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.  

Reading Janet Frame by Harvey McQueen. A Tribute.

Where the first pear slug hasn’t won,
the first frost has. Gaunt
the hawthorn’s lichened boughs
rise to cloudless skies and
for once no mower clamours loud.
Day? It’s a cracker. Just right
for worship, celebration, carousel
and the planting of jonquils.

Reading Janet’s poems…
the pocket mirror shows jaw
and bone under a Sunday stubble.
Next spring the bare hedge will bloom again;
but at present all too clear is its gaunt frame.


'Reading Janet Frame' is from Pingandy: New and Selected Poems, HeadworX, 1999

Harvey McQueen
13 September 1934 - 25 December 2010

Tribute by Tuesday Poem curator, Mary McCallum.
Tuesday Poet, Harvey McQueen died on Christmas Day aged 76. He was the oldest poet in this community of 30 poets from four countries we call Tuesday Poem. The posts on Harvey’s blog stoatspring, and the comments he made on other poets’ blogs, resonated with the wisdom, insight and honesty of a long life well lived, and were underpinned with a restless intelligence and curiosity that seemed to increase rather than diminish with age.

And Harvey’s blog posts weren’t your average ‘tossed off’ sort of posts – for he was a skilled writer. As one blog visitor, 'Dragonfly', said, s/he was drawn to Harvey's blog by his love of  language. The language was certainly as important as the message, and each post had structure and intent. As well as his seven volumes of poetry, Harvey edited as many anthologies, wrote books on educational issues, and published two memoirs including This Piece of Earth (Awa Press), based around his passion for gardening.

Harvey’s blog was a ‘live’ memoir – full of recollections and peregrinations, poems written by himself and others he admired, book reviews and political commentary. His posts were always thoughtful and wide-ranging. Stoatspring had a number of keen visitors on an almost daily basis, and most certainly on a Tuesday when it was time for a poem.

The poem posted here, with permission from Harvey's wife Anne, was written in the late 1960s and posted on stoatspring on October 18, 2010, He was quietly pleased because fellow writer Dame Fiona Kidman had declared it a favourite, and he explains how it sprung from reading Janet Frame's poetry collection The Pocket Mirror.

Harvey joined Tuesday Poem near the beginning of its life in April last year. He was uncertain at first, as he was relatively new to blogging, but quickly caught on, embracing the concept of a loose community of poets linked to at a common hub. Wheelchair-bound due to a muscular degenerative disease, Harvey found Tuesday became the day of the week when he would ‘socialise’ with poets around NZ, and in the US, UK and Australia. His blog followers grew exponentially.

In July, Harvey wrote Poet's (Wander)land : a post on the delights of the Tuesday Poem. He said, 'After the bluster, bombast and backbiting of much that is on the internet it was a relief to be in a gentler arena, a topsy-turvy world where blue may not be a favourite colour but can be a favourite word. Or a place where a fox is a wolf bearing a flower.'

I remember the palpable thrill Harvey had discovering a new poet or poem on the other side of the world or over the hill  (as he does here with US Tuesday Poet Melissa Shook), the astonishment when writers commented on a post of his seconds after it went up, and the particular delight he had one week when he managed to track down - via another blog reader - a poem Tuesday Poet Belinda Hollyer of the UK was seeking. She'd given him one line to go on: ‘I was nine at the time and a coward by fate’.

What continued to delight and surprise Harvey, was the ready communication and warmth of people a generation or a world apart linked by their shared interests via the internet. And he certainly added to that with his own generous posts and comments about poets and their work. I was always particularly pleased to have Harvey comment positively on a poem of mine.

Harvey’s posts also gave his own poems the context of his life and the passion he held for nature, with commentaries that were, at times, intensely moving. There will be Tuesday Poets who will remember Harvey’s post Patrick, the poem he wrote on the death of his stepson, or the last poem of his own he posted:

Increasingly
Despite memory -
'tiny, native narcissi
midst distant massif
verge & meadows' -
my cruel malady
spurs me to confess
increasingly, I
long for oblivion.

Harvey McQueen


I was also affected by Harvey’s posting of G.K. Chesterton's The Donkey -  because, like Harvey, my father had learnt it at school and quoted it often. The commentary is pure Harvey: ' Chesterton’s rollicking rhyme entered my literary midden. Also, obnoxious child I must have been, I pointed out that the animal could not be dumb if it had a sickening cry.'

And then there were the posts that rekindled my love of the work of Thomas Hardy, and opened up the poems of NZ nature poet Ursula Bethell. It was Bethell's poem Time Harvey chose when he was editor of the Tuesday Poem hub. He said of it, 'it still rings bells in my soul.'

Any post by Harvey was worth a visit, not just the poetry postings on a Tuesday. I loved the way the world still excited him, literature and the stuff of the mind pulled him in multiple directions, and that he always saw potential for change. His recent posts on Katherine Mansfield demonstrate this. After devouring the latest biography by Tuesday Poet Kathleen Jones – and posting on it, Harvey felt he had to re-read a small book by KM’s friend Ida Baker and post on that too.

And then he began to reread Mansfield's short stories.The last post he wrote himself, three days before he died, was on this topic. He said, 'This present slow read is an re-exploration of a tourist spot once enjoyed with enthusiasm and vigour.'

I liked seeing the number of Harvey’s blog readers increasing via Tuesday Poem, and especially enjoyed seeing the younger poets discover him. One of the highlights of Tuesday Poem so far for me was when three of us – Tim Jones, Saradha Koirala (one of our youngest poets) and myself - attended the launch of Harvey’s inspiring collection of 100 NZ poems: These I Have Loved. I must have met Harvey when I was an education reporter in another life, but this is the first time I remember meeting Harvey the poet.

He talked at the launch about his life as a teacher instilling a love of poetry, and how a bunch a rural kids couldn’t warm to Wordsworth but lit up when he read them Ruth Dallas’ Milking Before Dawn. That poem kicked off Harvey’s passion for teaching NZ poetry in schools, which in turn led to his work as an anthologist. Tuesday Poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman pays tribute to Harvey's ground-breaking work in this sphere.

Harvey was born in the rural community of Little River in NZ's South Island and died in Wellington. He was supported until the end by his wife, Anne Else, a writer, reviewer and blogger. A secondary school teacher, Harvey went on to be a school inspector and an educational advisor to Education Minister and Prime Minister David Lange at a time of tremendous upheaval in schools. In 2002, he was made an officer of the NZ Order of Merit.

The following is written up more fully in my blog tribute to Harvey:

'The first book on my list of hammock reading over summer was This Piece of Earth.I started it on Boxing Day, without knowing Harvey had died on Christmas Day, and finished it three days later drunk on its lovely words.

It’s a book that begs you to take the time to reconnect physically with the planet: listen to the song of the tui, appreciate the chutzpah of the self-sown seedling, observe the wings of the housefly, delight in the brief scent of the violet, share a green herb soup. It is written in a way that slows you down, calms you, makes you think again...

A day after finishing the book, I heard Harvey had died. I was devastated. It seemed so incredibly strange to have my head full to brimming with his voice and his words, when he was no longer on this earth to say them. And yet, I guess… how it should be for a writer, how he’d want it to be.'

Tuesday Poem has been very lucky to have had Harvey McQueen as a member and we will miss him. Some of the tributes by Tuesday Poets are below.

Tuesday Poem hub
Helen Lowe
Saradha Koirala
Helen Rickerby
Harvey Molloy
Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Andrew Bell
Mary McCallum
Claire Beynon

Anne Else has written the Last Post on Harvey's blog, and other tributes can be found on Bookman Beattie and his poetry publisher Mark Pirie's blogs.

Our condolences to Anne, his family and friends. A Memorial Service will be held at Old St Paul’s, Wellington, on January 28 at 11 am.  


Harvey: Rest in Peace.

E te rangatira, e te kaituhituhi, kua wheturangitia i te rangi, haere ki to atua, moe mai, moe mai, moe mai ra! Chief, writer, a star shining in the heavens, go to your god, sleep, rest, sleep!

This week's editor is Mary McCallum. Thanks to Anne Else for permission to run 'Reading Janet Frame' and to Jeffrey Paparoa Holman for the Maori phrase which he used in his tribute to Harvey.

Tuesday Poet: Harvey McQueen, 13 September 1934 - 25 December 2010

Te hinganga o te Totara haemata o te waotapunui a Tane — a mighty tree has fallen in the forest of Tane.

One of our Tuesday Poets, Harvey McQueen, died early on Christmas Day and will be greatly missed by us all.

To read 'The Last Post' by Harvey's wife, Anne, please click here.

You will also see commemorative posts by Tuesday Poets on the blogs listed in the side bar (or use our search tool in the sidebar - enter: Harvey McQueen).

The Tuesday Poem Hub curator, Mary McCallum, will be posting a formal tribute for Harvey here next Tuesday January 11.

 Helen Lowe

Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition 2011

Greetings TP readers. 

Consider today's invitation to enter the Caselberg Trust's inaugural competition a comma in Tuesday Poem's usual weekly rhythm. . . and a challenge to submit one of your poems to this exciting new comp.

TP contributors will be back in the New Year with curator Mary McCallum hosting the year's first posting on Tuesday 18 January. 

Meantime, we wish you all the very best for a happy holiday and an expansive and poetically rewarding 2011. Thank you for being a part of this wonderful online community. 

*

Inaugural Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize for 2011

The Caselberg Charitable Trust runs a residence for writers and artists at Broad Bay, Dunedin. The Trust has organised a variety of collaborative artistic events since its establishment in 2006, including the Fiordland Wilderness Residency in 2007, and, most recently, ‘A New Line’, in which 8 poets and 8 jewellers presented work inspired by each other’s disciplines.

The Inaugural International Poetry Prize competition will be judged blind by the distinguished poet Bernadette Hall. First Prize will be $500, Second Prize $250, and there will also be 5 Highly-Commended awards (with no monetary prizes). 

Submission deadline is 31 January 2011. 

The first- and second-placed poems will be published in the May 2011 issue of Landfall, and all winning and highly-commended entries published on the Caselberg Trust web-site (copyright remains with the authors).

For the Conditions and Entry Form, please go to http://www.caselbergtrust.org/

"Why We Do What We Do" by James Brown

James Brown is great live. He has had a lot of success, having published several collections of his funny, satirical and clever poetry with VUP. He has also won an armload of awards and residencies during his time. But it's when I see him read to an audience that he seems in his element.

Afterward, the crowd drifts away energised and uplifted. This may be because Brown's readings are self deprecating and funny, and it may be because he knows how to read a crowd, pausing at the right times, laughing at others. But it could also be because he seems like a normal guy. He gives other writers hope that, one day, they might be as relaxed with their own work as Brown appears at the podium.

“Why We Do What We Do” is one of my favourite James Brown poems because it gives me the same satisfaction as seeing him read. The poem is from The Year of the Bicycle (2006), a book that circles around Brown's obsession with mountain biking. It comes toward the end of the book and as part of a longer series. The poem can be read as a justification for having spent so much time writing poetry about his favourite subject. But if you flip that around, the poem can be seen as an encouragement to write about what interests you.

For this reason, “Why We Do What We Do” is the perfect poem for the Christmas post.

Since Tuesday Poem started in April this year, up to thirty Tuesday Poets have committed to posting poems weekly on their personal blogs and linking to the Tuesday Poem hub here via the live blog roll (see sidebar). The poems are written by themselves and other poets whose permission they have. As Tuesday Poem Editor, they are also rostered on to select and post poems on the hub.

The depth and breadth of the poetry selections and associated commentaries - by poets from NZ, the US, the UK, Ireland, and Australia - has been breathtaking. Also exciting is the interaction between poets and readers in the comments at the bottom of the posts. For Christmas, the Tuesday Poets have been paired as in 'Secret Santa' (when gifts are exchanged), and are posting poems or other offerings by their 'partner' poet.

We want to celebrate what interests us as writers, and our own voices. We also want to celebrate the Tuesday Poem which provides one more way to fit poetry into our lives. So check out the different blogs to see ones from our “shelf.” If “there's something / you want to hear, / you can sing it / yourself.”

Merry Christmas!


Sarah Jane Barnett is the week's Tuesday Poem editor and organiser of our 'Secret Santa'. Based in Wellington New Zealand, she is a writer, reviewer, and PhD student at Massey University exploring the prose poem. In her spare time, she makes things out of fabric and tries to live sustainably. Sarah blogs here. Why We Do What We Do is posted with permission.

To Stuart by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Early spring, and a cold wet morning.      The wind mooches about outside,           planning a home invasion. It’s Mary’s birthday, our Mary whom      you’d have loved had the Fates           spared you. I take you back five years before you joined      the Maori Battalion, and six before you           died. I have many questions to put to you, many that may not even have      an answer. Why being blessed with           enviable gifts did you abandon your studies after only a year?      You could have made your mark           in any field that calls for passion and imagination.      As a boy I followed you about           from match to match marvelling at what you created with a       cricket ball. Your bowling           action and the flight of the ball, gathering speed as it flew      towards its target, were to me            a work of art. As an admiring younger brother, I celebrate      this image of what you promised           and never lived to fulfil. ‘Nature,’ wrote William Blake,      ‘has no Outline, but Imagination has.’           I see you turn and run up to the crease. I see your      arm swing over. I see the            ball in flight – and that is all.

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

I selected this poem because of its personal connection with the Maori Battalion, and my admiration for Alistair Te Ariki Campbell who was the first Polynesian poet to have a book published in English, the spectacularly successful Mine Eyes Dazzle (Pegasus Press, 1950, 1951, 1956) with an Oxford revised edition called Wild Honey in 1964.

Campbell’s brother Stuart (named in his ‘Personal Sonnets’ as 446853 Private S.A. Campbell) was killed as a result of ‘friendly fire’ in 1945 while waiting to cross the Santerno River near Massa Lombarda, Italy. An RAF Bomber tragically dropped a 500 pound bomb near Stuart’s D Company unit of the 28^th Maori Battalion. The poem shows the younger brother’s admiration for Stuart, and the tremendous promise that was never realized in Stuart whose sharpness of mind and athleticism is captured in the poignant image of the cricket ball in flight that never lands.

Campbell was continuously revising. In a previously published version of the poem the quote from Blake in the penultimate ‘stanza’ uses ‘Art’ rather than this most recent version which uses ‘Imagination’. It’s a revealing re-vision, emphasizing a five-senses aesthetic rather than the highly abstract term art. The quote also grounds Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s poem in Blake’s English tradition of visionary poetry, while keeping it in the same field of play as cricket, and the promises of university study “…that calls for passion and imagination.” It also shows Campbell’s tremendous artistry, continuing to reshape work well after it was first published.

There are technical aspects to notice. I put stanza in inverted quotes above because the poem moves in eleven stanza-like tercets. The tercet pattern:  the first line far-left, the second line indented, then the third line further indented, cleverly creates small spaces in the long-flowing lyric, or ‘spots in time’ during the bowler’s run-up and then release. The maestro also lays a regular pattern of three stresses per line, creating a sweet or dolce music when speaking of his deceased brother.

Campbell returned and returned to the theme of his brother’s death, perhaps beginning with his famous 1948-49 sequence ‘Elegy’ which mourned his friend the mountain climber Roy Dickson’s death, but  contains an edge of familial grief conjuring his brother’s recent death; through to the 1960 ‘Personal Sonnets I’, 1964’s ‘Grandfather Bosini’ who calls out for Maireriki (Stuart’s Tongarevan name) and then dies, and the 2001 Maori Battalion sequence where this poem “To Stuart” first appeared. An enduring theme of the orphaned Campbell’s poetry was family, and his yearning to re-connect with them.

More on Alistair Te Ariki Campbell here and here. The poem is posted with the kind permission of Andrew Campbell.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is poet Robert Sullivan of Maori (Ngā Puhi, Kai Tahu) and Galway Irish descent. He has won several NZ literary awards for his poetry, children's writing and editing. His poetry collections include Star Waka, Captain Cook in the Underworld, Voice Carried My Family, and his most recent: Cassino City of Martyrs (Huia) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt Publishing, UK). 


Robert co-edited Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. Robert is the new Head of the School of Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and before that, directed Creative Writing at the University of Hawai'i.  He blogs here.