A letter to Jim Harrison by Lindsay Pope

.
It may be of no surprise to you that the day
your book arrived the waxeyes at my feeder
were noisier, more nervous and more abundant
than usual. On the global face, I live on the
lower cheek of the world where the tears fall
and turn to ice. So you might not know these
little birds. They may have hitched a ride on
some seafaring boat and decided to stay. Or
perhaps they caught the tail of some cross-
Tasman wind.

Your book flew in and has roosted in my head.
I have lost contact with my former Anglican
god and pray several hours most days in my
garden.

The plants are forgiving and do not object too
much to the muck I spread around, or
even when I rest to blow cigarette smoke about
their ears. The best time to talk with them is
when the light changes in the evening. The
warm soil seems to reassure as the chill of night
begins to settle on their leaves.

This land has no snakes, which makes us a
nation fearful of them. I am learning to live
with my own.

Thanks for your poems. I like digging into their
soil. It is like harvesting new potatoes. Each
time you unearth a shaw you do not know
what the reward will be.

As I write, the waxeyes are drinking. The wind
has turned to the south, so I’ll head down the
garden path to pick a supper of beans.

©  Lindsay Pope


Posted here with permission
Editor: Mary McCallum

Lindsay Pope

Lindsay Pope lives in Nelson, New Zealand. He keeps his head down digging the soil, chopping wood, picking his supper, hanging out with his family, writing poems. He writes of a life lived on the lower cheek of the world in the path of a bitter wind that can blow in from the south. Of men like himself living domestic lives in the path of that wind, making poems and planting potatoes to shore themselves up ... and other men living more rugged, isolated lives buffeted by the natural world ... all intent on leaving a mark somehow.

Jim Harrison

The keeper of uninhabited Stephens Island is the subject of 'Island Flight', and a coastwatcher during the war is the subject of 'Outpost'. The latter was posted by Keith Westwater on Tuesday Poem last year, and in a Landfall online review by Robert McLean, who said it was one of the best poems he'd read by a New Zealand poet for some time. He talks of this poet's 'bruised, stoical, masculine voice', praising his brevity, and the way he weighs every syllable, measures each phrase.

I know Lindsay's work well, having edited and published his first full collection Headwinds, which came out last year as part of our Mākaro Press Submarine poetry series, and includes 'A letter to Jim Harrison' along with 'Outpost' and 'Island Flight'.  Such riches.

'A letter ...'  is from one poet to another, and writes of the pleasure another man's words bring. It feels like a letter in its shape, the way the thoughts come – all at once to start with, and then line by line, thought by thought – and the voice is casual and colloquial, speaking as if to a friend. But there is also a glimpse of the heightened fabular language of a poet in the way Lindsay introduces himself and the place he calls home: those tears falling to ice, plants with ears. It is this combination that nabs me as a reader (and a publisher), and I admire the economical and confident way Lindsay achieves it.

What I love about this poem is also what it says to me about poetry per se: the way it (deliciously) roosts in the head as we go about our business, and how the reading of it pulls something gleaming and new from the dark soil of our brains.

Jim Harrison, I discover, is not unlike Lindsay in the life he leads and what he writes about. Jim lives on a farm in Michigan, and the Poetry Foundation talks of his connection to rural landscapes and the way 'he often explores human and animal drives set against an unforgiving world'. I didn't discover this about Jim when editing Lindsay's book, although I really should have. The author photos speak volumes! These two ought to hang out together.

This week's editor Mary McCallum is a poet, a novelist and a publisher who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. As a writer, she has published a chapbook of poems, a novel The Blue (Penguin 2007) and a children's novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish (Gecko Press 2014).  Her Mākaro Press publishes poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. She founded Tuesday Poem with Claire Beynon. 

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

Outpost, by Lindsay Pope

March, 1941.

The coast is a scribble. Stars are stored in a
wooden box on my shelf. It is more black than
white here. Like algebra but colder.

The hut’s walls are a ghetto of mice. Those I
catch become whiskers of smoke in the firebox.

I attend to the scratching radio.

This is not my dream.


July, 1942.

The short days are long here. Morse code
stutters in my aerial.

Every door of the home of the wind has been
thrown open. An albatross turns the world on
a dip of its wing. It has learnt the axioms of the
air. 

Mice crawl in the pockets of my sleep.

I wake, clutching a stick of chalk. Each day a
tally mark.


December, 1943.

The mice have all but disappeared.

Clouds, black as slate, are heavy with names.
They fall upon my roof clutching ash.

On short wave the radio coughs all night long.

I have lost the frequency.


(Published with the permission of the poet and the publisher)


A pleasurable discovery
I became aware of Lindsay Pope's writing only recently, when I bought a copy of Headwinds, (Submarine, an imprint of Makaro Press, 2014), whilst lunchtime bookstore browsing. Most of Headwinds' poems are as rich with metaphor and sparse with verbiage as Outpost is.

According to the publisher, the poems are "the story of a man living ‘on the lower cheek of the world where the tears fall and turn to ice’ who is simultaneously muser and maverick" and "Lindsay Pope’s combination of the domestic and the wild, of fables and personal disclosures, has created a beguiling first collection."

The poem
Of the many appealing poems, Outpost interested me for this post because of its skillful use of poetic technique and its subject matter. Pope, a former mathematics teacher, sprinkles the poem with maths metaphors and similes which startle the reader: "Like algebra but colder" and "It has learnt from the axioms of the air." Mice crawl through the poem like static and disappear off the page. But references to radio, morse code, and aerials also point to context.

When I asked Lindsay to comment on the poem's setting, he replied "Outpost is the imagined diary entries of a Coastwatcher stationed in Auckland Island's Carnley Harbour during WWII".

I had sensed the Coastwatcher aspect from my first reading, but was aware only of their stationing in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, so the appearance of an albatross threw me. According to some research which I then carried out, a secret five-year wartime programme of coast-watching stations was established on New Zealand's more distant and intermittently inhabited subantarctic islands. In the poem, Pope's narrative captures the isolation and virtual imprisonment of the coast watcher - '"each day is a tally mark" - and his slow erosion of sanity in the ambiguous last line: "I have lost the frequency". Considering the Auckland Island Coastwatchers didn't sight a single enemy ship in their five years of scanning the sea, I am not surprised.

The poet

Other than through his poems, Pope is reticent about his past. His very spare biography in Headwinds states "Lindsay Pope was born in Dunedin and lives in Nelson. His poetry has appeared in publications and online literary journals, in New Zealand and overseas."

Although Pope eschews social media, he did give a blog interview in 2012. The interviewer was Victoria University MA classmate, Ashleigh Young. During the interview, the following revealing exchange took place:

Young: Your work is often surreal and heavily metaphorical, as in your poem "Outpost": “Stars are stored in a wooden box on my shelf. It is more black than white here. Like algebra but colder.” And within this world is often a totally singular speaker, someone experiencing a necessary isolation: “The short days are long here. Morse code stutters in my aerial.” What is it about the experience of isolation that you keep coming back to in your writing?
Pope: I think I self-isolate. My personal history is one of betraying a great love. I find myself unable to trust myself to love fully again. Hence “I am more alone than together”.

The book

Headwinds may be purchased at Unity and other good independent bookstores, and online at www.makaropress.co.nz.

The Editor
This week's editor, Keith Westwater, lives in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. His debut collection,
Tongues of Ash (IP, 2011), was awarded 'Best First Book' in the publisher's IP Picks competition.
More of his poetry can be found on his blog 'Some place else'.

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