Pascale Petit: The Hieroglyph Moth

When the white ermine wings
opened at night

like a book of frost
smoking in the dark,

I understood the colours of vowels
painted on moth fur –

the black, red, saffron signs
of a new language.

Antennae grew from my forehead,
my tongue was restless in its chrysalis.

I felt lift-off
as if my bones had melted.
I stepped out into the snow –

not even an exoskeleton to protect me
in this strange country.

Pascale Petit
From 'The Treekeeper's Tale'


__________                                                                      Editor: Kathleen Jones (UK)

Pascale Petit was born in Paris but brought up in Wales. She studied art and became a sculptor before becoming a poet. She’s won, or been shortlisted for, almost all the major prizes in British poetry including the T.S. Eliot award. Her poetry always shows an awareness of visual as well as oral languages and the intricate relationships between signifier and signified.

The poems in her latest collection (which I reviewed here) take the paintings of Frida Kahlo as their starting point. The collection is called ‘What the Water Gave Me’.

'The Hieroglyph Moth' is from an earlier collection called ‘The Treekeeper’s Tale’ and I love its subtlety - the delicate depiction of the moth, and the layers of meaning underneath just glanced at in the spare language  - our lack of understanding of ‘dumb’ animals, insects and birds and our whole relationship with the natural world.

The moth is also a perfect metaphor for the process of metamorphosis that occurs in the mind between the idea and the finished poem. When you begin to write a poem you step out into unknown, dangerous territory and when you put a poem out for public view you really are going naked into a strange country. Pascale Petit says all that in a few words - a perfect demonstration of how poetry wins over prose!


This week's editor Kathleen Jones is a biographer and poet living in England.  She has published 11 books, most recently a biography of  Katherine Mansfield called 'The Storyteller' (Edinburgh University Press and Penguin NZ) and a collection of poetry 'Unwritten Lives' (Redbeck Press).  A winner of the 2011 Straid Poetry Prize, her new collection of poetry 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' will be published by Templar Poetry in November.

For more poetry posted by the Tuesday Poets, please visit the sidebar and look for the posts marked 'Tuesday Poem'.

With thanks to Pascale Petit for permission to use the poem.

Pacific Tsunami Found Poems by Teresia Teaiwa

1.

The telephone says

The body says

The multinational corporation says

           

Samoans had taken the sea’s friendship for granted

We can’t imagine            It’s unimaginable

Free phone calls to Samoa             (But only one Samoa)

2.

God’s minister says

God’s children say

God says

The wave was God’s way

We can’t concentrate on our assignments

I prepared a speech but I will not be reading it

3.

Surfer says

Waiter says

Sean says

The sea got sucked down below the reef

What’s one metre of water going to do?

Stupid

4.

Teddy Bear says

Ute says

Baby says

Hello to the pole

Hello to the tree

Hello to strangers on the beach

5.

Solomon says

Viti says

Niue says

Gizo

Floods

Heta

6.

New Zealand is scrambling

An Air Force Orion

New Zealand is scrambling

Hercules             staff and supplies

New Zealand is scrambling

Deputy Prime Minister Bill English

New Zealand is scrambling

More Kiwi casualties feared

7.

A depression moves

with a weak ridge extending

Then, late in the day,

a cold front sweeps

Strengthening westerly

in the moist westerly

Slow moving over

a cold southwest flow

Cold southerlies spread over

high over, ridge over

Then, late in the day,

a cold front sweeps

Credit note: "Pacific Tsunami Found Poems" was previously published in Going Down Swinging No.30, 2010, and is published here by permission of the author.

Editor's Note: Ever since I heard and enjoyed Teresia reading at one of the monthly Ballroom Café poetry readings in Wellington, I have wanted to post one of her poems on the Tuesday Poem blog, and she kindly agreed to my doing so.

Poets in the Asia-Pacific region have had all too many opportunities to write poems in response to natural disasters in the last few years. This is one of the best I've read.
 

Teresia Teaiwa teaches at Victoria University of Wellington in the Pacific Studies programme.

Her literary publications include a collection of poetry titled Searching for Nei Nim'anoa (available for sale here), and two CDs -- I can see Fiji  and Terenesia: Amplified Poetry and Songs by Teresia Teaiwa and Sia Figiel. 

Tim Jones is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. Tim is a poet, author and editor who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. His third poetry collection, "Men Briefly Explained", will be published by Interactive Press (Brisbane, Aus.) later this year.

To see this week's other Tuesday Poems, please visit the links labelled "Tuesday Poem" in the sidebar.

Tuesday: A Poem

... all laughed except Tyr: he lost his hand. 
The Poetic Edda on the god Tyr hence Tuesday -

A 6.3 quake devastated Christchurch NZ  Tuesday, 22 February, 2011  

Two planes struck Manhattan New York Tuesday, 11 September, 2001 

__________

He puts his hand in the wolf's mouth, the wolf

swallows. Let's start with this. A god not gone

but waiting; his sacrifice a gesture of surrender

and determination. And what of the tricked wolf?

A god's fingers stuck in his narrow throat – no chance to spit out.

It happens as it must. A handy

guarantee. Let's start with the price of order: 

the lean, worst place for a deity.

Sink in. Obeying destiny the wolf bites deep

and dreams of mocking laughter; Tyr of

the prize.

Let's start before this even, in the dark waiting

for the beginning, is it always the same?

The growl of night: descending, distending

like a rope woven with footfalls and hair,

bellowing storm and bee-wolf alike

embroidering new darkness with stories,

threaded like constellations in the sky's

blanket. A man has two hands, and no idea

he's about to give one up – a lesser sacrifice than the six

fabled elements entwined to order chaos. He lets go

his hand so the biter can be tied.

A yielding then. No runic miracle, no digits

carved into steel as Mahuika's fingertips ignite

fire from winter's heart to illuminate

the day of grace. Yet, here’s a bit of madness, a

lunar dream: the vulpine tether binds the gods

to the one-fisted man. The wolf-wrist twitches; light

pinkens the dawn, and a shoulder shove, a broad

back, a strong trunk separating day from night, 

earth from sky.

Everybody laughs, the bitterness of sacrifice:

blood's iron taste exploding on the tongue

licking air, trading war for chill slippers,

marking Tyr's day as one not of trust,

hope or faith, but the righteousness of battle;

a sinister champion of single-armed combat

under the sky. A day when the earth itself heaves up

as if to throw off the wolf's shadow.

Let's see it as a day of arms, then,

a duplicity of protection and loss

from a silken ribbon of footfalls, sinew, spittle and breath.

____________________________

By the Tuesday Poets April 2011 

Mary McCallum, Claire Beynon, Catherine Bateson, Janis Freegard, Bernadette Keating, Belinda Hollyer, Helen Heath, Orchid Tierney, Tim Jones, Kathleen Jones, Eileen Moeller, Andrew Bell,  T Clear, Harvey Molloy, Saradha Koirala, Helen Lowe, Susan T. Landry, Helen Rickerby, Jennifer Compton, Renee Liang, Robert Sullivan, Emma McCleary, Alicia Ponder, Catherine Fitchett, Elizabeth Welsh, and Sarah Jane Barnett.

In spirit : Zireaux. 

Written communally in celebration of Tuesday Poem's first birthday. Begun just past midnight Tuesday April 5 2011, completed 10.45 am, Sunday April 10 2011, and edited by curators Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon. 

____________________________

Well. we had a blast. It started a week ago on Tuesday, at one minute past midnight. The first lines were posted and off we went - a tag team of poets in NZ, Australia, the US, the UK (and one unexpectedly in Italy), across time zones and countries  - passing the baton. One by one we wrote 1-2 lines in our allotted slot between 8 am every morning and midnight every night.

Day One there was a small technical hitch that promised to unhitch the whole thing - easily sorted. Day Two, sadly one of our poets - T Clear in Seattle - had a personal crisis that forced her to withdraw. Not so easily sorted. We keep T's name on the list above in solidarity, and because she baked our delicious birthday cake. 

Astonishingly, 'Tuesday' the poem unfurled at its own pace and with its own heartbeat. Every four hours we'd check in to find a line or two - - - -  of new words - - - -  like the tiniest stitches discovered in the shoemaker's fairytale shoes. 

It was such a pleasure to see a word or phrase bouncing off another one, a line break leading to a new stanza, a long line stabbing out into whiteness, a short pithy sentence tucking up in a corner. Fun to read a colloquial turn of phrase or a pun or a word scooped out of another time.  Incredible to see the story of Tyr tugged and stretched and rolled into another shape with new threads. 

All the Tuesday Poets appear delighted by the coherence of the poem, and the way it's come together, and has something gorgeous and layered and powerful to say. None of us could have written it individually, let alone imagined such a thing, but together we could. We did. Little editing was needed, too, just some tidying up of stanza lengths, enjambments, the odd word, so the poem worked as a whole. 

As one poet said, opening up the finished poem was like Christmas morning. 

And what's it about? 

The first lines opened with the myth of Tyr - the god who gave us the word 'Tuesday'. Known also as Tiw, he is  - at one level - the Norse equivalent of Zeus or Jupiter. He was the god of both battles/war and justice/legislation/public assembly. He was courageous, fearless, a master tactician and skilled leader/diplomat. 

As a 'sky god', esotericists consider him 'not gone, but merely waiting to be called forth'. He is seen as protecting humanity and the gods from the destruction that would come if the heavens and earth should collapse into one another. In the northern mythology, it is Tyr who comes closest to a transcendental quality. The rune attached to his name summons religious belief and great leadership. 

The myth of Tyr is written up in the collection of Norse sagas called the Poetic or Prose Edda. It tells the story of how Tyr allowed the great wolf Fenrir to bite off his right hand in order to bind the wolf's chaotic force and protect others. The gods asked the dwarves to craft a magic leash or silken ribbon called Gleipnir to restrain the wolf. But Fenrir suspected a trick because the ribbon was made of elements that didn't exist. He wouldn't let the gods bind him unless one of them stuck a hand in his mouth. Tyr, known for his courage and honesty, agreed to do it.


The Prose Edda describes Gleipnir:


It was made of six things: the noise a cat makes in foot-fall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a rock, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spittle of a bird. And though thou understand not these matters already, yet now thou mayest speedily find certain proof herein, that no lie is told thee: thou must have seen that a woman has no beard, and no sound comes from the leap of a cat, and there are no roots under a rock.


Each Tuesday Poet has developed the Tyr myth, weaving in other myths and references to Tuesday in popular culture and that old chestnut 'the human condition', slowly building on the underlying rumble of the Christchurch quake and 9/11 - both on Tuesdays nearly ten years apart. The rumble grew and by the final stanza is a roar.


We're so proud of what's been achieved here. Could it possibly be a world first? 

Thanks to all the Tuesday Poets who are part of the Tuesday Poem this birthday week, and to all those who have come before and are waiting to return. Check out the sidebar to find out where these poets reside with their own poems and the poems they love. 

To you, the blogreader and appreciator of poems, we proffer our right hands. Do with them what you will. We will continue to write. 

Artwork: Tyr and Fenrir by John Bauer
Editors: Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon 

'Tuesday': an unfolding communal poem for a birthday

... all laughed except Tyr: he lost his hand. 
The Poetic Edda on the god Tyr hence Tuesday.


He puts his hand in the wolf's mouth, the wolf
swallows. Let's start with this. A god not gone
but waiting; his sacrifice a gesture of surrender
and determination. And what of the tricked wolf?
A god's fingers stuck in his narrow throat – no chance to spit out.
It happens as it must. A handy
guarantee. Let's start with the price of order:
the lean, worst place for a deity.
Sink in. Obeying destiny the wolf bites deep

and dreams of mocking laughter; Tyr of

the prize.

Let's start before this even, in the dark waiting

for the beginning, is it always the same?

The growl of night: descending, distending

like a rope woven with footfalls and hair,

bellowing storm and bee-wolf alike

embroidering new darkness with stories,
threaded like constellations in the sky's
blanket. A man has two hands, and no idea
he's about to give one up – a lesser sacrifice than the six
fabled elements entwined to order chaos. He lets go
his hand so the biter can be tied.

A yielding then. No runic miracle, no digits
carved into steel as Mahuika's fingertips ignite
fire from winter's heart to illuminate
the day of grace. Yet, here’s a bit of madness, a
lunar dream: the vulpine tether binds the gods
to the one-fisted man. The wolf-wrist twitches; light
pinkens the dawn, and a shoulder shove, a broad
back, a strong trunk separating day from night,
earth from sky.

Everybody laughs, the bitterness of sacrifice:
blood's iron taste exploding on the tongue
licking air, trading war for chill slippers,
marking Tyr's day as one not of trust,
hope or faith, but the righteousness of battle;
a sinister champion of single-armed combat
under the sky. A day when the earth itself heaves up
as if to throw off the wolf's shadow.

Let's see it as a day of arms, then,
a duplicity of protection and loss

from a silken ribbon of footfalls, sinew, spittle and breath.

____________________________
By Tuesday Poets April 2011
Mary McCallum, Claire Beynon, Catherine Bateson, Janis Freegard, Bernadette Keating, Belinda Hollyer, Helen Heath, Orchid Tierney, Tim Jones, Kathleen Jones, Eileen Moeller, Andrew Bell,  T Clear, Harvey Molloy, Saradha Koirala, Helen Lowe, Susan T. Landry, Helen Rickerby, Jennifer Compton, Renee Liang, Robert Sullivan, Emma McCleary, Alicia Ponder, Catherine Fitchett, Elizabeth Welsh, and Sarah Jane Barnett.
In spirit - Zireaux.

Poem completed 10.45 am, Sunday, April 10 2011 - final edit on Monday to be published Tuesday April 12, here on Tuesday Poem. 

Welcome to our First Birthday Party! We're celebrating with a communal poem that will skip backwards and forwards across the world and between time zones over the coming week (NZ, Australia, UK, US), with the finished poem posted next Tuesday.

Our tag team of Tuesday Poets who live in the land of the sidebar (eyes right!) will add their lines to the unfolding poem at the rate of four or five entries a day until Sunday, and then the full poem will be up for a week. Check out the Birthday page in the toolbar for details.

In our vision we say: 'Tuesday Poem is designed to encourage poets to write poems and people to read poems, and to nurture a poetry community without borders.' It has done that.

Fifty-four poems have been posted at the Tuesday Poem hub alone, and an average of 25 poems a week written by Tuesday Poets, or chosen from work they admire, have been posted on their own blogs. At our reckoning - and allowing for some repeats - that's around 1400 poems. Some are by the famous, others by unknowns.

One of the joys of TP is discovering a new poet. Another is showcasing one. Then there's the pleasure of finding yourself writing a poem for a Tuesday, or digging one out of a forgotten collection to bring it into the light again.

Like all good blogs and websites, Tuesday Poem functions because its members are generous with that thing they love. It's been extraordinary the stimulation, warmth, support and fun generated by this wide-flung group of people, many of whom have never met.

We thank all our Tuesday Poets - including the alumnae, those on sabbatical, and Harvey McQueen who passed away - our guest editors, blog visitors and supporters for being part of this.

Now, check out the blogs in the sidebar, as it's a birthday the poems may be celebratory, but you can't count on that.

Happy Birthday Tuesday Poem!

Mary McCallum and Claire Beynon, Tuesday Poem curators.


More on the history of TP here.

The Map (you give me) by Stephen Bett

You point out
places & it's
like doors
opening

Hallways
filled w/
sudden
light

So caught in
the frame

Dead ends
dark glass
frayed
wire

You are so
open to me,
place a
finger
new spaces
unfold
a map
of my need


Editor: Orchid Tierney

Stephen Bett's works are characteristically sharp and superficially simple. Yet they mask a sincere emotion which, in subsequent readings, grows deeper with intensity. Brevity yields nuances, words become packed with unsaid dialogue, lines are meant to be read 'in between.'

That being said, the layers within the poems are wonderfully subtle. It's true that I have little patience for works where the skeleton is even remotely obvious. If I go to a restaurant, I don't want to be served the ingredients of my meal.

Minimalist poetry makes its own rules to convey meaning but any successful poem should read beyond the printed word. My personal obsession with semiotics, cultural signs and their processes which adapt and form meaning, made me fall in, like, love at first sight with Stephen's work. I spent hours pouring over his book Track this trying to understand how he melded particular nuances to words that normally yielded none.

At the time, I assumed the faint linear structure of the collection imposed a vague, connect-the-dots memory where subsequent poems rode on the metaphors that preceeded them. Although several months on, I'm not so sure that line of reasoning is correct. The one thing I do understand of his work is this gut feeling: the hallmark of authentic poetry is the ability to inspire a determined thought process and - 'I wish I could I write like that!'

Stephen Bett is an insanely prolific Canadian poet of eleven poetry collections which include 'S PLIT' (Ekstasis Editions, 2009) and 'Trader Poets' (Frog Hollow Press, 2003). A new edition of his humourous spoof on the softcore porn industry, 'Extreme Positions' is due for release shortly. The Map (you give me) appears in the collection, 'Track This: A Book Of Relationship,' published by BlazeVOX [books], 2010, and is reproduced with permission.


Do check out the Tuesday Poem sidebar. Every Tuesday, our 30 poets post poems they've written or have selected by other writers, ranging from Sappho to Baxter to Hass.

This week's editor, Orchid Tierney, is an Auckland-based writer. She graduated from the Masters of Creative Writing Program at Auckland University in 2009, and edits Rem Magazine. Her website: www.orchidtierney.com.


Curator's Note: Next week, we celebrate the first birthday of the Tuesday Poem with a communal poem written by each of the poets line by line over the week ... drop in and watch the poem unfold.

Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits by Elizabeth Jennings

You are confronted with yourself. Each year


The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.


You give it all unflinchingly. You stare


Into yourself, beyond. Your brush’s care


Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.


There is no arrogance. Pride is apart


From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift


The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt


But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last


Experiment went on. You stared beyond


Your age, the times. You also plucked the past


And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,


And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.


Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,


The sadness and the joy. To paint’s to breathe,


And all the darknesses are dared. You chose


What each must reckon with.

From ‘Collected Poems’ Carcanet, 1987, © Elizabeth Jennings 1987, and used by kind permission of David Higham Associates.

TP Editor: Belinda Hollyer

Elizabeth Jennings (1926 – 2001) was a poet of great emotional intensity and acuity. Sometimes the effects of these qualities are almost unbearably honest – the Rembrandt poem, above, comes close to that for me – and are always supported by a faultless technique, as well as by what seems a wonderful inevitability of logic and imagery.

Her obituary in The Guardian quotes something she said about clarity: “Only one thing must be cast out, and that is the vague. Only true clarity reaches to the heights and the depths of human, and more than human, understanding.” Her own poetic achievements both echo and celebrate that.

Jennings was – and still is – a much-anthologised poet, and works such as ‘Delay’ and ‘One Flesh’ are the ones most people will know. I chose the Rembrandt poem because it seems to me to go straight to the heart of our fear of the real, dark, hugeness of death and decay, as well as of the challenges of art.

I can't find a really good picture of Elizabeth Jennings. There's one I've heard of (but not seen: it may be apocryphal) taken when she had just received her CBE in 1992, in which she stands glowing with pleasure and wearing a low-slung beret, short tweed skirt and striped socks above tennis shoes. I love the idea of that photo: utterly at ease with herself, and utterly happy.

Belinda Hollyer is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. She is a New Zealand writer living in London - a children’s author and anthologist - and she blogs at www.belindahollyer.com/blog.

A week of it by Dinah Hawken

It is dark.
Light
and dark again.

It is so.

It is something.
It is really something.

Small, beyond, becalmed
so be-all and end-all.

It is fine.
It is all that blue can be.

So be it.
It is too good to be true.

Are the odds against it?
If only it had another name
like so.

It’s alright. It comes along
in its own time, in the be-all without the end-all.

When it’s miserable
I fancy the o
in so.

So. It is this.
This is it.

Dinah Hawken was born in Hawera in 1943 and now lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of five books - It Has No Sound and Is Blue, which won the 1987 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for 'Best First Time Published Poet', Small Stories of Devotion; Water, Leaves, Stones and Oh There You Are Tui (2001).

I feel privileged to have had a preview of Dinah’s forthcoming (6^th) book - The leaf-ride. If you want to read more one of her poems "365 x 30" is at Best New Zealand Poems 2001.

Dinah has such a light touch yet her poems are substantial. There is a remarkable range of poems in The leaf-ride as it travels along in its ‘down-welling, up-welling drift’: poems that range from the power of a single word to the horror of violence to the joy of a newborn child.

Helen Heath is this week's Tuesday Poem editor, she blogs at helenheath.com. and lives in the seaside village of Paekākāriki, on New Zealand's Kapiti Coast. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University in 2009. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia. Most recently she’s had a chap-book of poems published by Seraph Press called Watching for Smoke (2009). Currently she is working on a full-length book of poems.

For more Tuesday Poems, click on the Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.


Curator Note: A week of it, it's been indeed. Tuesday Poem sends its condolences to the people of Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami. Tuesday Poet Janis Freegard's post expresses this with a haiku.

This New Place by Robert McGonigal

For Rose's baby

Body as Road Map

Body sees the 'you are here' sign,
then finds alleyways
and highways, which connect
the limbs and torso.

An inner guide helps body
explore, create meaning,
detour round slips.

Along these routes,
body seeks a dwelling
and to be nourished.


Body as Telephone

Body answers
a ringing from the pelvis.
It wants to spend all day,
wires connected
with other phones.

Often body sits by itself
an unanswered siren,
or it pushes buttons
for operator instructions.

Soon body learns
which numbers to dial
and which to leave on hold.


Body as a Somebody

Body is very pleased
with itself. This body
knows exactly where it's headed.
Legs stride
over the open ground,
arms reach far.

But some days,
eyes gaze out the window.
Fingers stretch,
tap the windowpane,
how they long to explore
the contours
of the fantail in the plum tree.


Body as Racetrack

Adrenalin circuits
the body in anger,
to sweat out
knots in the system.

Later, as it cools
a stillness ensues.
This is the end of the contest.
A time for bodies
in flow with each other
to rub two sticks together.


Body as Electronics

A wise touch on the crown:
this is the edge
between form
and the void.

Body knows how
thought-forms jolt
and tingle. As it
unplugs from these
the spine above the head
distils a higher voltage.


Body as Walking Stick

Body looks down the goat track
towards the next domain,
lit up by silver hair.

Before it goes
it reveals the meaning of

chiselled-out etches
on the skin.

These will support
other bodies who walk here.

_

     

TP Editor : Janis Freegard

I've chosen this poem in memory of its author, Robert McGonigal, a fine poet and a friend of mine who died far too young. Rob and I met in Greg O'Brien's poetry workshop at Victoria University in 2001 and kept in touch afterwards, occasionally swapping poems for feedback. 'This New Place', originally published in Turbine, is my favourite of Rob's poems.

Rob lived in Edinburgh for some time. I last saw him in 2006, when I was visiting family in South Shields (in the North-East of England) with my partner, Peter. We arranged to meet Rob in Berwick, on the border of Scotland and England, a sort of halfway point none of us had been to before. The three of us spent a lovely, happy day together, exploring the town, stopping for lunch in a little pub and walking along the old town wall.

It was always a treat to get a poem in an email from Rob. I hoped I'd be reading his poetry for many years to come. He was a talented writer and a lovely, gentle young man who is sadly missed and fondly remembered. Thanks to his family for permission to repost this poem.

Janis Freegard's first solo collection, 'Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus' will be published by Auckland University Press in May. She has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, and won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction in 2001. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand, and blogs at http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com/ and http://janisfreegard.blogspot.com/

Excerpt from 15 Flower World Variations - Jerome Rothenberg

flower

         with the body of a fawn

                   under a cholla flower

standing there

         to rub your antlers

                   bending

turning where you stand to rub

         your antler

                  in the flower world

the dawn

         there in its light

                  under a cholla flower

standing there

         to rub your antlers

                  bending turning where you stand

to rub your antlers

         flower

                  with the body of a fawn

under a cholla flower

         standing there

                  to rub your antlers

bending

         turning where you stand to rub
                   your antlers

The 15 Flower World Variations (Membrane Press, 1984) are derived from Yaqui Deer Dance songs by poet-translator-anthologist Jerome Rothenberg, using literal translations by Carleton Wilder et al. The full work can be found at the wonderful Ubuweb ethnopoetics site. 


Rothenberg's work has been called "anthology-assemblages." He identified with both the twentieth-century avant garde and with tribal poetry. The poems here are a literary manifestation of Yaqui (northern Mexican) cosmology. 

The Yaqui conception of the world is considerably different from that of their Mexican and United States neighbors. For example, the world (in Yaqui, anía) is composed of five separate worlds: the desert wilderness world, the mystical world, the flower world, the dream world, and the night world. Much Yaqui ritual is centered upon perfecting these worlds and eliminating the harm that has been done to them, especially by people (source)

Recently, I have had the privilege of reading the poetry of both Caroline Goodwin and Robert Hass, whose attention to the natural world I found refreshing but also sort of out of place in modern life -- which may explain the former. 

Hass laments 'the declining value we ascribe to the natural world', and assigns a duty to poets to correct this. Tuesday Poem thrives on contemporary poetry but it's hard not to appreciate the variational verse that carries this poem, and for me it resonates with the idea of nature as part of a diurnal cycle that constantly turns on itself.

Bernadette Keating is the editor of this week's Tuesday Poem. She is currently studying towards a postgraduate diploma in art history at Victoria University. She also writes poetry and occasionally blogs about writing and art. Bernadette lives in Wellington, New Zealand.


Curator's Note: One week after the earthquake that devastated Christchurch, it is good to be reminded of the beauty of the natural world - as evoked in the Rothenberg work - as well as its terrors. All Tuesday Poets living in the area (and the families of Tuesday Poets living there) are safe and well despite coping with hardships as the city continues to recover the dead and get back on its feet. All our thoughts are with you, Christchurch. 

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.