January Begins by Carolyn McCurdie

For New Year I wish you

Janus, the god who looks forward

and back, till his pupils dilate, intoxication

of distance. On your calendar it’s his month.

Here is the photo he hangs on your wall:

salt caravans in Niger,

from a paraglider, so high that camels

seem strung as if notes on scribbled staves of song.

On the horizon, a thin sprinkle like fire-blackened grain:

another caravan. One way with millet to trade, the return journey

with salt. They follow the line of the sand dunes, begin

in autumn, stop

before summer rains.

Those little blips are human beings, commas, apostrophes, keeping the line.

My wish for you: Janus, the god of transition. Here, in the last

islands of human arrival, the ancient

journeys belong to birds. When autumn comes, you’ll stand

on the beach to watch

shearwaters, day after day, low to the ocean, wings tipping the spray and the rocks

of the headlands.

They loop the Pacific, come back in spring.

The birds, the camels, doodle, meander,

embellish the lines on the mental map.

Janus, the god who lays out

mental maps. With a thumb nail he flattens

the folds. The paraglider delights him, the long

view, the old is the new.  He sings its audacity.

When you first learned to balance, unsteady, surprised,

this was the song that he gave you.

Since then, self-mutilation

of bumper-to-bumper, the queues in the customs hall.

Still he sings it, insists, on your calendar,

through the letters of your name, till you play it in your finger bones

like crystals of sunlight

that quiver down dunes, till you push out from the beach, dance it

in the arches of your feet as they brace

on wet slanted wood, on the slow-rising heft

of water. As they take one step.

Around and around it comes back. Can you hear it

that song? Yes. The intoxication

of song.

After rain, and when the wind shifts to nor’ west.

I wish this for you: Janus, who unlocks

the doors and tells you, the world, the wide shining world

is open. Go through.

'January Begins' was first published in Poetry NZ vol 46 and is posted here with the poet's permission.
Editor: Claire Beynon

George Steinmetz | Camel Shadows

Reading Carolyn McCurdie's poetry, I experience a kind of 'lift-off' as if my feet are no longer touching ground. Her words transport me to a world entirely 'other', her poet's landscape and sensibility at once intimate, restrained, vast, dramatic and original. Carolyn has a way of capturing the expansiveness of the whole - the overview - whilst simultaneously zooming in to her subjects with metronomic measure and penetrating accuracy. An air of enquiry, of 'scrupulous kindness', seem ever-present. Her poems open readers to encounters with place, persons, concepts and considerations that are spatial and sensory, reverent and relevant. And her poems are beautiful - compassionate and graceful in their engagement with life's subtler realities. Carolyn brings tenderness and light to themes that might elsewhere be cloaked in darkness or weighted by human frailty; our common, uncommon story.

About January Begins, Carolyn writes, "One of the things my sister gave me at Christmas 2011 was a calendar in which the January photograph was the one in the poem of camels in Niger. It was taken by 'National Geographic' photographer George Steinmetz from a motorised paraglider. It bewitched me and the poem seemed to arise quite straightforwardly from that. Then, quite a while after completing the poem, I began to understand other things about it.  In June 2011 my mother had died, aged 91, at the end of a life that had been diminishing for some time. I had been her carer for 11 years. Turned one way, I can hear in the poem that I am speaking to her. Turn it another way, and she is speaking to me."

I am struck by the way January Begins carries the hushed notes of Carolyn's conversation with her mother whilst at the same time speaking (or so it seems to me) into the heart of our current global situation. Whether or not she intended this, I find myself challenged to move with the poet as she transitions from the personal to the universal, from the private sentiments exchanged in her home to dialogue of a global nature and scale. In a flash, she takes us from the image in the calendar to the paraglider, 'so high that camels seem strung as if notes on scribbled staves of song'; desert expanse and coastal landscape are drawn together as if by sleight of hand, juxtaposed in bold language and plain sight; we find ourselves considering the possibility distance and death might be no more than a matter of perception, catch a glimpse of ourselves and our world as coordinates on the same map or - perhaps -  as two voices capable of music, harmony, collaboration.

Sharing airspace with her paraglider, we are granted a moment or two in which to witness ourselves and our planet from up close and at a distance - an opportunity to consider and come home to some new understanding of features and fractures, barrenness and riches. For me, the second and fifth stanzas seem especially suggestive of this ---  

My wish for you: Janus, the god of transition. Here, in the last

islands of human arrival, the ancient

journeys belong to birds. When autumn comes, you’ll stand

on the beach to watch

shearwaters,

                 and

like crystals of sunlight

that quiver down dunes, till you push out from the beach, dance it

in the arches of your feet as they brace

on wet slanted wood, on the slow-rising heft

of water. As they take one step.

The poem's final stanza brings us and this conversation full circle. The poet addresses her mother with tender, permission-giving urgency and at the same time issues us all with an invitation.

I wish this for you: Janus, who unlocks

the doors and tells you, the world, the wide shining world

is open. Go through.

Carolyn McCurdie lives in Dunedin, New Zealand, in a sun-filled house that looks out on hills, bush and farm land - a 40 minute walk to the city centre. She has been writing poetry for approximately ten years. Her poems have been published widely in print and on-line. After the Art Gallery was highly commended in the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition 2011 (judge: James Brown) and Making up the Spare Beds for the Brothers Grimm won first place in the NZ Poetry Society's 2013 International Poetry Competition. In his judge's report Vincent O'Sullivan wrote, ". . . Only a very good poet writes lines as effectively as that. Or so direct and elusive at the same time. In one sense, everything is so in place. Shift focus a little, everything carries threat. And that sense of apparent domestic order - there are cracks, stains, puzzles, that don't allow us to believe a word of it, even as we cannot rationally say why. All we are aware of is where the poem entirely directs us - the world is not as we see it, even when it is."

In addition to poetry, Carolyn writes short stories for adults (in 1998 she won the Lilian Ida Smith Award for these) and fiction for children. Her compelling fantasy novel The Unquiet was published in 2006 by Longacre Press Ltd. Penelope Todd, writer and founding director of Rosa Mira Books describes Carolyn as 'a writer of quiet power'. Yes.  A writer of poise, potency and presence, too. 

In her reply to my letter expressing my wish for her to be this week's featured Tuesday Poet, Carolyn mentioned she'd be away at the time January Begins was posted. "In a few weeks I leave for what is, at the age of 66, my first big overseas adventure. I am using money that Mum left me. Part of the plan is to visit the London street where she grew up, and then on to Glasgow to stand in the street that was my father's home. Circles. . . "

Indeed! Safe and stimulating travels to you, Carolyn. 

Please visit Carolyn's page on the New Zealand Society of Authors website - www.authors.org.nz - and for more of her poems, visit Deep South www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth 

To enjoy another week's selection of fine Tuesday Poems, please click on the links on the side bar. 

This week's editor, Claire Beynon, is an artist, writer and independent researcher based in Dunedin, New Zealand. She blogs here and here. Her website is aging gracelessly and is sorely in need of an update.

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News for all interested poets  |  CASELBERG POETRY PRIZE 2013 

Entries for the Caselberg Prize (First Prize NZ$500) will be welcomed between 1 October and 31 December 2013. For more information please go to www.caselbergtrust.org

ALWAYS ALMOST, NEVER QUITE by David Howard

            at home 
in the interpreted world

            - Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies I

1

The tree on the slope is contingent upon your voice.

I hear nothing so the tree won’t bend –

I need that tree to bend.

The horizon does not want poetry to keep going.

Intention? No star meant to be admired and yet…

Praise is impossible without doubt, ask a teenager.

The beautiful people hear a mirror’s echo;

What they know is special

Pleading. As if poetry needed their vanishing lines!

Always almost, never quite –

Laureates talking up a void rather than a storm.

Whatever, sorrow outlasts wonder.

For most of us it will be winter

Three seasons out of four. Ever had the feeling of feeling

Before?

Parmenides had it too; he knew

Nothing comes from nothing,

The universe is eternal, like first love.

It is hungry work, returning.

2

Because language is the history of being human

A cannibal is somebody who eats his words

As if they were fire.

Embers then ash are what comes of desire.

A food basket made from hope holds the lovers.

Like them, it ignites easily.

Saying is only one way of doing, it is

A narrow cloth for a long table.

However hungry, everyone must leave table

Without much thought for the stained cloth.

3

Anyway, songbirds are followed by birds of prey.

Both balance on top of the ballroom

At the end of the harbour pier.

The rowboat waits – that is what it was made to do

So it won’t get impatient, it won’t

Chafe the rope that will soon be thrown

Over. Hear the soulful violin, out of time;

Feel shoes moving in unison

Towards the edge of what was always known.

Why do we hold on

To the belief that infinite growth is possible

In a finite world? (Brian Turner)

At sunset my daughter gets a red cheek.

Her head separates earth from heaven, now from then

With a wall of fire. She will dance

On that wall, calling for the boy

Who tastes of juniper. His juice will keep her

Free from disease…

I smile through three decades

At this innocence. Always almost, never quite

A bullock hauls itself out of estuary mud

To shuffle through the Milky Way.

[published online in On Barcelona]

David Howard, photograph by Alan Thompson

                                                 Editor: Claire Beynon

'We imagine we are observed and are of concern to someone.' (Czeslaw Milosz, 'I Saw') 

Born in Christchurch, 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 David retired to Purakaunui in order to write: 'The rural hinter is perfect for this; by getting clear of the social whirl you realise what matters is the dirt under your fingernails. 

In November 2011 Cold Hub Press published David's collected works as The Incomplete Poems. In September 2012 his collaboration with printmaker Peter Ransom, You Look So Pretty When You're Unfaithful To Me, appeared from Holloway Press, the same month Otago University announced his appointment as the Robert Burns Fellow 2013. 'Yes, I feel lucky.' David's poetry has been translated into Dutch, German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.

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HAPPY NEW YEAR, Tuesday Poets and loyal readers - and welcome back to the online lap of poetry gods and goddesses. 

You'll see I've taken a slightly different - collaborative - approach to things this week. I invited four members of our collective (names more-or-less pulled from the hat) to read David's poem ahead of time and then to respond to his words with a single question. As the questions came in, I forwarded them on to David who in turn tapped out his reply. The ensuing discussion became not only the body, but the arms, legs, head and heart of this post; each bracketed dialogue, a small-vast world in itself.  

David initially sent me for four poems to choose from. Almost Always, Never Quite was the world that pulled me back, insisting I return - and, again, return. A poem that set me wandering and wondering, I found myself considering the ways in which mathematics, music and metaphysics underpin, shape and inform poetry, whether unconsciously or by intention. I was curious to know, for instance, whether David's poem 'arrived' at fifty-one lines by coincidence or by design, for is there not as inherent and reliable a magic in poetry as there is in prime numbers? Do such matters matter? I believe so. 

In response to my question, 'What prompted this poem and gave rise to its title?', David replied -

'To begin with an aside... Always Almost: Never Quite is the blue-blooded title of the second volume of Outsider by Brian Sewell – a man whose snobbery is so expansive it could fill the Kingdom of Heaven without assistance from any (other) deity. If ‘The beautiful people’ are his, the immediate provocation for the poem was an invitation to the intimate and honest Going West Festival 2012, with its declared theme Almost Always, Never Quite. 

What a shift there is from a colon to a comma! The former is a mark for equals, the latter for what only follows. In the monotonoverse of larger literary festivals, which are peppered with touring almost-celebrities, what most presenters ‘know is special/Pleading.’ Yet the best know more; they know that ‘language is the history of being human'. And that, while the vanity of their colleagues may appear infinite, vanity is one among many finite things: chiefly our species and the planet that we insist on calling, in error, ours. 

The poem goes beyond its occasion because, to be worth reading, a poem has to.'

*

Many thanks to David not only for agreeing to be this week's featured poet but also for investing so fully in this collaborative process. Thanks too, to Marylinn Kelly, Orchid Tierney, Renee Liang and Susan T. Landry for your attentive reading and for contributing so meaningfully to this discussion. (Susan - together with Boston writer and artist, Melissa Shook - recently launched an online journal on memoir you will be pleased to visit - Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie).

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          For most of us it will be winter

          Three seasons out of four.

Marylinn Kelly: Are you saying that (for most us) time is 3/4 not about producing, growing, flowering, emerging but rather existing in a dormant state? Is that wasteful or desirable? 

David: While my daily experience is that most of us are dormant most of the time (we often call it ‘being busy’), which I find wasteful rather than desirable, I also own the problem - logical and psychological - of becoming. It’s a contradictory matter; it often seems to me that ‘contradictory’ and ‘matter’ belong in the same sentence. As a child I intuitively subscribed to Parmenides’ notion of block time. Its most prominent adherent is Einstein, who was taken to task by Popper for a view that reduces change to the status of an illusion. While I am intellectually uncertain about essentialism I write from the imaginative position that what is, is; everything already exists, and for always.

                        Nothing comes from nothing,

            The universe is eternal, like first love.

            It is hungry work, returning.

*

Renee Liang: How often does other poets' work kick off your own work, and in what ways? 

David: Not often because I’m wary. Some poets are close friends. Hesiod, Cavafy, Pessoa and Pasolini are the ones I trust most. They have the good manners to stay out of the way when I am beginning a piece; once it is underway they occasionally pop in with advice. Rilke, who orients the opening lines of this poem, is a rare and rather superior visitor to my cinder block tower. I needed to argue through a few of the assertions in the opening of his Duino Elegies, especially: ‘For Beauty’s nothing/but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear’. That's because I view poetry as a way of knowing; it is primarily an attempt to understand rather than an aesthetic endeavour. Incidentally, this means that I treat contemporary notions of hierachy (The Best of the Best of…) and associated technical models as fluorescent red herrings. And a dialogue with the dead, which I welcome, does not presuppose reliance on authority.

            Saying is only one way of doing, it is

            A narrow cloth for a long table.

            However hungry, everyone must leave table

            Without much thought for the stained cloth.

*

Susan T. Landry: Your poem made me think of people who ask why is the sky blue or how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It made me think of an ancient Chinese carving I saw in a museum as a child, the tiniest people and boats and trees carved from a slightly larger but in any language still tiny piece of ivory, and all I could think of even then even as a child, was why?

My question to you is this: is the optimism inherent in the question about blue sky and angels and why enough? Is it always almost, never quite?

David: Your question brings up the ghostly whisper of Montaigne: ‘A straight oar looks bent in water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.’ He was writing at a time when the intellectual optimism of the Renaissance was being bruised by religious conflict. We read at a time when the economic optimism of the American Dream has visited nightmares upon the have-nots. Always almost, never quite: optimism – whatever its occasion and its object – is not enough. Songbirds are followed by birds of prey. The rowboat waits and, one day, no one will notice how the straight becomes bent yet remains straight. But the optimism of ‘the question about blue sky and angels and why’ is necessary for poetry, which is a kind of analogical thinking. Why? Because it takes faith to leap. The privileged authorities (whether from the state or private sector) use words to circumscribe, to diminish, whereas poets use words to open, to expand. 

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Orchid Tierney: There are two poetic gestures that really stand out for me in this poem. First is the use of citationality, the borrowing of other voices, or more specifically, the absorption of what-has-already-been-said-and-written, what is historical and passed into public space. Second, section two of poem contains two wonderful clauses:

            Because language is the history of being human
            A cannibal is somebody who eats his words
            As if they were fire.

"Because language is the history of being human" suggests to me that language is an after-effect of experience. In this way, one's gendered, sexual, socio-economic, and ethnic relations to the world not only shape our relations to the structures of language, but in fact, they generate them too. The second line of this stanza: "A cannibal is somebody who eats his words" indicates to me of the pervasive cultural recycling of pre-existent text which leads me back to my first observation of David's use of
citationality. That language is like "fire" would underscore the first line of this stanza: like fire, language is product of human ingenuity; it can nurture us from a distance but once spoken, it cannot be easily reabsorbed back into the human body. At least, to do so would pose a level of danger. But note, language here is spoken by the male subject; he consumes "his words." In this sense, David is referring to a specific gendered experience that produces a language in which its echoes share a male centre (*a* male centre, not *the* male centre).

I'm wondering how David sees his use of citationality as elaborating, expanding, investigating his male-centre relation to the structures of language. 

David: Citationality is a technique for interrogating the self, yet it requires empathy for others and respect for silence (which I regard as generative and therefore feminine). Again, to echo is to enter into relation with the greater-than. When I speak you hear more than me.

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Claire: I'd encourage multiple readings of Always Almost, Never Quite. My experience has been that with each reading, the poem's landscape inhabited me more, and I, it. My curiosity was repeatedly piqued as to the relationship between Parmenides (c. 515/540BCE) and his muse - and I found myself wondering about the conversations David might (and surely does?) strike up with Rilke when no one else is around.

I asked David if the three-part form of Always Almost, Never Quite was prompted by Parmenides' poetic and philosophical exposition, On Nature (his response: 'Yes, my poem's echoing structure is intentional. .  .'). In his largely-lost 3000-line poem, Parmenides asserts that 'to be means to be completely, once and for all. What exists can in no way not exist'. I admire - and even envy a little - the language he uses when describing the structure of the cosmos as a fundamental binary principle that governs the manifestations of all the particulars: 'the aether fire of flame', which is gentle, mild, soft, thin and clear, and self-identical, and the other is 'ignorant night', body thick and heavy.

What an exquisite image he paints! 

'The air has been separated off from the earth, vapourized by its more violent condensation, and the sun and the circle of the Milky Way are exhalations of fire. The moon is a mixture of both earth and fire. The aether lies around above all else, and beneath it is ranged that fiery part which we call heaven, beneath which are the regions around the earth. . . '

There's a soft/loud echo of this in David’s two closing lines - 

            A bullock hauls itself out of estuary mud

            To shuffle through the Milky Way.  

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David takes up his position as Burns Fellow on 1 February. David, we wish you exhalations of fire. 

To read more about David - his pyrotechnics and poetry, collaborative projects and solo publications, awards, service and residencies - please click on the following links:

Under Government and Restraint (David in crackling conversation with TP poet, Tim Jones)
New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre
Trout Press
Cold Hub Press
New Zealand Book Council

Claire Beynon is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, she immigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand in November 1994. Claire is a visual artist, art-science collaborator and writer of poetry and short stories. She blogs (somewhat sporadically these days) at All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude and Waters I Have Known. Her web address is www.clairebeynon.co. nz

After you've enjoyed Always Almost, Never Quite please take time to read the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them listed in the sidebar.

RIPE FRUIT by Ruben Mowszowski

It was that time again. 

He sat on the ground letting the dusk settle on him.
The air was dry, pulling the moisture from his lungs, lightening his body.
Why had he come?
Too long. It had been too long.
Once he had imagined a child.
Forget, forget.
He stared at the outline of the tree, its shape like an upturned hand,
beseeching or giving, he could not be sure.
Dear God, is it not long enough? Give me emptiness;
my heart is full of sharp pointed stones.
On the branches dark shapes stirred and one by one dropped off
with heavy fluttering wings.

    

Ungrateful wretch, he thought, at least you have life. 

He looked at his body to see that it was all there.

Thank you God; for this leg, for this arm; all the parts he could think of.

Later he would look around the stony Karoo for the rest. 

At some other time he might spread himself across the valley

casting hands and feet at the base of the twin mountains.

    

The silence was that of a place emptied, a place of no water save for the spring 

and the souls of ancient fish passing wraithlike through him.  

The rocks were hard on his feet; the ground was dry.

He had walked barefoot on the hard stony ground collecting thoughts scattered on the hillside.

All morning he had walked leaving dark crimson streaks behind him.

Take my heart, take my blood, he had pleaded.  

He longed for his body to be pierced, for his blood to flow and be absorbed by the dry air; to unravel himself over bushes and become picking food for birds and lizards;

to be sucked up the trunks of trees leaving his bones spring-washed pure

and bleached white. 

The tree had lost its outline. 

A shape separated itself and grew larger. 

She lay next to him, warming him.

He touched her face.

I was afraid, she said. I dreamed you built a house and it turned to sand.
He felt her arms tighten around him, dark curls against his face.

When he entered her, tears sprang from her eyes onto the dry ground.

He woke up, he was alone.  

The morning sky held a curved moon and a bright star.

New growth had appeared on the tree 

and the branches were heavy with ripe fruit. 




Ruben Mowszowski

~ * ~

Ruben Mowszowski lives in Kalk Bay, a salt-licked fishing village about an hour's drive from Cape Point, the Southernmost tip of South Africa. One late afternoon in January, he and I met in a sun-warmed courtyard and sat in the shade of an old syringa tree drinking wine, eating almonds and olives and talking till the sun sank behind the mountain. Inspired by our wide-roaming conversation, I went in search of his work.

To borrow the words of Sam Keen - "Aristotle said 'Philosophy begins in wonder.' I believe it also ends in wonder. The ultimate way we relate to the world as something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder."

To my mind, Ruben Mowszowski's writing renews our sense of wonder. When I invited him to send me a few lines as a backdrop to Ripe Fruit - a piece that seems to me equal parts reflective essay and poem - he replied 'I wrote the piece in Warmwaterberg - the hot mineral springs near Barrydale in the Klein Karoo. The peacocks there roost at night on the branches of trees. I'm always cautious about writing too much about a poetic piece but I'll say something about the landscape. . . the way the land speaks here and the animistic ethos that allows a tree to be imbued with the spirit of a person. The waters are slightly radioactive so all sorts of physical benefits are claimed but it's also a place where the wounded can go to heal the soul. . . " 

A few weeks ago, I posted Ruben's poem Karoo Moon on my blog. Although Ripe Fruit and Karoo Moon sound distinctly different notes, there's a raw-yet-yielding quality to both. Each piece took root - and is rooted within - the Karoo, a vast wilderness area of semi-desert that covers two-thirds of South Africa.

                ". . . Time here, if there is time, is all of time. Time space and form,
                mantis hare and moon, are but different aspects of one face.
                Earth and sky interpenetrate. Some people talk about a deeper
                breath. There can be sadness not related to anything one knows.
                Language fails. . . "

                                and a second excerpt from Karoo Moon 

                ". . . There is another story told in wind
                of wind that was once a man then bird
                dropping bloodstained feather into a pool
                among the daughters of the rain
                ostrich becoming ostrich again
                while sun thrown up into the sky
                reshapes the moon that does not die
                for ever, but reborn gathers souls,
                and clouts the hare and splits its lip
                for doubting resurrection of the dead. . . "

              

Bosduif, Kaaingsveld - Stephen Inggs (SA)

Digital print with archival inks on paper - 1118 x 805MM (from the series Legacy - 2009)

Ruben Mowszowski’s articles on science and culture have been published in The Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Independent, Leadership, Geographical (UK), Resurgence (UK), Style, Architectural Digest, Men's Health, Pforeword, Directions, Research Papers, Doenit, Chi, Right Stuff. Invista (Portugal), Fair Lady. He was author of the commemorative article for the launch of the Southern African Large Telescope (Click here to read SKA on the birthplace of humanitity). 

Ruben's literary writing has been published in Revue Noire (France), New Contrast, Vrye Weekblad, Cosmopolitan (SA). He is the co-author of Karoo Moons (Struik) and author of the short fiction collection Souls of Ancient Fish (Brevitas.) He was a prize-winning finalist in the Vita Short Story Awards, a finalist for the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, shortlisted for the SACPAC National Drama Award, runner-up prize-winner of the South African Science and Technology Journalism Award, winner of the South African Science and Technology Journalism Award, and shortlisted for the EU Literary Award. 

The Karoo

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Claire Beynon is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Claire immigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand in November 1994. She has a soft spot for many things, especially birds and earthworms

                 '. . . the more since chameleons bent in gnarled attitudes 

                 of prayer have long since left my garden. . .' (from Second Nature, CB 2007)

These days, long-legged lancewoods and an old rata are home and haven to flurries of native birds that gather in her harbourside garden. Claire is a visual artist, art-science collaborator and writer of poetry and short stories. She blogs at All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude and Waters I Have Known. Her web address is www.clairebeynon.co. nz

After you've enjoyed Ripe Fruit, take time to read the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them listed in the sidebar.