She has recently completed a memoir, The Province of Leaves. When she's not at her desk she can be found in her garden, trying to stay ahead of the weeds and the deer.

This week's editor, T. Clear, hails from Seattle, US. She is a founder of Floating Bridge Press, and her work has been widely published. Currently she manages production and shipping for a Seattle glass artist. She is enamored of blue flowers, cats, Ireland, slow food, her multitude of sisters and her two sons.


For more Tuesday Poems enter the sidebar where Tuesday Poets post poems by themselves or poets they have selected.

home to you by Michele Amas

one husband lost
playing a game
of tennis serving
or returning his heart
just quit and in this queue
for coffee his wife I can't ignore
so order pay hug hold
apologise for Christmas
being just around the corner
but this was not the one
I had arranged to meet
find a table, wait for another
wife, one who wishes
her husband dead
in as many words
one whose husband's
heart just quit
on her so
hug hold apologise
for this first Christmas
alone, too many tears
in this Olive café
my arms are branches
reaching for home
in a Christmas rush
gratitude and fear
green and red
I want to ditch the car
feel my legs walk
home to you
feel my heart pound
home to you
and when I'm home to you
lovepraisefuck you
like you're the Son of God


                                                                                   Editor: Mary McCallum


Michele Amas is an award-winning poet and actor who lives in Wellington but recently enjoyed a year-long stint in Menton, France, as the partner of a recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Prize: playwright Ken Duncum.

It's not the first time the KM has netted two writers for the price of one. Michele says she took a lot of notes but didn't feel the need (pressure?) to write poems while she hung out in the citrus heat of the South of France.

Back home in NZ, she started writing again and entered the inaugural Caselberg Poetry Prize, joining me in hitting the right spot with Judge Bernadette Hall and scooping a prize. It was - and still is - a surreal moment for me.

Bernadette's judge's report is a marvellous piece of writing about poetry and what makes a winning poem:

It’s as if I’ve been invited into a series of small rooms, 237 of them, and it’s up to me to choose the ones in which I’d like to set up house for a while.

Some rooms are plush, some are spare; some are draped in funereal black; some are like confessional boxes; in others people and creatures, rivers and trees dance and sing even though the walls are a bit wonky and there’s an odd knocking in the antiquated plumbing. My favourite rooms, a whole clutch of them, are fresh and surprising. They’re well built, there’s flair and imaginative energy in their making. The world looks replenished through their windows.

Yes! That's it - replenished. And on Michele's poem: 

‘home to you’ by Michele Amas, is wicked, there’s no doubt about that. It’s also elegant and quick and clever. You have to be alert as you’re jumped from line to line. Above all it’s an audacious love poem, circling, gathering, exploding in that unforgettable last line.

'home to you' was written after Michele rushed home with her heart pumping. She needed (her words) to get it down on the page as much as the woman in the poem needed to 'lovepraisefuck' the man she loves.  And oh! the reader feels it. Reading 'home to you' is what I imagine bungy-jumping to be - the vertical rush, things colliding/blurring (such bliss as this: 'playing a game/of tennis serving/or returning his heart'), the adrenalin, the bloody marvellous ending.

By the end I am breathless and renewed, and in awe of Michele's audacity with both our language and our hearts.

You can find the Caselberg Poetry Prize results, poems and judge's report here.

Do check out Michele's Daughter - chosen for the Best NZ Poems website and now in the 'Best of the Best NZ Poems' (the book) out now. And Orphans posted on my blog last year.


Michele has an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters (2005), she won the Adam Prize that year for the manuscript of her collection After the Dance which, published by VUP, was nominated for the Jessie McKay Best First Book of Poetry Award and the Prize in Modern Letters. Michele also won the Wellington sonnet award 2008 and is an award-winning actor.

'home to you' is posted on Tuesday Poem with permission from the poet. Do check out the poems written and selected by our team of Tuesday Poets in the right-hand sidebar. If a post says 'Tuesday Poem' click to read.

Mary McCallum is co-curator of the Tuesday Poem, a poet and novelist. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML the same year as Michele Amas (2005), lives in Wellington with her family, and when she's not writing, she's teaching creative writing at Massey University and working as a bookseller. Her blog is here. 

Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

and towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

but limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumbling,

fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

but someone still was yelling out and stumbling

and flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

as under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

he plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

behind the wagon that we flung him in,

and watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

his hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

if you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

- my friend, you would not tell with such high zest

to children ardent for some desperate glory,

the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

pro patria mori.

‘Dulce et Decorum Est'

Image © The British Library / 

The Wilfred Owen Literary Estate

For the title and last two lines of the poem, Wilfred Owen was inspired by Horace Odes III.ii.13: “Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.” '


'Five-Nines' were gas shells.
________________                                                                                              

Editor: Andrew Bell


Like many people, I suffered a sense of disquiet at the recent news of Osama Bin Laden’s death at the hands of US Navy Seals in Pakistan. Most people do not dispute that Bin Laden had masterminded some terrible atrocities, but the manner of his death and the scenes of jubilation on the streets of America only served to fuel a sense of unease that the victor had acting with no more morality than the victim. 


So I think Wilfred Owen’s poem serves as a timely and timeless reminder that acts of war are not glorious and that patriotism can be a dangerous tool in the hands of those with agendas to serve.

Wilfred Owen

Image © English Faculty Library, 

University of Oxford / Wilfred Owen

 Literary Estate

Wellington writer and academic, Harry Ricketts, has recently published an interesting book, Strange Meetings (Chatto & Windus), about the War Poets, reviewed here by Andrew Motion.

This week's editor is Andrew M. Bell, a poet from Otautahi/Christchurch who loves poetry, writing, his family and surfing, in no particular order. Recently, he has developed a new love for flushing toilets, unlumpy roads and stable ground.


For lots of other stimulating poems, check out the Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.




Note: The poem is in the public domain, and the two images are used according to the conditions of the Wilfred Owen collection, namely for educational, non-commercial purposes. 

Push by David Gregory

He has found the green door at last,

in a faded, jaded street.

And, slightly askew, it reflects

the slant of his memories.

Behind it, there might be a childhood,

if he could only reach the handle,

and against the glass

(the sunlit blood of stained glass roses)

there is the shadow of his father.

And the hallway builds back

into those small rooms.

In that one the faces turned

like flowers to the sun of her entrance.

That beautiful woman who spilt his love

easily as tea, and he only 

the second best china.

But listen, there is his mother singing,

and a chorus of relatives rehearsing

their relatively small disagreements.

How much? He asks the scrap-yard dealer.

Well, the man says,

these things don’t come cheap.


_______________________

                                                    Guest Editor James Norcliffe

Push is the title poem of NZ poet David Gregory’s 2008 collection (Black Doris Press). He is a stalwart of the Christchurch poetry scene, most obviously in his involvement with the Canterbury Poets’ Collective organised readings each year and his work (with John O’Connor) with Sudden Valley Press and Poets’ Group publications. He publishes relatively sparingly, unfortunately. 

Doors and childhood are presiding themes of David’s work, so in many ways Push can be seen as an archetypal poem.  The “green door” of the opening line references, of course, the famous fifties song. In that song, you’ll remember, laughter, fun, and mystery were available to the initiates on one side of the green door; but the singer on the other side found only exclusion.  

David Gregory

When the poet finds the green door at last in a scrap yard, “in a faded, jaded street” it offers only the “slant of memories” and these are painful: the shadow of his father, the beautiful woman who spilt his love, the chorus of disagreeing relatives. Moreover, whatever possibilities this disembodied door offers, they are only contingent - “if he could only reach the handle” there might be a childhood to return to. Note the modal verb.

Instead of a welcome, the poet must reconstruct the world beyond this “slightly askew” portal. In the final three lines David reveals that the door is in fact in a scrap yard and available for purchase although he is told by the dealer that these things don’t come cheap...

It’s a neat resolution and typical of David’s technique: investing the demotic, the throwaway, with a significance and resonance built up previously. I like this poem a lot. Like so many of his poems it presents itself as a small narrative, but typically, it withholds as much as it gives. The poet hides behind the lamppost of the third person, a point of view that, paradoxically, allows for greater intimacy.

Note the craft and care with word choice; the street, in the context of the green door, is jaded – a word freighted with both greenness and disillusion. There is the detail of local colour: the stained glass roses, the second best china. These swift brush strokes summon up a time and place efficiently and are of course the kind of glittering details memory provides.

Above all, there is in this poem the playfulness always in David’s best work, at odds with the wistfulness; and as always in his best poems, these temper each other. It is a tightrope strategy. A misstep one way could plunge the poem into wordplay for wordplay’s sake; a misstep the other could land the poem in sentimentality. In Push that David negotiates the tension beautifully.

In addition to Push, David's books include Always Arriving (1997) and Frame of Mind (1999), both Sudden Valley Press. The covers of all three books feature doors. His work also features in the Aotearoa NZ Poetry Archive.

This week's guest editor is poet, fiction writer and educator James Norcliffe of Christchurch, NZ. His most recent poetry collection is Villon In Millerton (Auckland University Press, 2007). Last year James was invited to read at the XX International Poetry Festival in Medellin (Colombia) and this year has been invited to read at the Trois Rivieres International Poetry Festival in Quebec. 


The Loblolly Boy and the Sorcerer (Longacre/Random), the follow-up to 2009’s award-winning YA novel The Loblolly Boy, has just been released. James has a rudimentary website : http://jamesnorcliffe.com/ He has lived for extended periods in Brunei Darussalam and China.


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Thanks James! 


Check out the poems in the sidebar written and selected by our regular Tuesday Poets from NZ, the UK, the US and Australia. 

Three Poems By Hayden Carruth

Little Citizen, Little Survivor

A brown rat has taken up residence with me.
A little brown rat with pinkish ears and lovely
almond-shaped eyes. He and his wife live
in the woodpile by my back door, and they are
so equal I cannot tell which is which when they
poke their noses out of the crevices among
the sticks of firewood and then venture farther
in search of sunflower seeds spilled from the feeder.
I can't tell you, my friend, how glad I am to see them.
I haven't seen a fox for years, or a mink, or
a fisher cat, or an eagle, or a porcupine, I haven't
seen any of my old company of the woods
and the fields, we who used to live in such
close affection and admiration. Well, I remember
when the coons would tap on my window, when
the ravens would speak to me from the edge of their
little precipice. Where are they now? Everyone knows.
Gone. Scattered in this terrible dispersal. But at least
the brown rat that most people so revile and fear
and castigate has brought his wife to live with me
again. Welcome, little citizen, little survivor.
Lend me your presence, and I will lend you mine.

from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Copper Canyon Press, 1996

Silence

Sometimes we don’t say anything. Sometimes
we sit on the deck and stare at the masses of
goldenrod where the garden used to be
and watch the color change form day to day,
the high yellow turning to mustard and at last
to tarnish. Starlings flitter in the branches
of the dead hornbeam by the fence. And are these
therefore the procedures of defeat? Why am I
saying all this to you anyway since you already
know it? But of course we always tell
each other what we already know. What else?
It’s the way love is in a late stage of the world.

from Collected Shorter Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 1992

The Minute Difference Between Birds And Leaves

She lay unmoving a moment longer, silver thighs
Still splayed, breasts tilted apart so that the bones
Of her chest showed like interlocked fingers while she looked outward
To moonlight and gleaming, billowing trees,
And then she turned on her side and said —
But he did not hear
The words flutter down on him, touching, tickling
With little brittle feet, pecking the meal
Of his arms and belly, the golden grain; he heard rather
The unspoken that is always eloquent, her few pleas,
Echoes very distant behind the lanterns of his eyes.
He rose then, scattering words, and went to the window shivering.
Cold boards fed the hunger in his feet. He looked at the trees
In silver frost, leaves falling, severing themselves and falling,
Their silence falling in moonlight, falling all night without wind,
Mouths falling
searching the whole body of earth with their kisses.

from A Green Mountain Idyll - Poems For Hayden Carruth, Longhouse Publishers& Booksellers, 2002

Editor: Eileen Moeller

It is impossible to represent Hayden Carruth's enormous body of work here, but I've chosen three poems that seem to capture his generous spirit, and his gift for magnifying, and making sense of, the ordinary moment.

Born in Connecticut, Hayden died in New York State on October 2, 2008, having dedicated most of his eighty-seven years to poetry. He was my teacher at Syracuse University, and my most beloved "poetry father". He was a master of poetics, who regularly received and edited manuscripts sent by his many literary friends, including seasoned poets like Galway Kinnell and Adrienne Rich.

I thought of him as heroic in his dedication to poetry, in his sensitivity, in his constant push against meaninglessness, and in his honesty about the demons that plagued him. His poems speak in the voice(s) of the American Northeast. They evoke a love of the local, of nature, of ordinary people, of the intimacy of everyday human interaction; they convey an open-heartedness and a lust for experience that makes me want to live more deeply.

I can hear his deep voice in all of the poems here, his lilting New England accent. I love the conversational tone of these, the way it offsets their exquisite imagery, the tension between the natural and the craft.

Permission pending for use of the three poems, more on Hayden here, and a list of his poetry publications:

• The Crow and the Heart, 1946-1959, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1959.
• In Memoriam: G. V. C., privately printed, 1960.
• Journey to a Known Place (long poem), New Directions (New York, NY), 1961.
• The Norfolk Poems: 1 June to 1 September 1961, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1962.
• North Winter, Prairie Press (Iowa City, IA), 1964.
• Nothing for Tigers; Poems, 1959-1964, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1965.
• Contra Mortem (long poem), Crow's Mark Press (Johnson, VT), 1967.
• (Contributor) Where Is Vietnam?: American Poets Respond, Anchor Books (New York, NY), 1967.
• For You: Poems, New Directions (New York, NY), 1970.
• The Clay Hill Anthology, Prairie Press, 1970.
• From Snow and Rock, from Chaos: Poems, 1965-1972, New Directions (New York, NY), 1973.
• Dark World, Kayak (Santa Cruz, CA), 1974.
• The Bloomingdale Papers, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1975.
• Loneliness: An Outburst of Hexasyllables, Janus Press (Rogue River, OR), 1976.
• Aura, Janus Press (Rogue River, OR), 1977.
• Brothers, I Loved You All, Sheep Meadow (New York, NY), 1978.
• Almanach du Printemps Vivarois, Nadja, 1979.
• The Mythology of Dark and Light, Tamarack (Madison, WI), 1982.
• The Sleeping Beauty, Harper (New York, NY), 1983, revised edition, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1990.
• If You Call This Cry a Song, Countryman Press (Woodstock, VT), 1983.
• Asphalt Georgics, New Directions (New York, NY), 1985.
• Lighter than Air Craft, edited by John Wheatcroft, Press Alley, 1985.
• The Oldest Killed Lake in North America, Salt-Works Press, 1985.
• Mother, Tamarack Press, 1985.
• The Selected Poetry of Hayden Carruth, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1986.
• Sonnets, Press Alley, 1989.
• Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies across the Nacreous River at Twilight toward the Distant Islands, New Directions (New York, NY), 1989.
• Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1992.
• Collected Longer Poems, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1993.
• Selected Essays and Reviews, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1995.
• Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1996.
• Doctor Jazz: Poems, 1996-2000, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2001.

This week's editor is US poet, Eileen Moeller, who lives in Philadelphia. Visit her Tuesday Poem on her blog and go to the sidebar for a host of other Tuesday Poems posted today.