The Map (you give me) by Stephen Bett

You point out
places & it's
like doors
opening

Hallways
filled w/
sudden
light

So caught in
the frame

Dead ends
dark glass
frayed
wire

You are so
open to me,
place a
finger
new spaces
unfold
a map
of my need


Editor: Orchid Tierney

Stephen Bett's works are characteristically sharp and superficially simple. Yet they mask a sincere emotion which, in subsequent readings, grows deeper with intensity. Brevity yields nuances, words become packed with unsaid dialogue, lines are meant to be read 'in between.'

That being said, the layers within the poems are wonderfully subtle. It's true that I have little patience for works where the skeleton is even remotely obvious. If I go to a restaurant, I don't want to be served the ingredients of my meal.

Minimalist poetry makes its own rules to convey meaning but any successful poem should read beyond the printed word. My personal obsession with semiotics, cultural signs and their processes which adapt and form meaning, made me fall in, like, love at first sight with Stephen's work. I spent hours pouring over his book Track this trying to understand how he melded particular nuances to words that normally yielded none.

At the time, I assumed the faint linear structure of the collection imposed a vague, connect-the-dots memory where subsequent poems rode on the metaphors that preceeded them. Although several months on, I'm not so sure that line of reasoning is correct. The one thing I do understand of his work is this gut feeling: the hallmark of authentic poetry is the ability to inspire a determined thought process and - 'I wish I could I write like that!'

Stephen Bett is an insanely prolific Canadian poet of eleven poetry collections which include 'S PLIT' (Ekstasis Editions, 2009) and 'Trader Poets' (Frog Hollow Press, 2003). A new edition of his humourous spoof on the softcore porn industry, 'Extreme Positions' is due for release shortly. The Map (you give me) appears in the collection, 'Track This: A Book Of Relationship,' published by BlazeVOX [books], 2010, and is reproduced with permission.


Do check out the Tuesday Poem sidebar. Every Tuesday, our 30 poets post poems they've written or have selected by other writers, ranging from Sappho to Baxter to Hass.

This week's editor, Orchid Tierney, is an Auckland-based writer. She graduated from the Masters of Creative Writing Program at Auckland University in 2009, and edits Rem Magazine. Her website: www.orchidtierney.com.


Curator's Note: Next week, we celebrate the first birthday of the Tuesday Poem with a communal poem written by each of the poets line by line over the week ... drop in and watch the poem unfold.

Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits by Elizabeth Jennings

You are confronted with yourself. Each year


The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.


You give it all unflinchingly. You stare


Into yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care


Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.


There is no arrogance. Pride is apart


From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift


The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt


But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last


Experiment went on. You stared beyond


Your age, the times. You also plucked the past


And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,


And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.


Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,


The sadness and the joy. To paint’s to breathe,


And all the darknesses are dared. You chose


What each must reckon with.

From ‘Collected Poems’ Carcanet, 1987, © Elizabeth Jennings 1987, and used by kind permission of David Higham Associates.

TP Editor: Belinda Hollyer

Elizabeth Jennings (1926 – 2001) was a poet of great emotional intensity and acuity. Sometimes the effects of these qualities are almost unbearably honest – the Rembrandt poem, above, comes close to that for me – and are always supported by a faultless technique, as well as by what seems a wonderful inevitability of logic and imagery.

Her obituary in The Guardian quotes something she said about clarity: “Only one thing must be cast out, and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding.” Her own poetic achievements both echo and celebrate that.

Jennings was – and still is – a much-anthologised poet, and works such as ‘Delay’ and ‘One Flesh’ are the ones most people will know. I chose the Rembrandt poem because it seems to me to go straight to the heart of our fear of the real, dark, hugeness of death and decay, as well as of the challenges of art.

I can't find a really good picture of Elizabeth Jennings. There's one I've heard of (but not seen: it may be apocryphal) taken when she had just received her CBE in 1992, in which she stands glowing with pleasure and wearing a low-slung beret, short tweed skirt and striped socks above tennis shoes. I love the idea of that photo: utterly at ease with herself, and utterly happy.

Belinda Hollyer is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. She is a New Zealand writer living in London - a children’s author and anthologist - and she blogs at www.belindahollyer.com/blog.

A week of it by Dinah Hawken

It is dark.
Light
and dark again.

It is so.

It is something.
It is really something.

Small, beyond, becalmed
so be-all and end-all.

It is fine.
It is all that blue can be.

So be it.
It is too good to be true.

Are the odds against it?
If only it had another name
like so.

It’s alright. It comes along
in its own time, in the be-all without the end-all.

When it’s miserable
I fancy the o
in so.

So. It is this.
This is it.

Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943 and now lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of five books - It Has No Sound and Is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 'Best First Time Published Poet', Small Stories of Devotion; Water, Leaves, Stones and Oh There You Are Tui (2001).

I feel privileged to have had a preview of Dinah’s forthcoming (6^th) book - The leaf-ride. If you want to read more one of her poems "365 x 30" is at Best New Zealand Poems 2001.

Dinah has such a light touch yet her poems are substantial. There is a remarkable range of poems in The leaf-ride as it travels along in its ‘down-welling, up-welling drift’: poems that range from the power of a single word to the horror of violence to the joy of a newborn child.

Helen Heath is this week's Tuesday Poem editor, she blogs at helenheath.com. and lives in the seaside village of Paekākāriki, on New Zealand's Kapiti Coast. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2009. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia. Most recently she’s had a chap-book of poems published by Seraph Press called Watching for Smoke (2009). Currently she is working on a full-length book of poems.

For more Tuesday Poems, click on the Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.


Curator Note: A week of it, it's been indeed. Tuesday Poem sends its condolences to the people of Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Tuesday Poet Janis Freegard's post expresses this with a haiku.

This New Place by Robert McGonigal

For Rose's baby

Body as Road Map

Body sees the 'you are here' sign,
then finds alleyways
and highways, which connect
the limbs and torso.

An inner guide helps body
explore, create meaning,
detour round slips.

Along these routes,
body seeks a dwelling
and to be nourished.


Body as Telephone

Body answers
a ringing from the pelvis.
It wants to spend all day,
wires connected
with other phones.

Often body sits by itself
an unanswered siren,
or it pushes buttons
for operator instructions.

Soon body learns
which numbers to dial
and which to leave on hold.


Body as a Somebody

Body is very pleased
with itself. This body
knows exactly where it's headed.
Legs stride
over the open ground,
arms reach far.

But some days,
eyes gaze out the window.
Fingers stretch,
tap the windowpane,
how they long to explore
the contours
of the fantail in the plum tree.


Body as Racetrack

Adrenalin circuits
the body in anger,
to sweat out
knots in the system.

Later, as it cools
a stillness ensues.
This is the end of the contest.
A time for bodies
in flow with each other
to rub two sticks together.


Body as Electronics

A wise touch on the crown:
this is the edge
between form
and the void.

Body knows how
thought-forms jolt
and tingle. As it
unplugs from these
the spine above the head
distils a higher voltage.


Body as Walking Stick

Body looks down the goat track
towards the next domain,
lit up by silver hair.

Before it goes
it reveals the meaning of

chiselled-out etches
on the skin.

These will support
other bodies who walk here.

_

     

TP Editor : Janis Freegard

I've chosen this poem in memory of its author, Robert McGonigal, a fine poet and a friend of mine who died far too young. Rob and I met in Greg O'Brien's poetry workshop at Victoria University in 2001 and kept in touch afterwards, occasionally swapping poems for feedback. 'This New Place', originally published in Turbine, is my favourite of Rob's poems.

Rob lived in Edinburgh for some time. I last saw him in 2006, when I was visiting family in South Shields (in the North-East of England) with my partner, Peter. We arranged to meet Rob in Berwick, on the border of Scotland and England, a sort of halfway point none of us had been to before. The three of us spent a lovely, happy day together, exploring the town, stopping for lunch in a little pub and walking along the old town wall.

It was always a treat to get a poem in an email from Rob. I hoped I'd be reading his poetry for many years to come. He was a talented writer and a lovely, gentle young man who is sadly missed and fondly remembered. Thanks to his family for permission to repost this poem.

Janis Freegard's first solo collection, 'Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus' will be published by Auckland University Press in May. She has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, and won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction in 2001. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand, and blogs at http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com/ and http://janisfreegard.blogspot.com/

Excerpt from 15 Flower World Variations - Jerome Rothenberg

flower

         with the body of a fawn

                   under a cholla flower

standing there

         to rub your antlers

                   bending

turning where you stand to rub

         your antler

                  in the flower world

the dawn

         there in its light

                  under a cholla flower

standing there

         to rub your antlers

                  bending turning where you stand

to rub your antlers

         flower

                  with the body of a fawn

under a cholla flower

         standing there

                  to rub your antlers

bending

         turning where you stand to rub
                   your antlers

The 15 Flower World Variations (Membrane Press, 1984) are derived from Yaqui Deer Dance songs by poet-translator-anthologist Jerome Rothenberg, using literal translations by Carleton Wilder et al. The full work can be found at the wonderful Ubuweb ethnopoetics site. 


Rothenberg's work has been called "anthology-assemblages." He identified with both the twentieth-century avant garde and with tribal poetry. The poems here are a literary manifestation of Yaqui (northern Mexican) cosmology. 

The Yaqui conception of the world is considerably different from that of their Mexican and United States neighbors. For example, the world (in Yaqui, anía) is composed of five separate worlds: the desert wilderness world, the mystical world, the flower world, the dream world, and the night world. Much Yaqui ritual is centered upon perfecting these worlds and eliminating the harm that has been done to them, especially by people (source)

Recently, I have had the privilege of reading the poetry of both Caroline Goodwin and Robert Hass, whose attention to the natural world I found refreshing but also sort of out of place in modern life -- which may explain the former. 

Hass laments 'the declining value we ascribe to the natural world', and assigns a duty to poets to correct this. Tuesday Poem thrives on contemporary poetry but it's hard not to appreciate the variational verse that carries this poem, and for me it resonates with the idea of nature as part of a diurnal cycle that constantly turns on itself.

Bernadette Keating is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. She is currently studying towards a postgraduate diploma in art history at Victoria University. She also writes poetry and occasionally blogs about writing and art. Bernadette lives in Wellington, New Zealand.


Curator's Note: One week after the earthquake that devastated Christchurch, it is good to be reminded of the beauty of the natural world - as evoked in the Rothenberg work - as well as its terrors. All Tuesday Poets living in the area (and the families of Tuesday Poets living there) are safe and well despite coping with hardships as the city continues to recover the dead and get back on its feet. All our thoughts are with you, Christchurch. 

Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree by Sarah Lindsay

He kept dreaming of a tree, dreaming

of a tree, dreaming of a tree

and its sound like a hush,

and it seemed he could open

his mouth when he woke and make the others

know something they didn’t already know,

his tree. But he woke and he couldn’t.

He kept thinking of a tree. He made a tree

of his arms and called to the others,

but all he could say, all they could say,

was tree, not that one, no, not here,

tree. They were hungry, shrugged and went on.

Later a leopard dragged him some distance

and left him on the remains of his back,

his plucked face tilted up, and a seed

fell on the stub of his tongue

in his open mouth. Took root,

sent a finger between his teeth

that parted his jaws with its gradual thickness

and lifted its arms full of leaves that fed

on what was in his braincase

and mixed with the sky, and made

a sound in the wind that was

almost what he wanted.


The limitations of language in communication is a theme that occurs in poetry not infrequently. Perhaps this is a little ironic given that poetry relies on language. But poets demand a lot from words, and it is no surprise that they get frustrated from time to time. To me, there is no poem that explores this theme more memorably than Sarah Lindsay’s Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree.

Mount Clutter 

I came across this poem on the website Poetry Daily. (No longer available there - this excellent website archives for one year only.) I had not known of Sarah before, but the poem left me stunned. I sought out more of her work, first Mount Clutter (2002), her second collection in which this poem appears, and then her 2008 collection Twigs and Knucklebones.

There are many, many poems in both books that I love. Even the titles are wondrous – Slow Butterflies in the Luminous Field, Elegy for the Quagga, Valhalla Burn Unit on the Moon Callisto are just a few. In these poems, the overriding sense that I receive is the sense of wonder, as expressed in Cheese Penguin (a poem about a penguin hatched from a cheese tin) : 'the world is large/ and without a fuss has absorbed stranger things than this.'

But in the end, when Sarah gave me permission to use one of her poems here, I couldn’t go past Olduvai Gorge Thorn Tree. Not necessarily because I thought it the best of her poems, but because it was the first I encountered, and therefore had the most impact on me.

Olduvai Gorge is in Tanzania and is famous for the discovery there of early hominids and their tools.

Sarah Lindsay is an American poet from Greensboro, North Carolina. Of her collections of poetry, Primate Behavior (Grove Press 1997) was a National Book Award finalist, and Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press 2008) was named a "Favorite Book of 2008" by the editors of Poetry magazine.  Lindsay has also been awarded the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize. More of her poetry can be read here.  


This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Catherine Fitchett who lives in Christchurch NZ. She wrote poems in high school but studied chemistry at university which led to several careers as a forensic scientist/toxicologist, and work in accounting. She returned to writing in 1999 and is the member of a poetry group, The Poetry Chooks, which has published The Chook Book, and Flap, The Chook Book 2. Vist her blog Still Standing on her Head, and for more Tuesday Poems enter the world of the sidebar where 30 poets from the UK, the US, Australia and NZ post poems. 


CURATOR NOTE: Catherine's city of Christchurch was devastated by a force 6.3 earthquake nearly 13 hours after this poem was posted. We send our prayers and wishes for their safety to Catherine and her family, and to the other Tuesday Poets who live there or who have family there: Helen Lowe, Andrew Bell, Joanna Preston, Kathleen Jones, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Tim Jones - there will be others; and to the whole of that shaken suffering city. Kia kaha: strength. 


PS. We've heard Helen, Joanna, Jeffrey and families are well, Kathleen's daughter and family are ok but living in a tent, Tim Jones' father and step-mother are also safe, but nothing yet on Catherine F or Andrew Bell. Any news please post a comment here. 


ALL TUESDAY POETS AND FAMILIES IN CHRISTCHURCH ARE SAFE AND WELL. Our hearts go out to those who have suffered loss or injury in the earthquake. 

Poem for a Hard Time by Lorna Crozier

Chickens
in a shed with screens to let in air,
a small door for them
to step in and out, not an inch
to spare. All things

in their place, particular,
the proper attention paid
so that around them
there seems a kinder light.

And then the eggs to gather,
one by one, warm in your palm.
Each tiny sun contained,
unbroken, no need for it to rise
or fall, no need for anything
to harm  you.

Lorna Crozier is a Canadian poet whose work has won numerous awards, including Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Poetry Award and the Canadian Authors Association. She has published twelve previous books of poetry, including a collection of selected poems, The Blue Hour of the Day. In 2009, Crozier published a memoir, Small Beneath the Sky about which Ursula le Guin said, “How rare such honesty is, and how hard-won, and radiant, and beautiful.” She has a new collection appearing in March this year, Small Mechanics.

During my year of memorising poems, 'Poem for a Hard Time' was one I memorised and it became one of my talismanic poems.  I love its crafted simplicity and the invitation to focus on small, manageable things.

You can read more about Lorna Crozier on her website.

'Poem for a Hard Time', Whetstone, McCelland and Stewart, 2005 was published here with permission. 

Catherine Bateson is this week's Tuesday Poem Guest Editor. She is an Australian poet and children's writer who has published three collections of poetry, three verse novels for young adults and numerous novels for younger readers. She teaches Professional Writing and Editing at GippsTAFE.

Poets by Janet Frame

If poets die young
they bequeath two thirds of their life to the critics
to graze and grow fat in
visionary grass.

If poets die in old age
they live their own lives
they write their own poems
they are their own might-have-been.

Young dead poets are prized comets.
The critics queue with their empty wagons ready for hitching.

Old living poets
stay faithfully camouflaged in their own sky.
It may even be forgotten they have been shining for so long.
The reminder comes upon their falling
extinguished into the earth.
The sky is empty, the sun and moon have gone away,
there are not enough street bulbs, glow-worms, fireflies to give light

and for a time it seems there will be no more stars.
 

--
This poem was one of many that Janet Frame (1924-2004) never published in her lifetime. The Pocket Mirror appeared in the late 1960s in the UK, America and New Zealand and has never been out of print, and many of the poems have become classics. 

"Poets" was first published posthumously in The Goose Bath (Random House NZ 2006; Wilkins Farago Australia 2008) and in Storms Will Tell (Bloodaxe Books UK, USA 2008).

Janet Frame showed this poem to her friend Landfall editor Charles Brasch on one of his visits to her house in Dunedin, but she refused to let him publish it. After Charles died in 1973, Janet sent a copy of the poem to another grieving friend of his, Margaret Scott. Janet described showing Charles the poem: 

"That afternoon he asked me what I’d been writing and I was bold enough to say I had written a poem and then bold enough to get it when he asked me to show it to him. This was so unlike me, for I never show things if I can help it. 

The poem was about the deaths of two poets, one in youth, the other in age. Charles liked it and suggested I send it to Landfall, which I never did, in fact I've never sent it anywhere. He liked it but he did not think it ‘wonderful’ or anything like that, nor did I, for it’s full of stupidities. We talked then about death in youth and in age, and Charles again suggested I send the poem to Landfall. He wanted people to read it and think about it. I'm sending it to you. I knew it would find its home one day."

The whole of the letter to Margaret Scott appears in Dear Charles, Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence which is a hand printed fine edition recently published by the University of Auckland's Holloway Press. 


 

Since its first publication 'Poets' has struck a chord with many readers, and I know that it has already been read out at several funerals. The self-effacing Janet Frame may well have identified 'stupidities' in the composition of the poem, according to her own impossibly high standards, but she was correct in her belief that her words might also bring comfort to those facing the realities of death. 

The poem has also been set to music by Jenny McLeod and the song based on it was first performed at the Wellington Festival of the Arts in 2008.

Pamela Gordon is this week's Tuesday Poem Guest Editor. She lives in Dunedin and works for the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The latest news from the Janet Frame Estate is posted at An Angel @ My Blog. Pamela has had her own poetry published in anthologies and periodicals, and occasionally takes part in poetry readings. She is currently co-editing a collection of Janet Frame's non-fiction.

The Homely Ghost by Marjory Nicholls

I shall come back

Very quietly, very softly,

A little brown shadow.

I shall not come

When the moon is white like a bone,

And the house-dogs howl.

Not on a dark night

With uneasy winds,

When the ivy scratches the window,

And the paper stirs on the wall.

I shall come back

In the Autumn,

In the early twilight.

I shall wear a russet cloak

And have a basket on my arm

With red apples and brown nuts in it,

And golden honey-comb.

I shall watch the children playing

And they will not be afraid.

The old woman will just walk past and nod;

Walk past, and into the beech-wood

With its coppery leaves on the ground,

And down by the pond, and the fields

With their big yellow ricks.

I shall pass the cottage-windows –

Those with red curtains and glinting with firelight.

I shall watch the blue smoke from the chimneys

And think of the groups around the fire.

Will any be thinking of me?

I don’t mind –

I am just a little brown shadow, flitting past.

Must I leave it?

Cold and alone, must I go

Through the wilds beyond Earth

To the courts where the white angels stand

August, majestic?

Be certain, I shall come back.

-

This Tuesday’s poem is a classic New Zealand poem by Marjory Nicholls from her collection Thirdly.

Born in 1891, Nicholls published three collections (A Venture in Verse, Gathered Leaves and Thirdly) and had poems published in The Spike, The Reporter, C.C. Review, the New Zealand Freelance, in The Old Clay Patch anthology under her married name Marjory Hannah, and in Quentin Pope’s Kowhai Gold anthology. She lived and travelled widely overseas to England, Australia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, New York and India, and married John Hannah. She died in a bus stop accident in 1930. Her last published poem appeared posthumously in the New Zealand Mercury, No. 1, 1933.

Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA) archivist Niel Wright, who republished her complete poems in two volumes through Original Books in 2009, says that ‘Nicholls was a leading New Zealand poet of the decade 1910-1920’. She was mentored by J H E Schroder who influenced among others Robin Hyde, Ruth Gilbert and Wright himself.

S. Eichelbaum stated in his foreword to Nicholls’s first volume: ‘Imaginative without being turgid, facile without being slovenly, Miss Nicholls’s verse has above all the rare distinction of a freshness and thoughtfulness, without which all verse is but body without spirit. These qualities should assure for it the warm welcome and appreciation which it certainly deserves.’

Nicholls was adept with the various rhyme schemes and dominant forms of the period, including the sonnet. She wrote beautiful poems on the changing seasons, New Zealand landscapes and the native flora and fauna of the bush. Her other subjects included domestic life, the Great War, fairy worlds, love, translations, local places she had been to (Mana, Wainuiomata) and dedications to, and observations of, people she had met. 

Some of her more memorable poems are only four lines: ‘Love in your life has flashed / Like water white down a fall - / Laughing, vivid and bright / But passing – and that was all.' (‘A Fleeting Gleam’, Wellington, 1913).

The poem I’ve selected here is ‘The Homely Ghost’ - a haunting poem that struck me at once. It almost seems prophetic in that the person in the poem, much like the poet, may come back. It certainly lives up to George Barker’s famous dictum that ‘Therefore all poems are elegies’. It seems fitting to publish it here as an introduction to her work.

Mark Pirie is Guest Editor for Tuesday Poem this week. He is an internationally published New Zealand poet, anthologist, literary critic, writer and publisher with a special interest in cricket poetry and 100 titles in the National Library. In 2010 he edited and published 'A Tingling Catch': A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009.' Mark's anthology of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry, Voyagers (IP, Brisbane), co-edited with Tuesday Poet Tim Jones, won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work 2010. His publishing company is HeadworX Publishers. Mark also helped organise the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA), and is responsible for updating the PANZA catalogue that has around 4,000 titles including the work of Marjory Nicholls. 

Publications by Marjory Nicholls:

A Venture in Verse (Whitcombe and Tombs, 1917).

Gathered Leaves (Whitcome and Tombs, 1922).

Thirdly (H.H. Tombs, 1930).

Complete Poems in two volumes (Original Books, 2009).

Further reading:

A reading of the Aotearoa poet Marjory Lydia Nicholls (1891-1930) : an essay by F.W. Nielsen Wright, Cultural and Political Booklets, 2001.

Notes on Marjory Lydia Nicholls complete poems by F.W. Nielsen Wright, Original Books, 2009.

J H E Schroder and the poetry of E. S. and Marjory Lydia Nicholls in C.C. Review : a report on research plus some original poems by F.W. Nielsen Wright, Cultural and Political Booklets, 2010.

The Physiotherapist's Piano - by Jenny Powell

The bones of his piano
have fallen out of a tune,

their shape stacked in loose

arrangements of body parts.

He has spaced the ivory keys

across the floor with spinal

precision as if each gap was

linked by the nerve of a note.

Felt hammers lean in towers

of hollow bones, air slipping

through every crevice, the air

breathing a scale of ascent.

The physiotherapist hums

with his hands, coaxes the hinges

and pins, copper strings, backposts

and pedals, bridges and board

into an upright frame,

a skeletal dream,

a silent machine.

The physiotherapist turns

the piano to face the moon

limping across the sky, stars weeping

behind a veil of cloud, scent of loss

shiver of dark, the mouth

of night calling, urgent

and angry.

The piano begins

to remember the tune.


Copyright Jenny Powell - 2011 
Reproduced for Tuesday Poem with permission from the poet. 

"Of course a physiotherapist would reconstruct an ailing piano just as he tends to the human body. As it finds itself, the piano remembers how to play the blues. . . " (Jenny Powell in an email conversation with Claire Beynon - 24 January 2010) 

Even if I didn't know she plays the French Horn, I think I'd find it difficult not to imagine Jenny Powell as a musician as well as a poet. Her poems do more than carry sound, suggest sound, express sound. They themselves sound. Her language and landscapes thunder and tinkle; they hum and blast and roar. Structurally and rhythmically, too, they seem to me like musical compositions. 

No sooner had I read The Physiotherapist's Piano than I felt compelled to read it again. And then again. For me, this has something to do with the poet's observations of what might initially seem to be a quite ordinary moment of maintenance and repair and yet has all the hush and intimacy of a vigil. The poet seems to me to be speaking as much of the relationship between a specific physiotherapist and his damaged piano/patient, as she is evoking that between universal healer/shaman and everywoman or man; our common, uncommon journey. 

I appreciate the way Jenny invites us into the space of the poem, calling on us not only to witness the repair process but somehow also to participate in it. There is darkness here; delicacy and weeping. The process is not simple, straightforward; not all light. 

Can one speak of a poem as 'patient'? I'm not sure - if not, may I at least suggest it has a quality of patience? 

*

Jenny Powell is a Dunedin poet and secondary school literacy coordinator. She has written four individual collections of poetry - Sweet Banana Wax Peppers (HeadworX, 1998), Hats (HeadworX, 2000), Four French Horns (HeadworX, 2004) and Viet Nam - a poem journey (HeadworX, 2010). Helen Rickerby - one of our Tuesday Poets - introduced Jenny's latest collection on her blog Winged Ink a couple of months ago, shortly after the launch of Viet Nam - a poem journey. 

As an artist interested in collaborative work, Jenny Powell initiated the collection Double Jointed (Inkweed, 2003) with ten poets of her choice, and in 2004 published Locating the Madonna with North Island poet Anna Jackson (Seraph Press).

Jenny features on the CD and book New New Zealand Poets. She was a finalist in the 2008 and 2009 Great Britain Aesthetica Creative Works Competition, short-listed for the 2009 UK Plough Poetry Prize and was a runner up in the 2010 UK Myslexia Poetry Competition. Her work can be found in a variety of international publications.

*

This week's editor is NZ artist & writer, Claire Beynon.  

Remember to click your way down the side bar for more Tuesday Poems.

Last Rescued Bird by T.Clear

Enough. Take your feathers
dead or alive and flutter into oblivion.
I'm done with the fractured wing,
the punctured lung, severed spine.
I will not weigh your soul
and account for all its cherished works.
Though your nest lies ruptured,
and broken at my feet, all my remedies
are used up, finished, expired.
Mud no more, dear downy love.
Burn the twigs, the riff-raff rags.
Let the cats loose.
Fetch the axe.
I'm cutting down the tree.

--
originally appeared in Crab Creek Review

T. Clear is a Tuesday Poet of Irish descent who lives in Seattle, U.S. She has been publishing her award-winning work for more than thirty years. She is a founder of Floating Bridge Press, and works as a production and shipping manager for a Seattle-based glass artist. Her poetry, photography and stimulating posts can be found on her blog Premium T (in our sidebar). Links to her published work can be found there too.   


Tuesday Poem first discovered T. Clear - christened Therese, she's known as T - via TP co-curator Claire Beynon's blog. As happens in the blogosphere, these two very similar thinkers/writers had connected, and Claire approached T. to join us in posting poems every Tuesday.  We were delighted when she came on board. One of her first Tuesday Poems was Last Rescued Bird which blew me out of the water.

T. Clear's poetry is powerful and clear-eyed. It ranges from the warm, funny and quirky to the unsentimental and uncompromising. Its foundations are strong, playful language. Last Rescued Bird impresses me because it is subversive, using the imperative mood and uncompromising language to attempt to silence the myth of woman as the unquestioning nurturer.

Against the thrust of society, history and literature, where the 'womanly art of caring' is apotheosised, the woman in this poem - for woman it must be - puts herself first, and cries 'enough'.

It reminds me of Australian author Helen Garner's The Spare Room which unsettled many readers for its portrayal of a relationship where a woman cares for a dying friend in her home, but also says, eventually, 'enough'. Author Kirsty Gunn in her review of The Spare Room says it's 'an exposé of the huge distance and moral hypocrisy that exists (particularly, I think this book is saying) in female friendship.' I like this poem for similar reasons.

As with any good poem, I like it, too, for how it sounds in the mouth. The 'f' and 'u' and hard 'c' sounds echo between the lines to evoke the 'rupture', the 'fracture', the exhaustion, the strength of purpose. No accident that together they form a word that's felt but not said.

'Mud no more, my dear downy love,' is wonderful for the softer sounds of 'o' and 'm' and 'u' which, with the phrase 'dear downy love', evoke earlier more tender feelings. 'Burn the twigs, the riff-raff rags,' is tough again - spitting. This is a woman who is uncompromising in her decision. And the poem finishes with three powerful statements that gather momentum to the final violent act of sundering.

Do visit T. Clear's blog for more wonderful revelations. Last Rescued Bird is published with permission and can be found on T's blog here.

This week's editor is the co-curator of Tuesday Poem, Mary McCallum. An author and poet, who also teaches creative writing, reviews books and works as a bookseller, she lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Her blog is O Audacious Book. Check out her poem this week After Reading Auden, and the blogs by the other Tuesday Poets, in the sidebar.