Speaking of the Balloonist by Janis Freegard

he had a balloon for a head

so to start with I didn’t trust him

his lips made rubber sounds when he spoke

he always rode a bicycle

and I was concerned his head might catch

in the spokes of his wheels and burst

(this never happened)

he dressed formally

immaculately turned out in trilbies

with pheasant feathers on the side

and bespoke suits

I wondered if he had to be

periodically reinflated

like the economy

he was well-spoken, the richness of his consonants

and globularity of his vowels

a constant source of pleasure

I got to know him a little

through my work at the academy

he was old as a vampire, he told me

and had spent time in the speakeasies

of Prohibition America

drinking bathtub gin and playing the trumpet

he stood for mayor in the last election

for days driving up and down my street

announcing himself through a red loudspeaker

I told him I’d vote for him

but when it came down to it

I didn’t vote at all

I meant to but I didn’t get around to it in time

then it was too late

I have failed democracy and don’t deserve it

someone accused me of trying to make him laugh

I can assure you that was never my intent

I have always been serious about this stuff

I have always spoken the truth

(I am not smiling)

this is how we shape each other: with every word we speak

once, while we were smoking opium together

I had the urge to undo the little knot at the nape of his neck

and blow and blow until we were both cloud-high

at times I look back and wish I’d done it

in the way we regret what we failed to do

more than anything we ever did

I aspire to be free of regrets

and console myself with the promise

that next time such an opportunity presents itself

I will seize that balloon with both hands

and will not be stopped

Answers to FAQs

1.     it was blue

2.     with a slight Estonian accent

3.     only in the beginning, then it faded somewhat

© Janis Freegard

Thank you to Auckland University Press and Janis Freegard for permission to publish Speaking of the Balloonist. This poem is from her latest book The Glass Rooster.

Editor, Helen McKinlay: 

The Glass Rooster is divided into eight echo-systems, yes echo, not eco as one might expect from someone with a degree in botany. A magical play on the eco systems of science and a new way of looking at the world as a group of systems which echo each other in multitudinous ways.

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Janis’s personal echo-systems range through The Damp Places, Forest, Cityscape, and The Alpine Zone to Space, Home and Garden, the Underground and In the Desert and demonstrate her feeling for the interconnectedness of all things, animal, vegetable, mineral and beyond.

Within each of her systems the poems reverberate the main theme. For example, in The Alpine Zones, the poems encompass a sense of high places. So in Speaking of the Balloonist, we read 'I had the urge to undo the little knot at the nape of his neck and blow and blow until we were both cloud-high…' and in the poem Dimorphism, ‘If, for example, the heart were a vegetable sheep, settled on the flanks of some southern mountain… it would know to keep growing smug and corpulent leading the good life harking at kea.’ And then there is the love poem where, the lover says, ‘I am inflated like a giant zeppelin and am no longer able to remain on the ground’.

The book entrances with poems which tell stories both true and imaginary, filled with rich imagery, sharp observation and the sheer joy of living. The mystical figure of the glass rooster, watches over all and sums up as the book progresses. In the poem Neutrinos, the rooster says ‘Hen we are the children of stars, we are made from the same substance, let me take you through galaxies, oh I will show you such things…’ For me these lines are the essential ingredients of the book.

Janis at launch of her first poetry book,
Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus

Science and Imagination: I believe that imagination is the vital tool which helps us to survive in our environment and plan for the future. It needs to be encouraged in children and fostered throughout our lives. I found out not so long ago that the great scientist, Einstein agreed with me in this for he said: 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

In Janis’s writing, science and imagination balance each other, allowing her to stretch the borders of known reality with credibility and to stride confidently into a poem with a statement such as ‘he had a balloon for a head.’  

I believe that to achieve this balance a writer needs to be well grounded in their own life as a writer. I asked Janis to make comment on how she achieves this: 

COMMENT FROM JANIS:  

In order to carve out writing time, I work a nine-day fortnight, with every second Friday as a writing day. Apart from the obvious benefits of financial security, there are a number of reasons I like having a “day job”: I feel I can make a social contribution (not that writing doesn’t do that too), I have another source for feeling I've achieved or completed something, and then there’s the social contact. I like having a group of people to say hello to every day and enjoy the occasional pot of tea with. When I’m writing, I like to break up the day with a walk, a visit to a café or a browse around an art gallery. Walking’s great because you get a change of scene, oxygen flowing and hopefully some fresh ideas. Writing is so much about being “inside your head”, it’s good to do something physical and out of doors.

Exciting to note that on the night Janis launched The Glass Rooster, (Auckland University Press, 2015) she also launched her first novel, The Year of Falling  (Makaro Press, 2015)

Janis at her double book launch

It is such a pleasure for me to post Janis and her wonderful book here today especially since she is a fellow member of the Tuesday Poem community. Thank you Janis for being my guest. I hope you enjoyed this post. -- Helen McKinlay

Janis Freegard was born in South Shields, England, but has lived in New Zealand most of her life. She has degrees in Botany and Public Policy. Her books include 'The Glass Rooster' (Auckland University Press, 2015), 'The Year of Falling' (Makaro Press, 2015), 'Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus' (Auckland University Press, 2011) and 'The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider' (Anomalous Press, 2013). She is also the co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (Auckland University Press, 2008). She has won several prizes for short stories, including the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies and several of her stories have been broadcast on radio.  You can go to Janis's website here.

Other Useful Links:

•  Article in Wairarapa Times re Janis's Ema Saiko Residency
•  Review of The Glass Rooster on Beattie's Book Blog by Elizabeth Morton
•  Janis's excellent author site on Amazon...includes updates on the books and a radio interview

Helen McKinlay is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. She is the author of the bestselling 'Grandma' books including Grandma Joins the All Blacks. She is also a published poet who lives in the top of the South Island NZ and blogs regularly on her own blog gurglewords. 

In addition to today's feature be sure to check out the wonderful poems featured by other Tuesday Poets, using our blog roll to the left of this posting.

                                                                                

Introduction, by Airini Beautrais

Neil, you were six weeks dead
when I was born, the last hours
of 1982. Almost thirty years
have gone by since then.

Driving through Whanganui,
I can't get my head around the streets.
Parallel to the river, or perpendicular?
The map in my mind is a map of the past,

probably never accurate to begin with.
The river has this kink in it, difficult
to align to. I often drive around that bend,
the place you left off from,

and I squirm in my seat, making room.
My second son will be born soon.
Therefore future. Therefore past,
all our skins and skins.

Muddied time, a crackle in transmission.
The concrete monolith unsettles me,
the empty park and its monuments,
its blank spaces of grass.

All the dark histories of this corner
of earth, where you placed your chequer
on the board. Here are some knot
in the network, some holes in the net.


(Published with the permission of the poet)

 

Last week (18th November) was the 32nd anniversary of Neil Roberts' death.  It was also the week Whanganui-based poet Airini Beautrais launched her latest collection, Dear Neil Roberts (Victoria University Press).  Neil Roberts was a punk anarchist who blew himself up outside the Wanganui Computer Centre (the building that housed New Zealand's national police computer).  Airini's collection is partly about Neil - how his friends saw him, how the media saw him, the political context of his action - but it's also very much about her own life and her reaction to hearing about what Neil did.

'Introduction', I think, captures the essence of the book very well.  Airini Beautrais has approached her topic with a great deal of thought and sensitivity. I knew Neil back in the day, and I'm pleased people are still talking, reading and thinking about what he did.  I also think this is a very fine book of well-crafted poems and definitely recommend it.

With respect to the form of the poems, Airini says, "Dear Neil Roberts is written in quatrains. The form seemed to fit, and I began to write to the four-line stanza. It is not an arbitrary lineation of what would otherwise be prose. It is full of rhyme and off-rhyme, and there is a poem in there with a set rhyme scheme and accentual meter. I have become really interested in form and I want to play around more with received forms. This is a matter of inner compulsion rather than any specific reactionary stance in regard to poetry."

Airini Beautrais (right) lives in Whanganui. Dear Neil Roberts is her third book of poetry. She is currently working on a PhD on the subject of narrative in contemporary Antipodean poetry.

This week's editor is Wellington-based poet Janis Freegard, who is the author of Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus and The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider.  She recently interviewed Airini Beautrais about Dear Neil Roberts on her blog.

I hear you singing in the next room by Helen Rickerby

I hear you singing in the next room

It is more than not being alone

We cook together and eat

from      blue bowls

Sometimes I am the wise one

                         sometimes you

The night we met, we both

kissed the same boy

You write ‘I love you’ in the condensation

        on the window

I lead you into luxury and indolence

We walk to the zoo and promise the animals

                                                                freedom

We draw a magic circle around ourselves

It is more than not being alone, it is being together

I hear you singing in the next room

Posted with permission.
Editor: Janis Freegard


I love this poem, from Helen Rickerby's second collection, My Iron Spine.  You get a glimpse into a whole relationship through just a few well-chosen details. The poem has a sweetness and simplicity about it, but with sounds, colours and actions that make it come alive: the lover singing in the next room, the blue bowls, the trip to the zoo.  There is a real sense of two people wrapped up in each other, their love being greater than the sum of the individuals. 

There's a musicality about the poem too.  I especially like the line about "luxury and indolence".  I also like the way it circles back at the end, to the singing in the next room.  But this time, we hear the singing with a deeper understanding.




Helen Rickerby is the author of My Iron Spine (HeadworX, 2008), Abstract Internal Furniture (HeadworX, 2001), and the poem sequence Heading North, which was  published in a hand-bound hardback edition by Kilmog Press in 2010. She also runs the wonderful Seraph Press - a boutique publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing high-quality poetry books - and is co-managing editor of the literary magazine JAAM.

Helen's latest poetry collection, Cinema, will be published by Makaro Press early next year. She blogs irregularly at wingedink.blogspot.com.


This week's editor, Janis Freegard, is the author of the chapbook The Continuing Adventures of Alice Spider (Anomalous Press, US, 2013) and the collection Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus (Auckland University Press, 2011), and is co-author of AUP New Poets 3 (Auckland University Press, 2008).  She lives in Wellington, New Zealand.


You can check out some of the other Tuesday poets and poems via the sidebar on the left.