The Hammock by Terry Moyle

Editor: Orchid Tierney

Terry Moyle is a vector artist and a top-notch experimental poet. His debut book, Cominghomeland (Auckland: Ducks on the Wall Publishing), was published in 2011. He has an MA Hons (English) from the University of Waikato and currently resides in Kaiwaka, Northland. 

What I particularly enjoy about Terry's work is his diversity.  Ranging from comic strips to 3D milk cartons, his work pushes poetry off the page into real life tangible artefacts. In this way, his experimental works are suggestive of new forms of literacy where text, image and object are inextricably related.  Yet, if I can sum up briefly, I want to suggest that works like Terry's are conversations that challenge binary demarcations of high and low art. Comic strips and milk cartons-throw away items in consumer society-are rendered unique through the interface of poetic language. The resultant work is a new territory between old and new forms of text.

I'd also encourage you to view his challenging Ugly/Beauty poem found here, in which typefaces  exert unusual pressure on the textual meaning.

Want more Terry? Feel free to visit his website here.

Orchid Tierney is an MA student at the University of Otago.  She has numerous publications on and offline.  Her first book, Brachiation, was released from the Gumtree Press in 2012. She edits Rem Magazine, a journal dedicated to New Zealand experimental writing. Wander over to her personal website here.
 

Please take some time to experience the marvellous selections of poetry from the Tuesday Poem community. You can find these listed along at the sidebar.

New Zealand Post Book Awards Poetry Finalists 2012

To celebrate the upcoming National Poetry Day in New Zealand, Tuesday Poem is presenting a poem selected from each of the three Poetry finalists for the New Zealand Post Book Awards - the winner to be announced August 1. National Poetry Day on Friday July 27 has events all over the country and will involve a number of Tuesday Poets.

But first, one of this country's most magical of poets and storytellers Margaret Mahy died in Christchurch yesterday. The Booksellers NZ blog has posted The Fairy Child as a tribute to a remarkable writer who has touched so many around the world. It begins: 'The very hour that I was born/I rode upon a unicorn' - yes, Margaret Mahy, you did. RIP. [More tributes in our sidebar]

Now the poetry finalists ...

Editor: Andrew M. Bell.

Unknown Unknowns 

Maybe one day we will even teach in schools,
along with Homer again, and the Aeneid,
the equally complex songs of the whale,
graduate students composing theories 
about the mysterious bass shift
in song latitude 61˚ longitude 15˚
towards the end of 1971 –
still, we will never know the secret song
the whale sings to himself,
the heretic variations,
the secret pleasure
he allows himself in the silence and the dark;
any more than the poet’s biographer,
revealing everything he’s told,
accounting for contradictions
in accounts, gaps in the paper trail,
can know where the poet goes at night
when even his wife, lying beside him
in the dark, can’t know where he goes
in the privacy of his mind;
any more than we can know
what other worlds God might have dreamed up
too secret, too sentimental,
too erotic to be manifest
in the universe
of dust and light;
any more than we can know
it isn’t this one after all
that is the imaginary world 
too sentimental, too beautiful,
too privately pleasurable
really to be real.

(from Thicket by Anna Jackson, published by Auckland University Press)


More erudite and scholarly readers could tell you more about the literary features of this poem than I can, but I can tell you that it appealed to me because it manages to be playful and profound simultaneously.

I love that it explores magical possibilities, the "what ifs" that are the jumping off point for so much creative endeavour. I admire how Anna Jackson has woven the secret lives of whales, poets and God together so seamlessly.







Blood Work 

Sheep and cattle arrived by lorry,
the lorries were like yards on wheels.
It was a big deal, my father’s work, the smell
was stronger than the brewery.
I took wide paces in my gumboots,
matching his steel-toed stride, I followed him
into the killing room
and spoke my name to the other men.

Nothing stopped, the chain ground on,
sheep hung from hooks, each man with a knife
had his own bit of flesh to deal with.
My lungs ached, my eyes watered
as if there was a fire, the blood everywhere,
red and red over their white cover-alls.

My father handled the aftermath, the sheep
with no head, or feet, or skin, or gut.
Dead cold carcasses coming down a ramp
like fallen angels. He shouldered and stacked.

When the whistle blew
we sat drinking tea from tin mugs.
I was spoken of as his girl,
strong as his strong,
that’s when it started
in the blood: this was his life.
I felt the join no knife could part
and I couldn’t see
how I’d make the journey
going away and away from him.

(from Shift by Rhian Gallagher, published by Auckland University Press)

Regardless of the dynamics, families are a subject everyone can relate to. I love the richness of this poem, the finely wrought nuances and the way the poet strikes a balance between the visceral nature of her father's workplace with the love and tenderness she feels for her father.


The repetition of "the blood everywhere,/red and red" is beautifully echoed in the final line "going away and away from him." This is a poem with a huge, beating heart.

Elsa 
November, 2009 

There is a little girl whose head
fits into my hand and whose spine
you can finger like a row of pearl buttons.

Her breathing is brisk and she startles
—like a skink in a beach garden—
even when she sleeps.

Each hair on her head is fine
and soft and her eyebrows
are two raised dashes on a pale page.

They are dark blue, oval, and new
—her open eyes. Her mother looks into
them and calls her ‘sweet pea’, ‘tree-frog’

or ‘mouth’, which is a lovely one
especially when the bottom lip
comes out from somewhere and quivers.

It is smaller than a wallflower,
a daisy or a miniature rose.
It could be a little walnut
except it is always opening
to fit around a nipple.

Her body is the length
of my forearm and her long
oblong feet are shoving the air.

Everyone asks to see her fingers
and their tiny mirrors but look, the nails
are like pruning saws—they flail
and catch across her face.

You cannot imagine or even dream
what a little face will be
until it is here named Elsa
and the centre of everything.

(from The leaf-ride by Dinah Hawken, published by Victoria University Press)

It is often an extremely difficult thing to write an intimate poem which expresses joy and celebration without tipping over into mawkishness. That Dinah Hawken seems to achieve it so effortlessly speaks volumes for her experience, her precision and her artistry. I presume she is writing about a newborn grandchild and she builds her description of Elsa with such delicate craftsmanship, detail by startling detail, until the scene is intensely vivid in the reader's mind.

The above three poems are reproduced here at Tuesday Poem with the permission of the respective poets and publishers. On a personal note, I would like to thank the poets and the publishers of these three fine collections, each one richly deserving of its place as a finalist.



This week's editor, Andrew M. Bell, writes poetry, short fiction, plays, screenplays and non-fiction. His work has been published and broadcast in New Zealand/Aotearoa, Australia, England, Israel and USA. His most recent publications are Aotearoa Sunrise, a short story collection, and Clawed Rains, a poetry collection. Andrew lives in Christchurch with his family and loves to surf. 

After reading the poem at the hub, try the 30 Tuesday Poets in the sidebar, and the poems they've written or selected - you won't be disappointed!

'Fuck you' by John Adams

Your chest contracts and egressive
pulmonic air thrusts into your
mouth and funnels a fri-
cative between your fence
of upper teeth and lower
lip;
your mouth widens and with
a voiced vibration utters
a closed central vowel until
your soft palate rises to choke
the flow in a velar plosive
croak but,
almost without pause, your jaws
close a bit as if to bite the co-
articulation and you
voice a velar fricative;
your mouth opens and
closes as you push
the resonance forward,
up

          and knowing those teeth upon which my tongue has slid
          intensely and knowing those lips
          the portal it was impossible to say where you stopped
          and I started and knowing that vibration which has soothed
          and softened me and know that mouth

adrenalin shrieks, I throw
open the door, I open my mouth to fuck
you too when the stapler

[Exhibit A]

                                                                  Editor Mary McCallum 

Exhibit B

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, what you have before you is a poem (Exhibit A) found amongst legal documents in the Briefcase (Exhibit B) of a Judge John Adams  (Family Court & District Court), identified in Exhibit C.

Exhibit C

See if you will how this poem is written in the language of a speech language therapist which is the job of Verity Charlotte Button - hit by a stapler during a fight with her husband John Portsmouth Button (solicitor). Did he do it deliberately? That's for the courts to find out.


'Fuck you' is not the only poem in Judge John Adams' Briefcase, not by any means. Yes, there are legal documents - as one would expect, or what appear to be legal documents, court reports, police reports etc, until one looks more closely. The form is there, the language too, but they are all strangely askew (Exhibit D), defaced, cut adrift from their origins. There are also other documents not usually found in a Judge's briefcase: a sudoku puzzle, a menu, a dictionary entry.

Exhibit D - extract from  Risk, Going Forward

I need to stop right here and confess five things:

1. I am not a solicitor or a Judge nor do I have anything to do with the courts

2. I am, however, a poet

3. Judge John Adams was one of my first students in 139.123 extramural creative writing (Massey University).

4. Briefcase won this year's NZ Society of Authors Best First Book Award for Poetry.

5. Of this,  I am extraordinarily proud (woo hoo!)

Exhibit E - as signed by the poet

Language is the thing for John Adams the Judge and John Adams the Poet. Words to him are there to be cross-examined, broken down in the dock, made to confess their origins, their intentions, their innermost desires. The whole of this collection is about the promise language holds and its actual limitations in the workings of law and the society it apparently serves.













In the beginning was the
gnomic hope of it,
the staple desire, to fix
          something
with some sort of meaning, a place where things
could clinch together  ....

What was staple is no longer
available; things connect incorrectly;
even the index escapes our fingers;
our aggregations scatter.

extract from Buttons


But it's more than just a game of words to this poet. As the judges of the NZSA award said, John Adams'  'experimentation with form depends upon the heart as much as it does the intellect.'

In 'Fuck you', you can see John Adams' vigorous delight in words and their possibilities. Hear how it gets right inside the workings of the mouth, inside the language of the workings of the mouth, and inside the workings of the mouth of man and wife, and see how it ends up in the air like the stapler before it fell to earth and everything went terribly wrong. The extract from 'Risk, Going Forward' does something else entirely -  legal apparently but poetic in fact.

Every poem in Briefcase does something else entirely in fact ... this is a provocative, passionate, highly rewarding read. Congratulations John!

'Fuck you' is published with permission from the poet and his publisher Auckland University Press. 'Justice' - another poem from the collection - can be read here.  Come back next week to read extracts from each of finalists in the Best Book of Poetry Award in the NZ Book Awards, selected by Andrew Bell.

This week's editor, Mary McCallum is co-curator of Tuesday Poem. A Wellington poet and novelist she recently published The Tenderness of Light (Makaro Press 2012), and before that, The Blue (Penguin 2007) which won two NZ Book Awards. Mary is also a creative writing tutor, freelance writer, reviewer and bookseller. She blogs at O Audacious Book. 

After reading the poem at the hub, try the 30 Tuesday Poets in the sidebar, and the poems they've written or selected - you won't be disappointed! 

Gigabyte by Mary Cresswell

The fact is that computers, like people,
have no problem remembering the messy stuff:
it's forgetting they can't do.

How much memory can you sell me? I want it all, asleep and awake, at the light
touch of a finger. I want the blood to stay liquid, the bones never to rise again, the
stink to stay undissipated in either still or moving air.

Forget bloody algorithms, archives, downloads, codices, indices, books, paper-brittle
files to fragment into contemplation, make me rest on my heels, make me wonder at
all this dust and cold coffee, ask what I am really after and is it worth it.

I have seen you watching action glowing in the dark bodies twisting, coupling, dying
out as the power dies leaving images burnt on memory ready to retrieve. We know
our passion is present; our passion is action.

You know, too, such frenzies are best gulped down fresh before some ungodly
troika variously rendered as reason, recall, reflection clatters up the driveway like
unwelcome parents coming home early because they forgot the key, when you
thought they would be out all night and leave you to it with all your mindless
friends.


______
Originally published in the online magazine, Talking, Writing, in January 2012.
Reproduced here with kind permission from the author.

                                          Editor: Elizabeth Welsh

Mary Cresswell is a Wellington poet who lives on the Kapiti Coast. Her book, Trace Fossils, was published by Steele Roberts in 2011. I have admired Mary's poetry for quite some time, and I recently stumbled across this new poem - Gigabyte - when I was reading a fascinating article 'Why Poets Sometimes Think in Numbers' in the online literary magazine, Talking Writing. 


I was immediately drawn to the poem, with its focus on time, memory, and the intertwining of past, present and future experiences, having spent hours during my Masters delving into the conceit of inner time in New Zealand literature. 

The idea of memory as a possible commodity - something to be purchased, to be 'had', to be casually picked up - is so human, so real. I can't express enough how much I feel that Mary has hit the nail on the head with her final stanza, where she invites the reader to share in, and relish, those trembling lived, felt, experienced moments - 'such frenzies are best gulped down fresh' - that seem to hold such illicit pleasures - 'you thought they would be out all night and leave you to it'.

When I contacted Mary to ask her if I could republish 'Gigabyte', she was kind enough to share with me some of her thoughts behind the poem and her approach: 'Like most of us, I think a lot about memory as I grow older. It irritates me that memory doesn't fall into nice, manageable compartments - it would be so much easier to deal with if it did. But, alas, at times, the past is as much a happening as the present is, and there are moments when I find them totally mixed in with each other. This poem "just happened" (pretty much) in one of those moments.'

For more information about her and her innovative poetry, please see her profile on the New Zealand Book Council website.

Elizabeth Welsh is a freelance editor, poet and PhD student. Originally from New Zealand, she now lives in South London. Her poetry and short fiction has been published in print and online. She is currently writing a chapter for a book collection on Katherine Mansfield's influences and has recently returned from speaking on Mansfield at the Sorbonne. She blogs about literary stuff here.

After reading 'Gigabyte', please do take the time to dip into this week's poetry selections from the rest of the Tuesday Poem community. You can find these listed along at the sidebar.

Why Don't You Talk To Me? by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Why do I post my love letters
in a hollow log?
Why put my lips to a knothole in a tree
and whisper your name?

The spiders spread their nets
and catch the sun,
and by my foot in the dry grass
ants rebuild a broken city.
Butterflies pair in the wind,
and the yellow bee,
his holsters packed with bread,
rides the blue air like a drunken cowboy.

More and more I find myself
talking to the sea.
I am alone with my footsteps.
I watch the tide recede
and I am left with miles of shining sand.

Why don't you talk to me?




                                       Editor: Tim Jones

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (1925–2009) is my favourite New Zealand poet. While Allen Curnow and James K Baxter were conventionally regarded, during the high nationalist (and masculinist) period of New Zealand poetry, as the twin titans of New Zealand poetry – or perhaps, for aspiring poets, its Scylla and Charybdis – Alistair Campbell's poetry, rooted in observation and experience rather than poetic ideology, speaks more directly to me.

Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947–71 was, if I recall correctly, the first collection of New Zealand poetry I bought. While some of the early poems in this selection, such as "The Return" (1949), are magnificent, it was the increasing simplicity, freshness and directness of address of the later poems in the book that especially impressed and (I hope) influenced me.

"Why Don't You Talk To Me?", written in 1965, has all these qualities, plus a cunning indirection. For much of the poem, the central question is present only by implication: the natural world makes its customary arrangements all around me, yet I am separate; why don't you talk to me? This poem says all that needs to be said, and no more.

For more information about Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, see his Wikipedia and New Zealand Book Council pages and his obituary in The Guardian.

Alistair Te Ariki Campbell

Publication Information

Published in Alistair Campbell, Kapiti: Selected Poems 1947-71, and reprinted in Harvey McQueen, ed., These I Have Loved (Steele Roberts, 2010). Reproduced as a Tuesday Poem by kind permission of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell's literary executor.

Tim Jones is a poet, author, editor and blogger. His latest book is his third poetry collection, Men Briefly Explained. His short story "The New Neighbours" has been included in the recently-published anthology The Apex Book of World SF 2. For more on Tim and his writing, please see his blog Books in the Trees.

Once you have read "Why Don't You Talk To Me?", please take the opportunity to read the poems which the individual Tuesday Poets have posted on their blogs. You'll see them linked from the sidebar at the left of this page.

RIPE FRUIT by Ruben Mowszowski

It was that time again. 

He sat on the ground letting the dusk settle on him.
The air was dry, pulling the moisture from his lungs, lightening his body.
Why had he come?
Too long. It had been too long.
Once he had imagined a child.
Forget, forget.
He stared at the outline of the tree, its shape like an upturned hand,
beseeching or giving, he could not be sure.
Dear God, is it not long enough? Give me emptiness;
my heart is full of sharp pointed stones.
On the branches dark shapes stirred and one by one dropped off
with heavy fluttering wings.

    

Ungrateful wretch, he thought, at least you have life. 

He looked at his body to see that it was all there.

Thank you God; for this leg, for this arm; all the parts he could think of.

Later he would look around the stony Karoo for the rest. 

At some other time he might spread himself across the valley

casting hands and feet at the base of the twin mountains.

    

The silence was that of a place emptied, a place of no water save for the spring 

and the souls of ancient fish passing wraithlike through him.  

The rocks were hard on his feet; the ground was dry.

He had walked barefoot on the hard stony ground collecting thoughts scattered on the hillside.

All morning he had walked leaving dark crimson streaks behind him.

Take my heart, take my blood, he had pleaded.  

He longed for his body to be pierced, for his blood to flow and be absorbed by the dry air; to unravel himself over bushes and become picking food for birds and lizards;

to be sucked up the trunks of trees leaving his bones spring-washed pure

and bleached white. 

The tree had lost its outline. 

A shape separated itself and grew larger. 

She lay next to him, warming him.

He touched her face.

I was afraid, she said. I dreamed you built a house and it turned to sand.
He felt her arms tighten around him, dark curls against his face.

When he entered her, tears sprang from her eyes onto the dry ground.

He woke up, he was alone.  

The morning sky held a curved moon and a bright star.

New growth had appeared on the tree 

and the branches were heavy with ripe fruit. 




Ruben Mowszowski

~ * ~

Ruben Mowszowski lives in Kalk Bay, a salt-licked fishing village about an hour's drive from Cape Point, the Southernmost tip of South Africa. One late afternoon in January, he and I met in a sun-warmed courtyard and sat in the shade of an old syringa tree drinking wine, eating almonds and olives and talking till the sun sank behind the mountain. Inspired by our wide-roaming conversation, I went in search of his work.

To borrow the words of Sam Keen - "Aristotle said 'Philosophy begins in wonder.' I believe it also ends in wonder. The ultimate way we relate to the world as something sacred is by renewing our sense of wonder."

To my mind, Ruben Mowszowski's writing renews our sense of wonder. When I invited him to send me a few lines as a backdrop to Ripe Fruit - a piece that seems to me equal parts reflective essay and poem - he replied 'I wrote the piece in Warmwaterberg - the hot mineral springs near Barrydale in the Klein Karoo. The peacocks there roost at night on the branches of trees. I'm always cautious about writing too much about a poetic piece but I'll say something about the landscape. . . the way the land speaks here and the animistic ethos that allows a tree to be imbued with the spirit of a person. The waters are slightly radioactive so all sorts of physical benefits are claimed but it's also a place where the wounded can go to heal the soul. . . " 

A few weeks ago, I posted Ruben's poem Karoo Moon on my blog. Although Ripe Fruit and Karoo Moon sound distinctly different notes, there's a raw-yet-yielding quality to both. Each piece took root - and is rooted within - the Karoo, a vast wilderness area of semi-desert that covers two-thirds of South Africa.

                ". . . Time here, if there is time, is all of time. Time space and form,
                mantis hare and moon, are but different aspects of one face.
                Earth and sky interpenetrate. Some people talk about a deeper
                breath. There can be sadness not related to anything one knows.
                Language fails. . . "

                                and a second excerpt from Karoo Moon 

                ". . . There is another story told in wind
                of wind that was once a man then bird
                dropping bloodstained feather into a pool
                among the daughters of the rain
                ostrich becoming ostrich again
                while sun thrown up into the sky
                reshapes the moon that does not die
                for ever, but reborn gathers souls,
                and clouts the hare and splits its lip
                for doubting resurrection of the dead. . . "

              

Bosduif, Kaaingsveld - Stephen Inggs (SA)

Digital print with archival inks on paper - 1118 x 805MM (from the series Legacy - 2009)

Ruben Mowszowski’s articles on science and culture have been published in The Mail & Guardian, The Sunday Independent, Leadership, Geographical (UK), Resurgence (UK), Style, Architectural Digest, Men's Health, Pforeword, Directions, Research Papers, Doenit, Chi, Right Stuff. Invista (Portugal), Fair Lady. He was author of the commemorative article for the launch of the Southern African Large Telescope (Click here to read SKA on the birthplace of humanitity). 

Ruben's literary writing has been published in Revue Noire (France), New Contrast, Vrye Weekblad, Cosmopolitan (SA). He is the co-author of Karoo Moons (Struik) and author of the short fiction collection Souls of Ancient Fish (Brevitas.) He was a prize-winning finalist in the Vita Short Story Awards, a finalist for the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, shortlisted for the SACPAC National Drama Award, runner-up prize-winner of the South African Science and Technology Journalism Award, winner of the South African Science and Technology Journalism Award, and shortlisted for the EU Literary Award. 

The Karoo

~ * ~

Claire Beynon is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Claire immigrated to Dunedin, New Zealand in November 1994. She has a soft spot for many things, especially birds and earthworms

                 '. . . the more since chameleons bent in gnarled attitudes 

                 of prayer have long since left my garden. . .' (from Second Nature, CB 2007)

These days, long-legged lancewoods and an old rata are home and haven to flurries of native birds that gather in her harbourside garden. Claire is a visual artist, art-science collaborator and writer of poetry and short stories. She blogs at All Finite Things Reveal Infinitude and Waters I Have Known. Her web address is www.clairebeynon.co. nz

After you've enjoyed Ripe Fruit, take time to read the other poems posted this week by members of the Tuesday Poem community. You will find them listed in the sidebar.

BOMB by Sian Williams

As the plate-glass façade of the university library disintegrated, Miranda looked up from her essay on symbolism in Germanic folk-tale and thought:

it’s true

      in an explosion

              everything

                      

                         really

                                       does

                                                     happen

                                                                   in slo-mo.

In the blinding flash, as the Japanese history student near the window was vaporised, the relevance of Hiroshima’s thousand suns was lost upon Miranda.

And as the pressure wave ballooned into the building and that creepy astrophysics guy at the next table was reduced to his constituent particles, the analogy of a new universe created by this Big Bang and now expanding exponentially did not cross her mind.

But as the twinkling blast-front neared, and the light fittings above her desk swayed elegantly in unison and exploded, Miranda thought briefly about Snow White motionless in her glass coffin: sleeping yet not sleeping, alive yet not alive, undead. And Cinderella, the Ash Girl, leaving her glass slipper on the steps and running — running ragged — into the night.

Lastly she thought about The Snow Queen in which the wizard’s magic mirror, when dropped to earth, shivers into a million fragments. Distorting, perverting, corrupting. She was Gerda, barefoot in the snow, bent into the howling ice-storm, searching for the transparent palace where Kay sits alone with shards of glass in his eyes and his heart — and now she was Kay —  trying to piece together the puzzle of a shattered frozen lake, to form the word Eternity.

First published at Flash Frontier, May 2012.

Editor, Michelle Elvy

* * *

This Friday, 22 June 2012, marks National Flash Fiction Day and I'm honoured to be the Guest Editor here this week and bring you this short short story. It's written by my co-editor at Flash Frontier, a journal we launched back in January. Flash is both challenging and inspiring. Capturing the essence of something in such a short space requires a certain skill, and flash fiction -- despite its very trim word limit -- allows both freedom and experimentation. 

Sian wrote this story for the Flash Frontier issue themed splinters. I find it a marvellous example of short short fiction -- beautifully written, simple at first glance with layers to unpack. 

I asked Sian a few questions to accompany this story (three, to be precise: this is flash, after all). The story speaks for itself, but I always enjoy hearing more from the author, too. 

ME: How did the idea for this story come to you -- this one moment in time, slowed almost to a stopping point?

SW: It started with an image in my mind of shards of glass suspended in the air slowly twisting and twinkling in a beautiful, yet sinister, way. I began thinking about explosions and remember watching slow-motion video of the nuclear tests in the Pacific. When the film was slowed right down, the individual forces created by the blast could be identified and separated --  the light, the pressure wave, the sound. The anatomy of the explosion became visible and I started to think about a story which examined these different components and presented them as a series of freeze-frame images. 

ME: The weaving of fairy tale into reality adds a wonderful element to this piece. Can you tell us why these particular fairy tales came to you? 

SW: I was thinking about materials which splinter, and in particular about ice and glass, and their relationship to each other. Ice and glass are recurrent motifs in many fairy tales, and the three fairy tales mentioned in the story all feature glass: Snow White's glass coffin, Cinderella's glass slipper. The Snow Queen begins with the breaking of the broken magician’s mirror, and later snow and ice feature strongly. I'm interested in how the themes and motifs used in fairy tales relate to our lives today, and it seemed to me that Miranda's experience in the explosion was in many ways an infinitely condensed version of the children's experience in The Snow Queen.

The glass coffin is interesting because it's an example of a serendipitous moment in writing when everything comes together. In addition to being made of glass, the coffin introduces the idea of suspended animation (an idea which crops up in a number of fairy tales including Snow White and Sleeping Beauty) and is the perfect image for this story as Miranda sees herself momentarily in suspended animation, caught motionless in the space between life and death. 

ME: In this very short story, you question in subtle ways the relevance of history, of science, of time itself -- and whether these are best viewed as a whole or as fragments. Tell us, do the fragments matter more, or does the whole?

SW: In this case the fragments are important; this story is about splinters, fragments of lives, things blown apart. What I tried to say here is that the way we experience life, even a shattering moment like this one, perhaps especially a moment like this one, is shaped by our own particular frame of reference, our context and place in the world. The Japanese history student experiences the explosion in terms of the bombing of Hiroshima, the astrophysicist in terms of the Big Bang, and Miranda in terms of the fairy tales she is studying. We all experience the same event in different ways, we are individual fragments.

* * *

You can read more about Sian Williams, whose recent accomplishments include being short-listed for the Flash 500 Competition and the Fish Publishing Flash Competition, here. Or you can meet her in Auckland on Friday, 22 June -- National Flash Fiction Day.  

Visit the NFFD site and find out about the competition's Short List and also events happening in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Whangarei. 


And please do enjoy the poetry and flash posted this week by other members of the Tuesday Poem collective. You can find their posts in the sidebar to the left. 

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Michelle Elvy lives and writes on her sailboat in Northland, but she's in Auckland much of this winter, researching and writing a collection of flash fiction set across the landscape of New Zealand history -- thanks to a grant from the NZSA and Auckland Museum Library. You can find her at National Flash Fiction Day on June 22 or at Poetry Live on July 17, where she will be the Guest Poet.  Michelle is also online at: Flash Frontier / Blue Five Notebook / A Baker's Dozen / 52|250: A Year of Flash / An Aotearoa Affair: A Blog Fest from Kiel to Kaitaia

The Cheese Room by Judy Brown

Here it is, on the back of the menu.

How, instead of a pudding, an extra fiver
will buy you the choice of the Cheese Room.
It shines in the corner, a treasury,
the moony glow of the cheeses walled round
with glass. As soon as she sees it, she's lost.
Before anyone spots her, she strips,
soaks a sari in buttermilk, wraps herself up
and goes in. She shivers to think of the air
full of spores, the shag-pile that fluffs
on things that slip your mind for a moment –
green islands on milk, jam lidded with wool.
A couple who've paid to pick slices of Reblochon,
Vignotte, Manchego, tap on the glass;
they can't believe how she stands,
drenched in whey, her hair wet to strings.
How she touches the rinds – dusted
with charcoal, or soft, that hidden-flesh bloom
you get on a Brie. There's the tightness
of smoke in some of the cheese, the fissured
and granular rock of a Parmesan split
into wheels. Then the diners lose interest,
return to their claret. Despite how oddly
she's dressed – the flimsy sarong,
the milky place where the muslin pulls into
the crack of her arse – perhaps they assume
she's some kind of expert assessing
the cheese? But she won't even taste,
pulls the cheesecloth over her face
and curls up on the floor. She's happy
to wait, passive like milk, for the birth,
for the journey from death into food.

©Judy Brown

The Cheese Room comes from Judy’s 2011 collection Loudness.
It appears here with permission from Judy and her publishers Seren Books.
Thank you both.

Editor Helen McKinlay

The first three words of this poem, ‘Here it is’… propel us into a lavish sensory experience.  Resist and be left tapping on the glass. Like a fine camembert cheese, rich and creamy in the centre but well contained within its rind, The Cheese Room’s  magic is spun within a well-crafted structure. I particularly admire the way Judy uses line breaks and caesuras to halt the momentum before her next piece of unexpectedness, for example:

'Despite how oddly
she's dressed – the flimsy sarong,
the milky place where the muslin pulls into
the crack of her arse – perhaps they assume
she's some kind of expert assessing'

The Cheese Room is capable of deep analysis and surmise.  For myself, I am happy to delight in it for its own sake, a reminder to let go, take a leap, enjoy. When asked to comment, Judy replied, ‘the trigger for it, a visit to a restaurant, no longer has any connection to what the poem becomes.’   I like it that she said 'becomes' … Nice to think of it as still becoming!
It was GK Chesterton who led me to Judy Brown.  I was researching his comment, ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.’  Of course GK died in 1936, well before the power of the internet, which now abounds with cheese poems. Cheese, like love, crosses boundaries.

Topics range from the discovery of one’s inner cheese to a comparison between the qualities of cheese and humans. And what would GK have thought of his contemporary, James McIntyre (1828- 1906)?  Sometimes referred to as Canada's Worst Poet-thanks, it is said, to his cheese poems, James is remembered and anthologised still and is the inspiration of the annual Ingersoll, Ontario, Poetry contest.  James aside, I think GK would have been as thrilled as I was to discover Judy’s poem. The silence can be declared well broken!

Enjoy Gk’s short essay on Cheese from his book of essays,‘Alarms and Discursions’ here.


LINKS TO OTHER POEMS BY JUDY BROWN

Loudness    The Worst Journey in The World   Passenger     

and Best Drink of the Day a youtube clip

Judy Brown was born in Cheshire and studied English at the universities of Cambridge and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has lived in Northumberland, Cumbria and Hong Kong and now divides her time between London and Derbyshire. Judy’s first book Loudness (Seren, 2011) was shortlisted for the 2011 Forward Felix Dennis prize for best first collection. She has been widely published. Her awards include the Manchester Poetry Prize 2010, the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize 2005 and the Poetry London Competition 2009.

In November 2011 'The Cheese Room' was selected as Poem of the Week in The Guardian.

Before you go, leap into the side bar and enjoy the wide selection of 30 Tuesday Poets who live there.

Helen McKinlay is a published children’s author and poet  from New Zealand.  She blogs at gurglewords. 

'Joseph' by Michael Woods

I

It was all tension
in the delivery room,
and you still seemed
glimpsed galaxies away,
pouring your heart out
in the automatic writing
of the foetal monitor's pen
that traced its racing.

I heard each beat
as an outside broadcast
through a squeaky speaker
live-wired to your scalp.
These electric things made
more than a potential difference
as the nurse noticed your distress.
The machine plotted nothing
and found its origin.

Shocked into memory
all I recalled was our first
virtual meeting in those
early scanning days when,
searched for like fish by sonar,
you showed up shadowy
in your secret space, waving a hand to me
that could be a plesiosaur's paddle,
a coelacanth's fin - semaphore from
an oceans away womb-home,
moon distant where you had landed.

Then, in the blink of an aeon,
you broke radio silence,
translating yourself again
into the language of graph lines.

II

I saw you born from water
into air as you barged
into the summer.
You were an astronaut to my eye,
space-walking from the mother ship
but blood-roped still,
already miming our every voyage.

It was the quick slow motion
of it all that lives in me -
you coming from your sea of tranquility,
washed up by the amniotic tide;
that suspended second when you looked
and held me in the forever of your face,
before you drew breath,
before you cried.

Copyright Michael Woods
from 'Absence Notes',  2011,  Templar Poetry
Reproduced with permission

                                                Editor:  Kathleen Jones

I've just been reading  Absence Notes - the first collection from Michael Woods - and this poem really stood out.  It's a beautiful poem about the birth of a child from the father's point of view rather than the mother's, and that's what makes it unusual. We don't often hear about birth from a man's perspective - aren't often reminded that bonding is just important for them as it is for the mother.   I like the images and metaphors, 'blood-roped'  - the womb astronaut. 

Several of the poems in this collection are about family relationships - Carol Ann Duffy in a review noted that it 'maps the events and connections which shape our lives - childhood, parenthood, friendship and love.'   Michael is an authority on Gerard Manley Hopkins and there are echoes in some of the poems (particularly the title poem 'Absence notes') which link back to Hopkins.  Apparently every collection should have at least 3  'Wow!'  moments.  This is definitely one of them.

"Michael Woods was born in London.  He is married with three children and teaches English and Drama in Malvern, Worcestershire.  His poems have won several prizes and have appeared in a number of anthologies.  As editor of Tandem poetry magazine, he has sought to promote the work of young writers.  He also runs live poetry events at the Lamb and Flag pub in Worcester."





Kathleen Jones is this week's Tuesday Poem editor, currently living in Italy.   She is a biographer and poet, whose first collection of poetry  'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21'  was published in November 2011.   She  blogs regularly at 'A Writer's Life'.

Once you have enjoyed "Joseph", 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 sidebar.

A Jar of Balloons or The Uncooked Rice by Matthew Yeager

Have you ever had a haircut so bad
you cried? When you open the drawer
after having poured yourself a bowl of cereal,
do you reach for a small or large
spoon? How conscious are you of your
posture? Will you agree to let a lover
use your tooth brush? Which chemicals'
smells do you like? During which phase
of life did you acquire the bulk of your
friends? Have you ever quit a bad job
emphatically, ripped off a uniform or apron,
thrown the balled-up cloth at a superior,
then stomped off? Grey or gray? Who ...


Go to Sixth Finch, Summer 2009, to read the rest of the poem.

                                                                 Editor: Sarah Jane Barnett

The reason I haven't posted the entirety of Yeager's poem is because it is long. And I don't mean long as in it has many parts, or long like a narrative poem, but long like the Great Wall of China. I was introduced to the poem by writers Ashleigh Young and Tim Upperton, who dared me to read it. So I did, in just over an hour.

Being made solely of personal questions, the poem is unrelentingly about you. It places the reader as its focus through the act of being read. Yeager's line breaks mid-question create a pace that leads into the next question. "When making a shooting- / yourself gesture, do you do the gun barrel / with two fingers or one?" he asks. "Do you insert / the finger-gun into your mouth or press it / to your temple?" When reading the questions it is hard not to think of the answer (I use two fingers and press it to my temple). Questions bounce off each other and come together to make strange suggestions. They unsettle. It's like staring into a mirror for too long. Then they keep on going.

The poem inspires many responses, the two most common, I'm guessing, are over stimulation and boredom. It has also inspired bloggers to answer Yeager's questions, which one could argue is a vain task. In saying that, Ward's Words, saw the question form of Yeager's poem as a request to the reader to answer the questions, which he did in full. It's an interesting interpretation.

So all there is to do now is read the poem. I dare you.

Reproduced on The Tuesday Poem Hub with permission.
.

Sarah Jane Barnett is this week's Tuesday Poem editor. 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. Her first collection of poetry, A Man Runs into a Woman, is due to come out this year from Hue & Cry Press. 

Once you have enjoyed "A Jar of Balloons or The Uncooked Rice", 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 sidebar.