Miner's Cook by Meliors Simms

Flying in, the sea is dark and demanding.

Our island appears like a jewel and grows

green until we circle to land, 

then I see the red sore gouged at its centre

and my bile rises as the plane drops.

On the ground I am lost in the chaos

of unloading in a sudden dark that hides everything

beyond our beams. I’m looking for the bread,

fresh bread brought to last this first week

but by the time I’ve found it the loaves are gnawed to stale crusts

and I’m in despair with a hungry crew to feed.

I must push my fear and sorrow

out into the dark and be grateful when our neighbours,

the whalers, come over the hill with roast meat.

I stumble asleep among crates of food

and dream of home but when I wake up I’m still here

and a relentless dawn calls me to breakfast for thirty. 

For days of sorting supplies and learning a new kitchen,

fuelling men between their shifts,

all I ever see is the grassy slope sheltering our camp,

a wink of water behind us and a sky full of strange stars.

Finally there is time for a walk, up the hill

I see again the bleeding gash I am feeding,

and vomit into the grass.


Meliors Simms

No Mine is an Island - Meliors Simms 

Blanket-stitched, needle-felted recycled wool blankets 2011

                                                               Editor: Claire Beynon

Meliors Simms (NZ) is a woman of diverse talents; a 'radical crafter'*, environmental custodian, creator of exquisite hand-made and altered books, poet and fine artist of high integrity. 


I first encountered Meliors's books and meticulous needle-felted artworks about two years ago when a friend, knowing my passion for Antarctica, directed to me to Meliors's blog, Bibliophilia; I was awed and delighted by the familiar yet entirely 'other' world I encountered there. Crocheted coral reefs, embossed paper fossils, blanket-stitched oceans contaminated by woollen droplets of rust-coloured oil; a finely-contoured relief of a pristine Ross Island. . . I felt an immediate resonance with Meliors's work and with the ethos underpinning it.

In her artist's statement for You are an agent of change, Meliors explains her process in the following words - "The slow, accretive nature of my artistic practice is an analogy for both the natural world and human society. . . These ‘domestic arts’ also signify apparently unrelated individual human choices regarding food, housing, transport and energy; and their cumulative environmental impact. . ."

I chose Meliors's poem Miner's Cook for this week's Tuesday Poem for the way it exemplifies so much of what I understand her creative process to be about - namely, a call to re-establish the right relationship with our earth; a plea to wake up to the many covert and overt ways in which we cause our planet harm; in this poem and the accompanying artwork, No Mine is an Island, Meliors quite literally stitches into relief our blind disregard and wilful mismanagement of our natural resources. 


Miner's Cook - an image that might or might not have appeared to her in a dream - is a no-holds-barred poem of protest, lament and advocacy. This is work that is at once subtle and provocative, lyrical and confrontational. It serves as archive of our times.

"Look across the surface and down a mine that bleeds toxic tailings into the sea. Look within, beyond the obvious, behind the scenes. There is a complicated story underlying every thing we buy and all that we reject. The consequences of our consumption extend far, and sustain long, beyond our individual use. We cannot fence off ourselves from each other, or from the air, the earth, the waters of our world. Whether careless or deliberate in our choices, whether in denial or awareness, we do not stand alone. Let there be no mistaking: each imperfect stitch of cotton thread was made by hand, every layer slowly needle-felted from recycled blankets and un-spun wool. My materials are plants and animals but my finger tips became calloused from hundreds of hours pushing needles of steel, tempered from iron, mined from an earth left as scarred as my skin. . . " Meliors Simms

*Fellow blogger and Tuesday Poet Tim Jones posted an in-depth interview with Meliors in August. 

Claire Beynon is this week's TP editor. An artist, writer and novice filmmaker, Claire's blog - www.icelines.blogspot.com - is about to turn three; her first entry was written in October 2008 en-route to a field camp in Antarctica. 


For more Tuesday Poems, please follow the links in the side-bar to the right of this page.

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Tuesday Poem now has 100 followers!

The 100th person to join our TP community is Salaq. 

 We will be sending Salaq a package of poetry books in celebration. 

Rives controls the internet by Rives

                                                       Editor: Sarah Jane Barnett

Apparently the words woot, sexting and textspeak have been added to the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Personally, I try to slip woot into casual conversation. It is up there with squeegee in terms of pleasurable language. It's commendable (essential!) that the Concise OED keeps up with new words, because that's the great thing about language, it changes as we do. I am sure that someone said reading old English is a form of linguistic archeology.

For my turn editing the Tuesday Poem hub I wanted to feature a poet who makes everyday, or even ugly, language beautiful. Why? My high school photography teacher once said to me that it was easy to make a beautiful image of a beautiful object, but hard to make a beautiful image of an ugly object. That conversation stuck with me, and it's been my creative philosophy ever since. This is why I've posted a poem by Rives.

So, who is this Rives guy? John G., to be precise, is an American performance poet and children's author. He is a whizz at pop-up books, has been the US National Poetry Slam champ, and holds a patent for paper engineering. I first discovered him through TED where he performed the poem, "Rives controls the internet." He also appeared at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival this year, so some of you might have seen him.

You can find out more about Rives on his website: http://shopliftwindchimes.com/

---

Sarah Jane Barnett is this week's Tuesday Poem editor and a regular contributor to the Tuesday Poem community. She is a writer and reviewer who lives in Wellington, New Zealand. At the moment Sarah is halfway through a PhD in Creative writing, with a focus on ecopoetics.

Once you have enjoyed "Rives controls the internet", take some time to enjoy the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them all listed in the right-hand sidebar.

Four New York Poems by Deborah Garrison

I saw you walking through Newark Penn Station
in your shoes of white ash....
                                               [extract from 'I Saw You Walking', Deborah Garrison]
______
Editor Mary McCallum

In recognition of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 this week, I am posting a 2008 film of New Jersey poet Deborah Garrison reading four poems related to the attacks, from her second collection The Second Child (Random House, USA, 2007; Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

The first poem in the film is 'Goodbye, New York' - a pretty enough if familiar sort of ditty about a beloved city, but if you're in a hurry skip to 'I Saw You Walking' at the 1'30 mark on the timer - a poem written from the appalling events of 9/11, followed by 'September Poem', written a year later, after the birth of a child. Lastly, 'Into the Lincoln Tunnel' describes how a daily commute is still shadowed by thoughts of what happened in New York in 2001.



Garrison's poetry is new to me and on first listening, it feels wildly uneven, one minute using language squarely anchored in the ordinary and domestic and such frank and unexpected juxtapositions that they can feel like collisions, and the next moment falling back on tired abstractions and trite rhymes. But somehow, of all the 9/11 poetry I've trawled through to find something to post here, her poetry seems to me among the more interesting for its unevenness, for its frankness and willingness to speak up, for its reminders that humanity is something hauled from blood and guts. She makes me think of a woman in a Greek legend wailing from the wall after the invaders have left.

'I Saw You Walking' can be read here with the other poems that appeared in the New Yorker in the months following the attacks, including Polish poet Adam Zagajewski's 'Try to praise the mutilated world' which appeared on September 24, 2001, and while not about 9/11, expressed for many Americans what had happened to them, and is discussed further here: 'Can Poetry Save the World? Zagajewski, Auden: the poets of 9/11'. W H Auden's poem - 1 September, 1939 - was also 'an affirming flame' for the Americans in 2001, along with Poet Laureate Billy Collins' commissioned poem The Names. Garrison's I Saw You Walking was published in the New Yorker on October 22, 2001.

Deborah Garrison worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker for 15 years, and is now the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon. Her poetry has been both criticised and praised as being hip and accessible - her first collection The Working Girl sold an astonishing 30,000 copies -- and then, as the New York Times said, "just as she was being lauded as one of those hip young postfeminist urban women portrayed in “Ally McBeal” and “Sex and the City,” Ms. Garrison gave birth to her first child and moved to New Jersey. For several years, she did not write a poem." Then along came her collection The Second Child.

The publisher blurb says of it: "Her recent poems explore many facets of motherhood - ambivalence, trepidation and joy - coming to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in the world around her. She confronts her post-9/11 fears as she commutes daily from New Jersey into New York City, continuing to seek passion in her marriage and wrestling with her feelings about faith and the mysterious gift of happiness."

More on Deborah Garrison here. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed this reading in New York on 11 September 2008.

Once you're heard what Deborah Garrison has to say, enter the world of the sidebar and find up to 30 Tuesday Poets from the US, the UK, Australia and NZ with poems they've written or by others they like, all posted on a Tuesday.

Mary McCallum is curator of the Tuesday Poem, assisted in this by Claire Beynon. She is an author and poet, freelance writer, teacher and bookseller who lives in Wellington, NZ. She also likes to blog at O Audacious Book. 

Where thought goes by Helen Lehndorf

'Now, lift the heart' my yoga teacher always says.

I envision my heart levitating outside my body,
at eye level. Its heavy pulsing, a slight squelch
as I cup my hands under it, and guide it upwards,
trying not to recoil from the very meat of it, the
shudder of it as the aorta gapes air like a tiny mouth.

My yoga teacher tells us to imagine we have strings
attached to the tops of our heads. 'Imagine I am pulling
your string', she says. I imagine I am a flabby puppet
and she is trying to get a taut line so she can make me
jump and dance. She mimics string-pulling and I yank myself taller.

My yoga teacher says 'You are a baby, you are a flower,
you are stirring a giant pot.' I am a woman in a yoga studio
trying to remember I have a body. She says
'Where thought goes, energy flows'.
She is dying of cancer. Where does that leave us?
Maybe we will donate her to science.

Science will play her body like an instrument, strumming her veins,
blowing air between dermis and muscle. They will lift her heart,
gently, with surgical tools which look like two giant spoons.
But look at that, she is not dead yet. She is right here, in triangle
pose. My thoughts go west, go wayward. My thoughts are cul-de-
sacs. Dead ends. I am a sick baby, a cut flower. I am not safe
around a visual metaphor.

Editor: Emma McCleary

I met Helen Lehndorf on the internet. She was on Flickr, I liked her photos, she liked my blog, I liked her blog – it was all very 2008. Ignoring the first rule of meeting people from the internet (aka potential serial killers) in real life, I happily trotted around to Helen’s back yard where we ate chocolate cupcakes on a rug in the sun. We’ve been firm friends ever since.

Therefore, when it came to my Tuesday Poem editorship I knew I wanted a poem by Helen. I’m not very objective – I think everything she writes is fantastic and it thrills me no end that she’ll soon have her own book of poems. The Comforter is being published by Seraph Press later this year.

I asked Helen to send me three poems to choose from and this was my standout favourite. I always have a weakness for death references and I love the language and the imagery. For me this poem is strong, cheeky and relatable (and that last line sounds like a bad wine review).

I’m not a poet – I get to do this because I’m the Web Editor at Booksellers NZ and happen to like poetry, so we contribute to the Tuesday Poem every week. I’m really keen to hear what others – readers and poets - think too.

When you've read Helen's poem, try the other Tuesday Poems which pop up every week in the sidebar, including the Booksellers' Tuesday Poem.

This week's editor, Emma McCleary, is not only Web Editor at Booksellers New Zealand, she also blogs about her life in Featherston, runs her craft empire Emma Makes and is a printmaker.

Song by Peter Bland

The old Chinese lady
who lives next door
lays out her washing
on a red-tiled roof
as if she were back
in her childhood home.

She sings to herself
a song with long pauses,
a song passed on
full of comings and goings
like the sea on
a calm day when
it drifts in exhausted.

It's a song with no real
end or beginning. One
we still hear
even in the pauses
as she stoops
to water her money-tree
or reaches heavenwards
to collect her washing.


_____________

                                                   Editor Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Yorkshire Godwit

Peter Bland at the launch of Coming Ashore  August 2011

We don’t have many godwits homing to New Zealand from Yorkshire, except for Peter Bland, a bird of poetic passage and many migrations between here and there since his first long journey south on an immigrant ship in 1954, bearing his precious copy of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock.

Peter Bland has been fattening himself on these feeding grounds ever since, and enriching us with eleven collections of poetry on the way, as well as co-founding Downstage Theatre and acting in local film. Now 77 years old and a widower mourning his lost love, Beryl, he is back amongst us, living in Auckland and our most recent recipient of the NZ$60,000 Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry.

He deserves it, richly: and to celebrate, we have his latest collection, Coming Ashore, launched last week in Wellington by Steele Roberts. I was asked to speak to the book on the night: a rich collection of elegy and history, and sharply-observed images of the inner and outer life of the poet through his bicultural world views.

This poem, “Song”, is one of my favourites, of many choice pieces here: the viewing persona observes a next door neighbour, a Chinese woman, quite elderly it seems, singing as she hangs out her washing. In 21 carefully crafted and understated lines, Peter Bland brings her to life: the song, the strange quality of otherness and the keening for home its sounds evoke, “full of comings and goings/like the sea on/a calm day when/it drifts in exhausted”.

She sings as she waters her money tree, she sings as she looks up to heaven hanging the washing: here is an immigrant captured in print, somewhere between life and death: “It's a song with no real/end or beginning. One/we still hear/even in the pauses/as she stoops/to water her money-tree/or reaches heavenwards/to collect her washing.”

There is no moral, nor strain: simply the pellucid poise of the best of the ancient Chinese poets he so admires, the emotional ache that we can feel in the final lines of Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife”: “If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,/Please let me know beforehand,/ And I will come out to meet you /As far as Cho-fu-Sa.”

Bland is at one with his subject here because he has stood on similar ground: the immigrant, the man of two worlds with two sets of voices in his head, those from a childhood home, and those from New Zealand streets. This is why he can give her back to us with such simplicity and depth – but only a life of dedication to his craft can help us a little way in explaining the power of his art.

This poem is published with the permission of Steele Roberts and you can find Coming Ashore here. When you've absorbed "Song", take yourself into the right hand sidebar and discover up to 30 poems from the Tuesday Poets linked to this blog.

This week's editor Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is currently on leave from Tuesday Poem while he is writer in residence at Hamilton University in NZ's central North Island. Our thanks to him for his post on Peter Bland. Jeffrey is a poet and academic who normally resides in Christchurch and blogs here. His last post was an earthquake poem. 

Butterfly, by Rhian Gallager

We entered a year of slow burn
I stole a line from her eyes
She wrote by hand return

The body awoke to the act of yearn
Moisture met the heat of July
We entered a year of slow burn

A door ajar, could yield or close firm
From colleague to intimate ally
She wrote by hand, I wrote in return

Disclosure inched by turn
A long striptease of send and reply
We entered a year of slow burn

Shining and wild were in
Our lines, barely disguised
She wrote by hand in return

All grew from a pact of adjourn
Overwintering, waiting a sign in the sky
Fused on a year of slow burn
Word at the start became touch in return.

(c) Rhian Gallagher

.
About the Poem:
"Butterfly", first published in Poetrix, will be included in Rhian Gallagher's second collection of poetry, Shift (forthcoming from Auckland University Press.) "Butterfly" follows the form of the villanelle, although it reflects the contemporary trend of allowing variation in the wording of the refrain.

I believe this poem is representative of Rhian's work in terms of the beauty and delicacy of the writing, a delicacy that nonetheless enhances both the emotional depth of the poem and also the adherence to a demanding form.

I have revisited Rhian's first collection, Salt Water Creek, on several occasions now, enjoying the juxtaposition of intellect, interior reflection, and often profound emotion that characterises her work—and very much look forward to the publication of Shift next month.

"Butterfly" is reproduced here with the permission of Rhian Gallagher.

.
About the Poet:
Rhian Gallagher’s first poetry collection, Salt Water Creek (Enitharmon Press, London, 2003) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for First Collection. Gallagher received the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award in 2008. Auckland University Press is publishing her second collection of poetry, Shift, in September 2011. Gallagher is also the author of a non-fiction book, Feeling for Daylight: The Photographs of Jack Adamson, (South Canterbury Museum, 2010).

—
Helen Lowe is this week's Tuesday Poem editor and a regular contributor to the Tuesday Poem community. A novelist as well as a poet, Helen's first novel, Thornspell (Knopf) is published in the US, while her second The Heir of Night, (HarperCollins, US; Little, Brown, UK) is also available internationally and recently debuted in The Netherlands, as Kind van de Nacht. She is currently working on her third novel.
—

Once you have enjoyed "Butterfly" do take some time to enjoy the other poems posted by members of the Tuesday Poem community for this week. You will find them all listed in the right-hand sidebar.

Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach by Tim Jones

Forest and sea have had their way

with memory. A few houses — silent,

locked — remain. Between car and beach,

a field of Shetland ponies, already

calling her by name. But I'm

facing inland, bush not far beyond,

mountains piled like thunderheads

across the morning light. Was this

our house, or this, or this now empty field?

For eighteen months, we lived here

while they built the road. I was two, then four.

What I have are barely memories:

my mother at the washing line. My father's

longed-for homeward stride. Grader drivers

lifting me onto their knees to ride.

Work done, we drove away, the new highway

bearing our fortunes south, over spilling streams,

across the Main Divide. Now I'm back, reclaiming

what may be reclaimed. The forest

has no answers. The sea lies past the ponies.

"Look," she says, "they're eating from my hand."

________________________

 Editor: Alicia Ponder

From the soon to be released collection Men Briefly Explained, I found Tim Jones' Shetland Ponies, Haast Beach instantly compelling. It's the first stanza deliberately filled with contemplative pauses - echoing those empty spaces of memories from a long-forgotten past - and the lovely shape in the way the poem moves between the present and the past, with glimpses of these, as if from a car window on a long journey to a pivotal destination. The poem as a whole has a real feeling of reclaimed memories in a solid and imperative now.  

Tim Jones is a poet, author and editor, and Men Briefly Explained will be his third solo collection of poetry, out in October.  I'm looking forward to hearing him read from it at a launch event at Rona Gallery, the bookshop my family owns in Eastbourne (Friday October 28, 6 pm), and at other venues around the country.  


Tim's support of New Zealand poets and poetry has been amazing, he was highly instrumental, along with co-editor Mark Pirie, in creating and keeping alive the dream of "Voyagers" a highly esteemed collection of New Zealand Science Fiction poetry and a real boost for many NZ Poets.  He also recently edited the Australian and New Zealand Speculative Poetry Collection in the second issue of Eye to the Telescope, published online here by the Science Fiction Poetry Association.  

 

Tim is a Tuesday poet who lives in Wellington NZ, and blogs at Tim Jones: Books in the Trees.  Some of his books can be found on his blog, including the short story collection Transported longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Alicia Ponder is this week's Tuesday Poem editor.  She lives in Eastbourne, and loves poetry, and writing for children.  She is the co-author of two art books, and is published in New Zealand and Australia .  She blogs here at an Affliction of Poetry.  


After you've read the hub poem, try out some of the Tuesday Poem posts in the sidebar. 

Envelope by Anna Jackson

I stick a stamp on an envelope.
It is a lake, a little glassy, and a mountain, behind the lake.
A little bit of lake is left behind on my tongue.

I would not like to be a fish in that lake.
A little bit of me would always be going missing.
I would always be leaving the lake for the mountain.

And now, it is several days later.
I am waiting for a reply.
Then I see that the stamp is still attached to me.

So that explains my demonic energy lately!
That explains how I rose so high so fast,
what everyone means when they refer to my depth.

But where am I being sent?
And when I arrive, who will open me?
Roughly, with a finger, or gently, with a knife?

__________________
                                                    Editor: Robert Sullivan

I selected this poem because it is from a brilliant new collection, Thicket (AUP). Anna Jackson is influenced by Russian poetic traditions following the Bolshevik revolution (although its declared influence is Virgil), and so she often informs her writing with an edgy danger, in this instance contrasting the roughness of fingers with the genteel ‘knife'.

Without wishing to explain the poem, I admire the several figurative transformations: the narrator into an envelope, the lake into saliva on the narrator’s tongue in which a fish struggles. Later in the collection there is a poem called “The Fish and I” reminding me about its many internal cross-references, as well as to other poetics.

"Envelope" is published on Tuesday Poem with Anna Jackson's permission.

There is another of her Thicket poems and more about her here on  Tuesday Poem. 

To read more Tuesday Poems, look in the sidebar where up to 30 poets from NZ, Australia, the UK, the US and Italy post poems by themselves and others they admire. The poems go up all through a Tuesday - in the southern and northern hemispheres.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is poet Robert Sullivan of Maori (Ngā Puhi, Kai Tahu) and Galway Irish descent. He has won awards for his poetry, children's writing and editing. His most recent poetry collections:  Cassino City of Martyrs (Huia) and Shout Ha! to the Sky (Salt Publishing, UK). 

Robert co-edited NZ Book Award finalist Whetu Moana: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English with Albert Wendt and Reina Whaitiri. He heads Creative Writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and  blogs here. 

The Wild Bees by John Griffin

A death wind swished across your open book
and dusted from its dusty leaves and colophon
the spores that gather in spines and gutters,
that swarm when agitated like motes in sunlight
like mites metamorphosing into seething bees
that set the silence humming, throbbing.

What comes alive in the shimmering shafts,
dancing and lemniscating, constructs infinity
inside a geometry of longing and there too
within its tessellations order hypnotises
disorder and draws out the unctuous drones
till they abandon their myrmidonian binging.

Veined wings made of water lift water’s weight
and flap water’s freight improbably into flight
where it hovers now before the portals of pollen
and fans antigens, powder-down and dander
with such a busy buzz the glassine scales intensify
the air, evaporate the dew and vaporize your tears.

The hive in the eaves was built out of absence,
or rather vacancy was its invitation — the colony knew
and soon occupied the silence with circadian rhythms
and you let them even welcoming the palpitations
they brought to things as a sign of life's affirmation,
and risk should their styli be more apt to sting you.

These insects could raise you out of yourself
and air-condition that claustrophobic infirmary
where sickness had you jailed — Delphic bees
pollinating your mind’s imponderables
with thoughts of correlatives beyond itself —
they could even alchemise your tears to gold:

Each swag has a scarab that the bees bear back
to their Omphalos — the Greeks already knew
and named your girls and the Egyptians before them
put onyx amulets in the woven skeps of dreams
so that the soul might harvest its cosmic course
towards that place where Ra drops honey from the sun.


Published with the permission of John Griffin

__________
This week's editor: Zireaux

Poets are not people. And a good poem abandons all biography. I know almost nothing about John Griffin, whether he's attended schools, programs, workshops, written chapbooks or crap-books, published in lit-mags or shit-rags, or whether he's won any awards (I do hope he hasn't; my estimation of him might diminish).

But I know this poem. I know its instrument, its styli, if you will. I know that what we have here is a genuine work of art -- heroic, honey-tender, precisely beautiful -- created by a genuine poet.

We can talk about the remarkable combination of form and flow in "The Wild Bees," the six stanzas, six sentences, the six-sided honeycomb cell; the fluid phrasing -- "draw out the unctuous drones," "powder-down and dander," "pollinate...the imponderables.'

We can talk about the images, the conceit, the subject matter; how the bees, after all, as teardrops-come-to-life, flapping "water's freight improbably into flight" (lovely stuff, so very bee-like and palpable), are but messengers, workers, drones in the creation of Griffin's poetic unguent. Or how "The Wild Bees" is really a kind of love poem, an offering of soma or salve, a nectar meant to soothe the pain of a writer (a writer-goddess in this case) to whom, or perhaps with whom, the poet is responding.

Rather, what we must talk about -- even more than the sweet affection -- is what the poem demands of us: Not the meaning so much, but the language. Now let me speak softly here, a whisper, lest our real poets, quietly toiling away at beauties in the background, be distracted from their craft:

The poet must have faith in the design of language. In the structure, the honeycomb, the tessellation. "The geometry of longing." In vocabulary. Yes, vocabulary.

From spores to motes, mites, bees, scarabs, from death to golden tears and honey sun (bees were once thought to spring, like maggots, from the dead), from colophon to "seething bees" and "shimmering shafts" -- beauty is in the careful, coordinated, construction of words out of the swarm. And sure, it can be dangerous to "lemniscate" without a permit -- Griffin is no novice (he's waggle-dancing with his bees!) -- but don't be afraid to mingle with myrmidons, or let the bees sting your lips.

And you (exclamatory whisper!), O peddlers of minimalism, hucksters of haiku, I request you keep your smokey spiritualism away from the hive. Can you not hear the growing clamor of the i-Clones, the Fad-Pads, the X-Cubes and MeTubes, the Factor Xs, the Super 3-D Cinema-Plexes? Why should we submit to the blog-fog, the vapors of vacancy (stay calm, my voice!), when language can reach -- or better, ride, fly, however improbably, like Dante's Beatrice (Dante being the CGI animator of his day), to the place where Ra drops honey from the sun, on the powerful, jewel-encrusted Griffin-wings of language?

-- Zireaux

______________

For more information about former Tuesday Poet John Griffin (who lives in Ireland, by the way), visit his website.

You'll find information about Zireaux, as well as his latest verse and commentary, at www.ImmortalMuse.com.

We do hope you'll take some time to enjoy the other Tuesday Poem posts this week, listed in the right-hand sidebar.

Afternoon with Simon by Ashleigh Young

A reflection fills the rain
on the window: it’s Simon, proffering his lunch-taker
filled with gold almonds: almondos he calls them.
His eyes have the shine of all good editors’ eyes:
polished by finding.
I drop my pen, reach over, trailing red
crossed-out fingers:
I have been attacked by a man-eating grammar.
My eyes have been prised from my head
by looking.
Simon studies the lines of rain and eventually
starts talking, beginning each sentence with ‘I suppose’
because he is too hospitable not to leave room
to agree with somebody else
and he also really does suppose:
sometimes assuming that all this is true, sometimes only
imagining it to be so.


We clear a spot amidst the books that nobody
in this country will read. We are the international
editorial team: ours is the great city of color
and Mom and ‘You betcha’
circled by ocean, not sea.
We make our talk up
like newspaper shelters in the street: strange at first
and lifting at the edges, soon becoming part
of the city’s furniture.


Simon, too, has a voice that lacks volume.
When people catch wind of it
they interrupt to save him
the trouble. Well, their cars go faster. But, goddammit,
he has things to say; like
if in doubt, laugh
even if doing so will offend someone
because the odds are you will offend them even more
if they think you are serious –
which in the current climate is the no. 1 risk –
or they will not notice you and will tramp right through your house.
In conversation, a quiet-voiced person
needs plenty of space, needs flags to wave, needs
a moat filled with deep water.


Through our window, a giant Dan Carter
stands there in his undies. Imagine having
that confidence – to wear yourself
like you were an expensive set of clothes.


Simon does lunges
in his homemade trousers.
I ask what he is doing but he doesn’t hear;
he’s partially deaf, sometimes partial to being deaf
and I suppose I would have more friends
like Simon if the other people didn’t catch the half-things I say.
This is a job where so many words go forth heroically
only to fall through a rotten board in the floor.
But it does not matter that crucial parts have been lost.
I used to say nothing and now I am talking;
used to live nowhere and now I am eating
gold almonds in the afternoon, with shelter.




_______
  
                                                            Guest Editor: Tim Upperton

Ashleigh Young is a New Zealand writer currently living in London and blogging at eyelashroaming. She is well-known for her creative nonfiction works (or “pieces”, “sketches”, “things”, as she called them in a Booknotes article): she won the Adam Foundation Prize in 2009 for her essay collection, Can You Tolerate This? (the title essay can be read here), and her essay, “Wolf Man”, won the Landfall Essay Competition the same year. She is perhaps not so well-known for her poems, despite their regular appearance in our off- and on-line literary magazines (Sport, Turbine, Best New Zealand Poems). 

Her poem, “Certain Trees”, is the final poem in The Best of the Best New Zealand Poems, and was singled out by Sam Hunt as the best of them – the best of the best of the best. 

There’s not much I can add to that, except to say that Ashleigh Young’s voice is, I think, unique – in both the essays and the poems, I hear its distinctive, individual tone of engaged enquiry, a curiosity about the world that suspends judgement while still reaching tentative conclusions. It wonders where things are going, and follows them, and the reader can’t help but wonder and follow too.

I’ve chosen “Afternoon with Simon” as it typifies her strengths. The poem appears to meander through a not particularly busy afternoon, and it’s not until the end that we realise how acute the observation is. I find this poem extraordinarily humane, and I feel richer for reading it.

Tim Upperton lives in Palmerston North, New Zealand. His poems have appeared in various places including Agni, Landfall, New Zealand Books, Sport, Turbine, and The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. His collection A House on Fire (Steele Roberts) was published in 2009. 

Thanks Tim! Now do take time to check out the poets in the sidebar including Melissa Green at the bottom of the list because her blog isn't updating on the blog roll. 

Poems for National Poetry Day (NZ)

from The Radio Room by Cilla McQueen (Otago University Press 2010)

About The Fog

Damp sea-fog lay like a sheep on my journal

outside all night on the table,

turned radiant blue ink to turquoise wash

through which the permanent horizons stared

twenty-eight pages empty.

                                                Of vanished thoughts here

and there word-slivers, blots in the gutter, bled edges;

some legible sentences in ballpoint.

As if by tears

                        lost the death of my mother,

the reunion with my tokotoko at Matahiwi,

Orepuki Hopupu ho nengenenge matangi rau

at hand beside me now, ribboned, knotty, sleek,

Washed away, goes without saying, language

absorbed by a fog to dissolve in the sun.

from The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls by Kate Camp (VUP 2010)

When things get broken we recount their history

On blue and orange lino tiles

triangles of the tulip glass

of the four I bought

from a tent

by the underground city

two with cracks

were nestled in newspaper.

The stallholders

of Turkey

do not love me

after all.

One by one

I am smashing

the knickknacks

of the past.

To smithereens I blow

the family of owls

and tragically the tiny glass

hand-painted flowers

we drank from

through baby teeth.

When the house was burgled

they broke the mirror tile

saw there a picture

of themselves.

There is all the time in the world

to regret

when something is falling

coffee pours up

from the cup

the plate turns

its soft food

towards the floor.

An earthquake

would be

an explosion

of memory

jars

blasting open

peaches

glass

and syrup.

from Mauri Ola – Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Whetu Moana II), a poem by Alohi Ae’a (Hawaii), collection edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan (AUP 2010)

Hālāwai 

I dream that you stand beneath the night

sky, watching the stars. You track

their movements, as the dome of the earth swings

overhead. The star you seek rises

and there, as it breaks the horizon, you turn. Face

Tahiti. The wind is silent at this moment. I turn

in bed; the air is cool.

Such small things keep us together. I work

the sennit of our love, roll it between

my fingers. Next week, I will help you lash

the masts. In the open ocean, the ropes we pull

will keep this canoe together. It will rise

and fall with wind and wave and storm. You go

with it. I remain here.

You sit at Moa’iki under the full bright

of a distant moon.  At Waikīkī, moonlight

makes little difference – yet here I am at Queen’s,

watching the waves swell dark

against a grey horizon. I catch my breath – see

the shower of light falling, falling. I find the handful

of constellations that I know. Grip them in my mind.

Nine a.m. Sunday morning, Dolphins spin

far offshore. I see their bellies flash silver. You

want to reach out and touch them, strike the sleek pulse

of their sides. What does all that smoothness

remind you of? What are you thinking as the wind

catches in the sails? How is it that I can hear your voice,

echoing across the distant channels?

                                                    

                                                            Editor Renee Liang

This week, we celebrate New Zealand's upcoming National Poetry Day (July 22) with not one, but three poems.  I’ve chosen those which called to me the most, from the pages of the shortlisted books for the poetry section of the 2011 NZ Post National Book Awards. It’s a purely personal pick, and quite possibly I would have picked a different bunch on a different day. Looking at them now I’m amazed at how much they resonate with each other. The books (all remarkable collections) are so varied in mood and theme.

The Radio Room by Cilla McQueen is a work held together by the delicate strands of space and time. Traversing geographical and ideological boundaries, the poems remind me of sketches in a day journal, some quick impressions, others much more detailed, worked and returned to.  Behind it all is Cilla’s forthwright and direct voice, offering personal events as a microcosm of universal experience.

Kate Camp’s The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls is a much more intellectual work, basing itself on a found text (the first Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, an early 14th century work of Christian mysticism by Marguerite Porete) and extending this as a lens on the present time and place.  She manages to take a medieval European work and make it modern, and in some ways quite “Kiwi”.

Mauri Ola – Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Whetu Moana II) edited by Albert Wendt, Reina Whaitiri and Robert Sullivan, is possibly best described as a treasury of the Pacific voice.  The work selected covers poets throughout Polynesia, including many emerging and established voices in Aotearoa. Many of the poems deal with the discovery or claiming of identity, or the facets of daily experience that make up a culture.  There’s a fair amount of anger as well as humour, but overriding it all is a joy in finding expression.

So what have I chosen?  Three poems that all, in the different voices of their writers, deal with the loss of loved ones through the physical remembrance of objects. Cilla’s poem, evoking the loss of a journal, the favourite tool of this writer, but with a wry hope in the closing line that maybe the words will have gone to a better place.

Kate’s poem which weaves objects bought on OE with childhood items and which in its closing stanzas refers to the small but significant losses a natural disaster like an earthquake can bring.  Somehow, I find her simple inventory of objects more poignant than all the news images of broken buildings. And Alohi Ae’a’ (a Hawaiian writer) who so beautifully uses the metaphor of a boat to sail across space and time to join her loved one.

I’m in Christchurch at the moment and walk to work every day past buildings that are broken, that symbolize loss, yet by their loss remind us of the important links to the past.  I think that’s why I like these poems – they rebuild in words the lost objects, acting as both commemoration and reconstruction. Lost things are less lost if they are found again in poetry.

The winner of the NZ Book Award for poetry will be announced on National Poetry Day. After you've read the selected poems here, look into the Tuesday Poets on the live blog roll to the right, many of whom will be celebrating Poetry Day.

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Renee Liang, an Auckland poet, playwright and paediatrician. Some of her poetry can be found on her blog Chinglish, and her new play FAAB is on in Auckland and Wellington in September and October.