New Margins by Joan Fleming

On the way home from art school she stopped to shave off a piece of her hair. The skin was new under there, soft as soft bristle, a new field of thought. She started meeting with a living room of women, drinking tea without the buzz. They invented hand gestures so everyone could talk at once. This means, I hear you. They talked about all the things they had and did, which others didn’t and couldn’t, like social unevenness was a cause they caused by never thinking about it. I think it looks fine, he said when she came home. Whatever you want. He started to never mind. His never-never mind never minded. He drifted off someplace and left his head behind. The centre of their story lost its centre. It bloomed like a cauliflower. All the florets were edible, dense with nutrition in blank colour. She stitched sorry text on a charcoal face and signed her name. She questioned all the structures. She read dense text for doorways. The fine things she was born with became a weight, she rubbed at her white skin. She tied a set of wrists and tamped gold leaf at their sawn point, penance and gleam. Sorry is an art. Marriage is an art. Art is an art. She stitched for hours, and he was her rock. A rock on the couch. A rock in the kitchen, washing the dishes. He washed a dish every twenty minutes. What do you want? I don’t mind. He went to work where he talked about assets. Losses and gains. Gold and string. Every stitch is held in place by another stitch, is held down. They stayed up nights with furred questions. Could you love me, plus some other? What kind of enough is enough? The questions had the smell of old pets. They cared for no creatures in the day, in the day light. Then one more question. What about a baby? The thought of it floated, it glistered, they could almost hear it, it had no smell. 

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In November last year, with poet Anna Jackson and doctoral student Angelina Sbroma, I organised a conference about biographical poetry. We had a great time, with poets and scholars (and poet scholars) from New Zealand and Australia, and so many interesting conversations were started.

Before the conference we invited all the participants to submit a biographical poem for an anthology, which is, as far as we know, the first ever anthology of biographical poetry. The poems in the anthology take the idea of biographical poetry in all kinds of interesting directions. Some deal with the lives of the dead and famous, though generally in some unexpected sort of way. Others, like this poem, are about the lives of the anonymous.

In this prose poem, which is part of a series, we get an insight into the lives of an unnamed couple. It is very much showing rather than telling - like much good poetry, it nails just a few details, but gives us a whole world, a whole life. I love this poem because it is enigmatic, but also very specific, very precise. These are qualities I have found in other of Joan's poems, including those in her fine debut collection, The Same as Yes.

'New Margins' will be included in Joan's second collection, Failed Love Poems, which is forthcoming from Victoria University Press - I think later this year. I am definitely looking forward to reading it.

Joan Fleming is a doctoral student at Monash University’s graduate programme in Literary and Cultural Studies in Melbourne. Her research focuses on power dynamics and competing epistemologies in poetic texts. She is the author of The Same as Yes (Victoria University Press, 2011) and a book of failed love poems, which is forthcoming. You can find Joan's website here: http://www.joanflemingpoet.com/.
And you can read a piece she wrote about love and failure, with the gorgeous title 'Poetry as a child on fire who is trying, and failing, to pronounce itself', here: http://nzpoetryshelf.com/2014/05/02/an-occasional-series-on-poetry-joan-fleming-on-poetry-as-a-child-on-fire-who-is-trying-and-failing-to-pronounce-itself/.

This week’s editor, Helen Rickerby, is a poet and publisher from Wellington. She has published four collections of poetry – her most recent, Cinema, was published by Mākaro Press in 2014. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique publishing company with a growing reputation for publishing high-quality poetry books, and she is co-managing editor of JAAM literary journal.

And check out the other Tuesday Poems in the side-bar to the left.

They Could Have Stayed Forever by Joan Fleming

There’s a free beach somewhere close to here, where everyone’s covered in sand. And everyone knows that sand is time, or time is sandy, and all the barriers are striped, red and white, like Christmas candy. But no-one’s there. They couldn’t find the rhyme for fun hiding in their pocket money. There’s only the space where they ate spun sugar, then floated off the boardwalk after their snack. Now, open palms in the endless season of these audacious empty spaces shiver, wave. And now, you can find out what it is the dead sea craves: for you to wade in and let your eyes sting in its salted buoyancy. To watch the sky change as you float on your back, from blue to grey to silver to black. 

                                     

Editor: Orchid Tierney

Joan Fleming is not a British writer of crime and thriller novels. Joan Fleming has not had a distinquished career in the field of psychoanalysis. However,  I have seen Joan Fleming read Freud. I also witnessed her take 20 dollars from our swear jar. "I'll pay it back!" she said. We never got that beanbag for the office because we have both been helping ourselves.  

Joan Fleming, the Joan Fleming that I know, is a super talented poet, and probably one of the kindest people I have met. So I am very pleased to present one of her poems here on Tuesday Poem. 

This poem was written to accompany an exhibition of photography by Kate Van Der Drift, made up of large scale, high-key outdoor scenes of abandoned holiday places. These quietly still, beautifully eerie photographs, taken near Israel's dead sea, convey a sense of migration, emptiness, and change. Something has happened: the people have left, found another place or another planet to inhabit. It is not sad but hopeful - the end of one thing and the beginning of something new.

 

Photos by Kate Van Der Drift reproduced with permission

Joan Fleming

Joan's debut collection, The Same As Yes, was published last year by VUP. In 2007, she won the Biggs Poetry Prize; her work has also appeared in a number of places such as Landfall, the Listener, Sport, 150 New Zealand Love Poems (Godwit: 2012) and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. She is currently finishing her MA at the University of Otago where she is writing about Anne Carson and iterative poetics.

This week's editor Orchid Tierney  is currently finishing her MA at the University of Otago, where she is writing about electronic literature. 



Enjoy more wonderful poems from our Tuesday Poem contributors by navigating the left side bar.

Bookcase Full Of Closed Books Wants To Sing by Joan Fleming

The books are all commuters pressed together on a crowded five o’clock train. Every commuter has a bird, trying to beat its wings, inside their chest. No one talks. No one talks about the furled flock of story harboured by the hard spine, the clamouring dusk chorus, suppressed inside the travelling body. Which hardbacks will open up, tonight? Releasing a piteousness of song, a murmuration, an exaltation, a flight.

                                                  Editor: Helen Heath

This poem is from Joan's debut book of poetry, The Same As Yes, which will be launched on November 17. The whole collection is a series of conversations, beautiful and strange. Everyday things take on their own life, if only we can stop and notice them. I love these mysterious and strange little gems.

Joan Fleming won the Biggs Poetry Prize in 2007, and her work has appeared in Landfall, the Listener, Sport, Turbine and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. She and US poet Emily Toder paired up to produce a chapbook which featured on Tuesday Poem last year. She lives and works between Wellington and Golden Bay.

Joan says:

The poem came about because I have a beautiful, huge, hardback OED thesaurus, and while I hardly ever use it for it's proper purpose (that is, finding better words than the ones I usually choose), I love to read the middle section of the thesaurus which has all kinds of lists: lists of every different sort of hat, lists of the names of diseases, lists of dances, lists of crimes, lists of architectural terms. 

One of the lists is a list of the collective nouns for birds. So, that list, combined with an impulse to imagine the stacked books in a bookshelf as something else entirely, is how this poem was born.

Poem published with permission.

Helen Heath is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Helen's book of poetry, Graft, will be published in May 2012 by VUP. You can read more at her website helenheath.com . Sadly, Helen is leaving Tuesday Poem to go on sabbatical for a little while. She's been an enthusiastic Tuesday Poet since we began in April 2010 - posting all sorts of marvellous poets and poems -- and with Claire Beynon's image, she created our Quill logo. Helen is also so reassuring with her advice on blogging.  We'll miss you, Helen, come back soon. 

Have a look to your right at the sidebar to see all the other wonderful Tuesday Poems this week.

Auntie talking to her niece by Joan Fleming

When I was young, I used to steal through the suburbs in the middle of the night where we lived, and smash the light bulbs and garden gnomes from people’s front porches. I thought the people had foolish decorations in places where they never looked. I don’t feel like that anymore. Let’s put zinnias in the places where the people don’t look. Something pretty and specific, something that will only live so long. What else can I tell you? Five-eighths is the same as ten-sixteenths. Salt water is good for your teeth, and if you’re wholehearted about it, you can ask the sea to be your dentist. Some people live in buses that never go anywhere, and that’s okay too, as long as something’s growing. No, blue’s not my favourite colour, but it might be my favourite word.
 

Joan Fleming lives and writes in Golden Bay, New Zealand. A clutch of prose-poems entitled Two Dreams in which Things Are Taken has just [yesterday] been launched as part of the DUETS chapbook series, which pairs one New Zealand and one American poet. Joan is paired with Emily Toder from Northampton Massachusetts whose collection is called I Hear a Boat. 

You can read more of Joan's work online at Best New Zealand Poems 2008, Turbine and Snorkel. 

Published on Tuesday Poem with permission from the author. 
 

Joan says of the prose poem: “I like prose poems. They’re small and deceptive, like something between a dense vignette and an image with side dishes. The ones I’ve been writing are like little fictions — a bit surreal, mostly human, and totally driven by language.”

This week's editor is Mariana Isara a Christchurch writer currently working on her first collection of poems ‘Delusions of Grandeur’. 

Please take the time to enjoy the other Tuesday Poems by clicking on the links in the sidebar.