Marco Polo by Ali Alizadeh

Marco Polo

Maybe it’s the natural
extension of immigration.  Maybe

it’s the awesome travel
bugs, making my wife’s feet

uncommonly itchy.   I’m not
surprised, at any rate, to hear

the paediatrician’s nickname
for our son. ‘Marco Polo’ suits

his - in utero - trajectory
along the Silk Road, from

Kublai Khan’s Forbidden City
to the snow-covered stones of a caravanserai

in central Turkey.  Not to mention
the Australian interregnum

where ultrasound scans
revealed his sex.  But our Marco

probably won’t pen a Travels
as he won’t know the other

of unending expedition, say,
cherished waterways of Venice, in short

a concrete home.  Are we monstrous
parents?  Why have we conceived

and delivered a life into the world
in transition?  If held to account

by a solicitous young man
with my eyes (and my wife’s better

eyebrows) one day, accused
of depriving him of his deserved

comforts of sedentary genesis
(motherland, mother tongue

two ebullient grandmothers, etc)
I can only offer an image: removing

picture frames, tribal ornaments
from the hooks; clearing the drawers

of wrinkled notepads with withered ideas
and perforated socks; tearing

the hooks off the walls.  And then
the bright outline of the picture frames

vacated on the otherwise drab
dust-darkened surface of the wall.  It’s this

record of the passage of time
the contrast between the original

preserved shade and colour
and the rest (ditto our lives) dog-eared

by mould, sunlight, scratches
of nature and accidents.  It’s this

visible discrepancy between
what we were and what we’ve become,

the possibility to uncover
and see it.  The nomads treasure

wisdom; the reality of aging
towards death.  You see, Marco

- I’ll tell him - if we can see
death looming, like a dark island

on the navigator’s horizon
then we won’t be shocked when

time’s run out.  This means
a life without our primal fear.  That’s why

we travel.

© Ali Alizadeh
from Ashes in the Air (University of Queensland Press)
Reproduced with permission

Editor: Kathleen Jones (UK)

Ali Alizadeh was born in Tehran in 1976 and migrated to Australia in 1991.  He graduated with Honours in Creative Arts from Griffith University, Gold Coast and holds a PhD in Professional Writing from Deakin University, Melbourne.  He has taught at universities in Australia, China, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, and has also worked as street performer, hair-wrapper, and delivery driver.  He is a writer of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, drama and literary criticism and this is his sixth book.  He lives with his wife and son.

I love this poem - the elongated shape, like a journey, and the progression of thought.  Instability, repression and conflict have brought a flow of refugees from the Middle East across the globe, and it shows no sign of slowing down as the area becomes increasingly turbulent.  A sense of belonging is very strong in human beings - knowing where and who you come from helps us to know who we are. Giving birth to a child in a foreign country, realising that the child is never going to know their grandmothers, or the everyday details of the lives their parents have left, is a strange experience.

In the poem Ali Alizadeh confronts the questions he feels his son may one day ask.  Why?  Why did you leave and deprive me of my cultural heritage?  In return the poet presents the child with the images of hurried departure - seizing possessions, tearing even the hooks from the walls.  Hooks attach us to places, to material things.  The emigrant must leave them all behind.  But then he tells his son that it is death, the primal fear, ‘looming, like a dark island’ that is the real reason for the transit across the globe to live in a foreign country. ‘This means/a life without our primal fear.  That’s why/we travel.’

'Marco Polo' comes from the collection Ashes in the Air, published by Queensland University Press.  The collection covers a wide range of subject matter - much of it hard-hitting and political; cultural contrasts, the History of the Veil, Sky Burial (for John Kinsella), and personal poems that recall an ‘archaeology of suffering’ as well as the ecstatic joy of new landscapes and relationships - love ...

‘we flew from the profane towards a paradise

and earthly constellations, stirred by something
like the love that moves the sun and the other stars’. [My Divine Comedy]

Emigrants and refugees are nomads, often by force rather than by choice - a life of 'unending expedition'.  The loss of the Motherland creates a hunger, an empty gap between 'what we were and what we've become'.  But being a nomad also presents opportunities and a richness of experience.  As Ali writes in the poem, 'The nomads treasure wisdom'.

But that wisdom is hard-won.  In Ali Alizadeh's poem 'The Suspect' he describes what it feels like to be 'the other'.  In Iran

'I was an "apostate", principal's term for
the boy who failed Koran Studies and wrote

an essay on Leonardo da Vinci.'

But in the west, he is someone who makes other people nervous, '. . .   shackled to a passport

etched with Born in Tehran.  There I was
suspected of perfidy to the Faith, an Infidel

-wannabe.  Over here I am suspected
of terror.'

There is a bleakness about the conclusion, that someone with a Middle Eastern passport, and an interest in Western ideas and literature, can find themselves between 'the Islamic Republic's

Evin Prison, pliers pinching their finger
-nails;  or sleep-deprived and hooded indefinitely

in the dark solitaries of Guantanamo Bay.' 

'Ashes in the Air' is a brilliant, unique, collection.

Kathleen Jones is a poet, novelist and biographer, living between Italy and England.  She spent almost a decade living in the Middle East, where she began to be interested in its literary traditions, and to realise what it's like to be nomadic. Her latest collection 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21', published by Templar is about belonging and departure.  She blogs at A Writer’s Life and her website can be found at www.kathleenjones.co.uk

Please take a look at all the contributions in the sidebar and read what the other Tuesday Poets are posting. 

If you liked this post, you might like the memoir, by Marjane Satrapi, called 'Persepolis'. 

Early Growth by Rachel O'Neill

At her party the boy runs best with the hard-boiled egg. During
the obstacle course she meets him at the bird feeder on top of
which raisins are scattered. ‘I’m a bird,’ she nibbles and the boy
really does bob and nod. Later he says, ‘we’re twins, and I can
telepathically read the thoughts in your head,’ at which point she
makes a dent in his leg. It’s spring. Sometimes she hears an animal
cry as it comes out of its tent, or what’s it called? The uterus. It’s
taken from its mother and put on the teat. After the birthday cake
the kids run around, they bleat, skitter and find their feet. They
start to count the exposed growth rings on a tree stump, loops as
fine as hairs. One father keeps calling these the inseparable years.

Poem published with permission.
Editor: Sarah Jane Barnett 

Rachel O'Neill
Photo Credit: Kim Lesch

Rachel O’Neill is a writer, visual artist and editor based in Paekākāriki on the Kapiti Coast. Her writing has appeared in a range of publications, including Best New Zealand Poems 2011, Paper Radio, the inaugural The Long and the Short of It competition book published by Sport and Unity Books, and issues of Turbine, JAAM, and Brief. She completed a conjoint degree in English and Sculpture at the University of Auckland (2005) and a Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern letters (2008). Her debut collection, One Human in Height, will be released by Hue & Cry Press this year. O'Neill also blogs at Little Disturbances.

"Early Growth" was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2011. Of the poem, O’Neill said: ‘If my memory is correct, children's birthday parties in 1980s rural New Zealand were the kind of epic affairs that disturbed the myth that the country is not very populated. It seemed like every man, woman and child came to some of my parties. My mother put eggs on spoons and we ran as fast as we could without dropping them. There was also an unusual game that involved completing an obstacle course involving giant outdoor furniture.

In the poem there is an entanglement of child and adult point of view. It mirrors the way we humans can easily be confused by certain transitions, say from a sense of new life to experiencing more complex feelings around what new life might mean.’

What made me want to share this poem was my personal response. My son turned two in July, and the first two years of his life seem to have happened in seconds. I know; the sentiment's cliche! Still, the image of the "rings on a tree stump," which the father then calls "these the inseparable years," perfectly evokes the way childhood tumbles away. While this reading is somewhat different to the interpretation given by O'Neill, I think it speaks to, as she states, the "complex feelings" that life creates.

This week's editor Sarah Jane Barnett is a writer and reviewer who lives in Wellington. Her first collection of poems, A Man Runs into a Woman, was published by Hue & Cry Press in 2012, and has been shortlisted for best poetry collection of the year in the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Awards. She blogs at theredroom.org

When you've read Early Growth, do try some of the other Tuesday Poems out there. Check out the sidebar. 

Grass by Jill Jones

Empty girl I was, so far inside, grass didn't know me
It was something unbending, only light seemed to touch
But so long as I could smell the sea, so long as salt
I had extrications, music, that fire, phase & beat
And all around the world went off, banners & avenues, cruelties
Now it's come one, come all, a kind of sassy hoedown
The grass is going, it cracks & withers sadly, almost infinitely
But I'm becoming younger as my dead drugs strangle each-to-each
I go out with skin mixes, cantos & some fear rocking
I stand or fall but now I can feel that region's joy, the bones


from Broken/Open, Salt Publishing, 2005 published with permission

Editor: Catherine Bateson


Jill Jones, an award-winning Australian poet, has published seven full-length books of poetry including Ash is Here, So are Stars (Walleah Press, 2012), Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield Press, 2010), and Broken/Open (Salt, 2005). A new book, The Beautiful Anxiety, is due from Puncher and Wattmann in late 2013. Her work is represented in a number of major anthologies including the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature and The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry.

I really love and admire this poem. It richly skirts narrative moving the narrator from fragmented yearning to a more complete self-knowledge which acknowledges both personal history and the unknown. One of the things about Jones's work that I've always enjoyed is her ability to change register and insert an unexpected, and sometimes salty, vernacular into the formal structure. '....come one, come all, a kind of sassy hoedown' does this here and the internal rhyme and rhythm of 'come one, come all' with 'I stand or fall' a few lines later works beautifully.

If you want to read more poems by Jill Jones, you can find some here. Thank you, Jill, for Grass.

Catherine Bateson is an Australian poet and writer for children and young adults. She is currently on a residency in Paris, funded by the Australian Council for the Arts. Her latest children's book, Star, was published last year by Omnibus Books. Her latest collection of poetry, Marriage for Beginners, John Leonard Press, came out in 2009.

After you've read Grass, try some of the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar by or chosen by our Tuesday Poets. 

Where, by Paula Morris

Where are you from, I ask the waiter.

He is from Brazil, Poland, Florence.

Sometimes he is from Mexico, and I

say: so is my nephew’s fiancée.

In Auckland the taxi driver who lives in

Henderson is from Afghanistan. There are

forty of them there, he says. They love it, but
they have to make their own bread.

In New York the taxi driver is from Pakistan.

He asks me where I’m from, and wants to

talk cricket. His dream, he says, is to live

with his brother in Bradford.

In Auckland the dentist is from Brazil. In

Sheffield the café owner is from Auckland.

In London our waiter is from Glasgow.

In Glasgow our waiter is from Melbourne, like

my doctor in Iowa City, the nose specialist,

who leans over me on the operating table.

Where are you from, he asks me.

I tell him Auckland. Good on ya, he says.

Sometimes in Auckland the taxi driver is

from Auckland. He is not from anywhere

but there. If he’s old enough, I tell him my

dream, bringing back the trams.

Thanks to Paula Morris whose poem 
is posted with her permission

Editor Renee Liang

Paula Morris is a fiction writer of English and Maori descent. Born in Auckland, New Zealand, she's studied and worked in a number of places - York, Manchester, London, New York, Wellington, Iowa City, New Orleans, Glasgow - and is currently Fiction Writer-in-Residence at the University of Sheffield.

Her most recent novel, Rangatira, won the fiction categories of the 2012 New Zealand Post Book Awards and the Nga Kupu Ora Maori Book Awards, and was published in German in 2012 by Walde+Graf. Her short story collection, Forbidden Cities, was a regional finalist in the 2009 Commonwealth Prize. She's also the author of YA mystery novels set in haunted cities around the world (published by Scholastic US) and a forthcoming children's book, Hene and the Burning Harbour. 

Paula is well-known here as a fiction writer, but I’ve also long admired her insightful and intelligent literary interviewing, on show most years at the Auckland Writer’s and Reader’s Festival. It was on her trip home for this that I persuaded her to teach on a writing course for migrant women I run, New Kiwi Women Write Their Stories. This is a four-week ‘fast and furious’ tour through poetry, fiction, editing and performance, and the women are invited to contribute to an anthology at the end, launched (with afternoon tea of course!) as the finale.

A number of well-known writers have been tutors, and they are invited to be in the anthology too. Imagine my pleasure and surprise when Paula sent me the poem above. This poem, which starts with the familiar phrase (to many) “Where are you from,” is packed full of witty detail: the taxi driver who talks about making bread, the nose specialist in Iowa who uses the iconic Australian phrase, “Good on ya.” But the apparently random list is in fact carefully constructed. Everyone, it seems, is from somewhere else. Everyone has multiple allegiances, multiple identities.

In Paula’s poem, the speaker starts by asking the question, but then is in turn asked as she moves around the world. This is a scenario common to us nomadic Kiwis. In fact the answer to that question, “Where are you from,” might well be, “It depends on where I am.” The last verse of Paula’s poem suggests, however, that not all of us are comfortable with the notion of shifting geographies: “He is not from anywhere/but there.”

One of the things I enjoy most about this poem is its cheerful delight, the innocent curiosity with which the question is asked. In the world of the poem, asking where someone is from is a way of connecting. It leads to further opening up and maybe even a exchange: cricket, a dream of trams. I’m going to succumb to temptation and offer a poem I wrote in 2006, ‘From Where’. This is an altogether darker poem, sparked when a camera-toting man stopped me as I was walking in the Auckland Domain (my home turf since student days). To some of us born in NZ, the question “Where are you from,” seems to carry an insinuation of “you don’t belong.” It’s an often daily reminder that we ‘look different’. And yet the way the question is asked (very kindly) means we can’t respond with anything other than polite, as-vague-as-we-can-make-it, murmurings. (Which I did, then went home and wrote this poem.)

I’d love to say that seven years later there is no longer any need to write poems like this; unfortunately I still get asked the same question, and I still feel like I’m being questioned on my right to live at home! My reaction changes, however, as soon as I travel. I find it intriguing that Paula and I responded so differently to the same question. Below, her answers to some questions I sent her; and then, my poem.

What sparked this poem? 
I guess the spark for the poem was my incredible nosiness about where people are from; I'm always asking everyone, including shop assistants and receptionists and people I meet on the tram. (They have trams in Sheffield!) I think I can get away with it, because I'm 'foreign' as well - even in New Zealand, because I don't live there. The material seemed to lend itself to a poem because of its compressed form, so I could play with the juxtapositions a bit. Also, the compression of a poem works because often I get little more than a name of a place from someone: these are often announcements rather than discussions, like the one on the operating table in Iowa!

You're more commonly known as a prose writer, but the confidence of this poem suggests you write poetry quite often. Are you a closet poet? 
Yes, I'm a poet on the sly. The very sly, as I don't have much confidence in my poetry. I still sound like a prose writer, I think. Often I write in syllabic meter to try to constrain my lines more, or to demand more of the word choices. I like the playfulness that's possible in a poem, and also the chance to write about things I see/experience directly, which I can't do in my fiction. 'Where' is the first poem I've had published as an adult, you know, apart from a parodic villanelle (called 'Billanelle') written for Bill Manhire's 60th-birthday book. My very first publication as a child was a poem in the primary school magazine. It was about Guy Fawkes. It began 'Guy Fawkes was an Englishman/He though the government was wrong' and ended with 'And they hanged him.' That's all I remember. Clearly I was a prose writer even back then, and obsessed with history ...

How do you choose what to write about? 
I don't think I choose what to write, exactly, whatever I'm doing. Something comes bubbling up, and won't go away. Sometimes it's a case of a connection or intersections, a few things coming together. A while ago I visited the ruins of Pontefract Castle, where Richard II was killed, and I was thinking about it for a while. Then there was a bad car accident nearby that made national news here in the UK, and it seemed as though these two things were related, tangentially. Place is always important in my fiction, and clearly the interest translates.


From where
by Renee Liang

where are you from
she asked
licking fat cream from the tips
of perfect manicures

and I said
actually I live just around the corner.

no really she said
looking in her handbag for lip gloss
where are you from

and I said
from here
as if I didn’t know what she meant
the first time.

From here?
she said
one perfect eyebrow raised
as if she wanted to redo her eyeliner

and I said
quickly
yes

and I knew
the next question.

oh she said
oh where are your parents from then
and I wanted to say
Disneyland

but I knew she wouldn’t believe me
so I said
China

and I could see her summing me up
origami eyelids
golded skin
straight black hair
flat chest

I could see her
breathing in

in relief.

This week's editor Renee Liang, a second-generation Chinese New Zealander, is a poet, playwright, paediatrician, medical researcher and fiction writer. She is involved in organising community arts events such as artistic blind-dating initiative Metonymy and Funky Oriental Beats (FOB), a platform for Kiwi-Asian performing artists. She is a regular contributor to The Big Idea, a website linking NZ's arts community. Renee has been published in a number of journals and anthologies and has produced three chapbooks of poetry: Banana, Chinglish and Cardiac Cycle. She has written, produced and toured three plays: Lantern(2009), The Bone Feeder (2009/2011)and The First Asian AB (2011). She is currently working on Paper Boats, a play about the journeys of Chinese-Kiwi women. Website: www.chinglish-renee.blogspot.com

Remember, there are lots of great poems to check out this Tuesday - look at the sidebar!

Surface, by Peter Munro

Swept among seas that walk downwind,
beaks and feathers wheel to hook and pick.
Skimming low, fulmars heel and spin
speed.  Their twines knot the world to its quick.
I learn to listen with my skin.
Gusts kiss me, whispering their cold.
Caressed in tempos that whitecaps kick,
rust scours my vessel, fills her holds.
She presses into a surface nicked
by birds feeding where salt unfolds.

Fulmars chitter.  Kittiwakes yelp.
White streaks the backs of waves as if scars.
Whipped sinuously, like bull kelp
waving down current when the flood spars
with land or the ebbing sea whelps
tide pools upon dried out shorelines,
white betrays the gale where each gust tars
the surface.  I learn to read signs,
brushed scrollwork rolling out so far
meanings merge where whitecaps align.

My trawl leaves the surface behind.
The net descends from the broken backs
of seas through currents the moon aligned
in layers, sinking from black to black.
I tow her where my eyes are blind.
I listen as her sonars call
to my vessel, sending pings and clacks.
A granite outcrop snags her crawl,
strikes her dumb as chains and footgear wrack.
Among fins and gills, silence falls.


Thanks to Seattle poet Peter Munro whose poem 
is posted with his permission. 

—Editor: T Clear

When I asked Peter Munro to send me a poem, I knew that he was up in the vast north on a fishing boat doing research, and thought it a marvelous opportunity to give this post one of the things that I love to do when reading poetry — to place the poet in a landscape relevant to what is being composed. In my humble opinion, this particular landscape is high drama with a bit of the romantic involved. (Although I'm dead certain that Peter would deny any aspect of the romantic notion.)

Over the past few months, at at open mic that I attend, I've listened to Peter read, in sequence, "chapters" of a 31-page poem titled The Baptism of Mack MacListon. After the first few times I heard him read this, I gave up trying to follow the narrative, and instead gave in to the spectacular music of it. At once it's like listening to Debussy blended with Nine Inch Nails. He gave me a hard copy of it a month ago, and I'm slowly making my way through - the music as present on the page as when experienced in a purely auditory fashion.

I also asked Peter to send some words, in addition to his poem, on his location - and he came through, generously. Without further commentary, from the Gulf of Alaska, here's Peter Munro:

My calling is poetry.  However, I am fortunate to have a second calling that allows me to make up for income deficits in the poetry biz.  In my day job, I am a research fisheries biologist.  I love the work.  I am part of a team that contributes to the stewardship of commercially important fish stocks in the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and the Bering Sea.  Specifically, we contract with small trawlers to carry teams of researchers out to sea and conduct research fishing according to statistical protocols.  We use our catches to estimate populations of bottom fish such as cod, halibut, flounder, and rockfish.

I was working on this poem when T. Clear asked me to send her a piece to use in Tuesday Poem.  When this poem comes out, I will be nearing the end of a fifty day trip in the Gulf of Alaska, working in the latter two-thirds of a seventy-five day survey that stretches from Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, to Ketchikan, in Southeast Alaska.  We send the trawl down to the bottom 5 to 7 times a day.  It takes about an hour to fish then one to three hours to process each catch into data plus additional time for managing data, tending to fishing gear, and making fishing decisions with the captain.

Once the vessel’s crew have dumped the catch into our sorting table, we more or less do everything else by bending our backs, hoisting and shoving a lot of 30 kilogram baskets of fish.  We sort by species, weigh, count, dissect to determine sex ratios, measure lengths, take certain body parts for determining the age, and then conduct a number of other special, more one-off projects.  It is slimy, bloody work.  The crew numbers three on deck working with us and the scientific party numbers six.  We all put our noses into the muck dumped from the cod-end and tease each other till the work is done.

The boat is the F/V Sea Storm, a 123-foot, house-forward, steel trawler built by MARCO in Seattle in 1980, christened as the Doña Genoveva.  She is one of the most beautiful vessels in the North Pacific, though definitely on the small side by modern standards.  Her lines are derived from old-school Norwegian shipwrights, translated through the western combination design developed on the left coast of the USA after engines began to displace sail, and that came into flower during the king crab boom of the 1970s.  She would be too expensive to build today, requiring far too much cold-rolling of steel to produce the curves.  But she rides like a champion, a sweet motion that seems to be completely predictable; no sudden lurches or surprise throws.  Her skipper swears she can take any weather, even though only 123 feet.

Truly the Sea Storm is old school: she was built for fishing, with living-on by humans being a Norwegian afterthought.  The quarters are crammed far, far forward.  I’m living in a room with three other guys with less than a meter between our two stacks of bunks.  We can’t all four stand in the room at the same time, much less get dressed or open a locker.  One of the women in our field party bunks with the cook and the open door to the galley and all the conversations bellowed there over the sound of the main and the generators.  The other woman in our party has her “own” stateroom, smaller than a closet, but it’s where we work up our data so she isn’t really able to be there except after we’ve all gone to bed.  There are twelve people on the boat and a total of ten places to sit down, including the captain’s and pilot’s chairs up in the wheelhouse.

To work on poems, I get up at 4 in the morning, since most of the rest of our company stays in their bunks until 6.  Net goes in the water at 7.  We try to work hard enough to be too tired to notice or care that none of us can sit down without touching another person (usually a being we wouldn’t be inclined to touch at all and especially not this much).  I won’t mention the smell other than to remind you of fresh water rations and weeks of sweat, pollock blood, cod intestines, arrowtooth flounder slime, and shortspine thornyhead scales.  Every day I shrug into my foul weather gear, tromp out on deck, breast up to the sorting table, start slugging fish, and marvel that I’m getting paid to do this beautiful work (said without irony).

The skipper says to mention the fresh fish.  (I have written this in the galley and simply cannot ignore editorial input from my shipmates.)  We do get to eat fresh fish: spot shrimp for lunch today.

The skipper has also grumped at me that there are eleven places to sit down, not ten.  Those eleven seats still feel more like five.

I’ve blithered on this long about research fishing because I love it.  However, poetry is my real gig.  Please visit my web site: www.munropoetry.com

When I’m not at sea I live in a bedroom community to Seattle, Washington, USA, with my wife and our two sons.

---
This week's editor, T. Clear, manages a glass art business in Seattle, producing and shipping work for galleries and gift shops all across the U.S. She has been publishing her work for over 30 years, and her first book-length manuscript, Dusk, is forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press in 2014.     

When you've emerged from the sea-blown world of Peter Munro, please do check out the poems from our thirty Tuesday Poets in the sidebar.   

Copyright details in the sidebar.                                                                                                                                                     

Tika by Saradha Koirala

Goodbye takes the form of a blessing.

My family press tika on our foreheads

rupees into my palm.

Mountain-high through time and air

the red paint dries, the rice grains fall

leaving a trail that could surely lead us home.

But sometimes you can't tell what you've seen

until you close your eyes

and the imprint reveals

an inverted world of darkened brights

and a pale sky

a halo around the ones I'll miss.

Tika stayed with us for each part of the journey

and at last we were hurrying

to our final connection.

Back home I find red smudges on my notebook

like gilt edges of a Bible

indelible tika

staining my most sacred things.

Editor: Harvey Molloy

'Tika' is the final poem from Saradha Koirala's magnificent second book of poems Tear Water Tea. In India and Nepal a tika is a blessing received at the end of a puja ('worship'); the person performing the puja places their forefinger into the dye and makes a single red vertical mark on the recipient’s forehead.  During the puja, offerings are made of light, scent, flowers, rice, and sweets.

I have lived in an Indian family for over twenty-five years and know that to assume that puja is just about 'religion', 'belief', 'worship' -- all very conceptual, very intellectual, and quite slippery, especially in Hinduism and Buddhism  -- is  to miss the event of Tika; Tika marks a passage or transition.  Something is about to change, to journey to become something else and  'Goodbye takes the form of a blessing.' That wonderful line also resonates with me because I share with Saradha, and my wife Latika, and with many others, the 'Goodbye' at the heart of the immigrant experience.  Our families are elsewhere, to visit them is to arrive finally at goodbye as we return to our homes elsewhere.

Saradha's poems often include the experience of a complication.  The visitors leave, the tika drying on their foreheads, but the possibility of remaining lost, even abandoned, without any chance of return comes  through in that ambiguous could surely, with all its German märchen hints of Hansel and Gretel left in the woods. It's not would  nor will.  There's an uncertainty after leave-taking as loved ones pass into memory and it's only in this memory that a recognition can take place: 'But sometimes you can't tell what you've seen.'  'Tell' necessitates the work of poetry -- all of Tear Water Tea remains committed to a sustained reflection on experience. 

How does one measure courage in poetry?  It's a difficult question.  One sign of courage is to remain true, though not unyielding to reflection, to the sense, perhaps even the hunch, of an experience and its value or significance.  This courage means not by necessity or habit adopting a mask (although it’s all a mask in the same way that drama is all characters) or to remove the intensity of the significance through ironic distance (unless irony is integral to the sense or hunch).  

Writing this I am struck by the many words I have at my disposal to name literary tropes and rhetorical figures and the less specific words I find for the special, the unique, the marvellous, the miraculous, the fortuitous, the valued, the spiritual, the 'souled', the sacred: the experience of unique moments that confer value and which are somehow part of a vastness.  The experience of tika lingers and stains the present through memory and this staining is now a hallmark of the 'sacred things.'  The image of the gilded pages of the Bible is both courageous and perfect: the stain is on the edge or margin of sacred things and is bound in some mysterious way with writing and belief. I don’t belong to any religion but I have a hunch that one of the great taboos for many poets of today is faith. 

Zen aficionados might urge us to just live in the moment but Saradha’s poetry suggests that an appreciation of our own experience is not immediately apparent but rather requires memory, reflection, perhaps even the act of writing, to make sense.  Saradha’s work is both personal and thoughtful—there’s much to discover with each reading.

The Poet

Saradha Koirala lives, writes and works in Wellington, New Zealand, and is of Nepali and Pākehā descent. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters and her poetry has been published in The Listener, broadsheet nz, Hue & Cry, Turbine, Sport and Lumiere Reader. She is also a Tuesday Poet who blogs here and her book is available here. 

This week's editor, Harvey Molloy, is a writer and teacher who lives in Wellington. His first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008.  He is the current poetry editor of Jaam magazine.

When you've read and enjoyed Tika - do check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar. 

A Garage by Robert Gray

In one of the side streets

of a small hot town

off the highway

we saw the garage,

its white boards peeling

among fronds and palings.

The sun had cut a blaze

off the day. The petrol pump

was from the sixties—

of human scale
and humanoid appearance
it had a presence,

seemed the attendant
of our adventures on the road,
the doorman of our chances.

We pulled in, for nostalgia,
onto concrete. From where
did that thing's almost

avoidable sense of
sacrifice, or remorse,
arise? One felt it

as though a line
in the hand, drifted far off
somewhere, unweighted.

Who was this, in faded
cream outfit, with badge,
expressionless small head,

and rubbery hose laid
on the breast, dutifully
or out of diffidence?

Were arms being shown, and in
servitude or consent?
The stoic discomforts,

suggests a rebellion.
Elusively, such feelings
are wafted through us, but how

interpret them? A person
relied upon and yet
dangerous. Was this

another, or oneself?
Were we familiars of something
never to be known? I looked

down a blank street, of pines,
lightpoles, old houses
in shady yards, where it made

a genuflection, in approaching
the gentian-coloured hills;
then at the long workshop, a dim

barn, or empty corridor,
in the galaxy, with somewhere
far along it one star

crackling and bursting.
Then at the greasy
dog, in its narrow shade;

and at the old bowser—
a sense still proclaimed but
ungrasped, though everything

lay open. Someone shouted
acknowledgement, so we sat
quietly. The light

had become an interest
of this place, pronounced
in contrast with the peculiar

matt blackness of sump-oil
that was soaked widely
on earth, gravel, and cement—

an obscurity as opaque
as the heart's, which was keeping on
with its tunnelling there.

Editor: Jennifer Compton

Robert Gray is an Australian poet I always intended to get round to and read deeply and tick off my list, but somehow I never did. It wasn't until I read his translucent prose memoir – The Land I Came Through Last (Giramondo 2008) – that I was fired up to tackle his body of work. And luckily Cumulus (John Leonard Press 2012), his Collected Poems, had just been published so I had a handy volume for the task. I say task, because I had got the idea into my head that he was a 'difficult' poet. I was so wrong! He is the very antithesis of 'difficult' although no one would ever describe him as 'easy'.

I was on the train travelling from my home in Carrum into Flinders Street, and I was reading Cumulus, and, as we hit Mordialloc, I lifted my head and looked out through the train window, up at the sky and the light from the sea mirrored up in the sky, and fell into an abundant meditative state. I didn't want to read any more for the moment, but I held the book as if it was a psychometric object.

I chose this poem to post without fully understanding why I chose this one out of all of them. I thought that maybe it was because of the word 'bowser' which I haven't heard being used for a long time. I never stopped to wonder as a child why that was the word for a machine that dispensed petrol, so was delighted to find out quite recently that it was named after the inventor of the first gasoline pump, Sylvanus F. Bowser. But as I was typing the poem up I recalled (and it is strange how you have to recall something that has animated most of your life) how fearful and suspicious of cars I have always been. 

For instance, I have never learned to drive. I have never owned a car, or used a bowser. I would rather walk, or ride a bike, or use public transport that get in a car. A car is my last resort. Cities that have areas that don't privilege cars delight me. And of course, there is now a global consciousness that makes my stand against cars much more reputable than it has been in the past. I chose this poem before recent events in Lac-Mégantic, and because I am posting it now, my appreciation of the theme of the poem has been considerably sharpened.

THE POET
Robert Gray was born in 1945 on the north coast of New South Wales. He lives in Sydney, where he has worked in journalism, advertising, as a buyer for bookshops, and more recently as an occasional teacher of literature.

Since 1970 he has published eight books of poetry and six selected editions of his work. For these he has won most of the prizes and literary awards available to a poet in this country, including the Australia Council’s Emeritus Award in 2011. He is also the author of a prize-winning prose memoir, The Land I Came Through Last.

When a landscape is sparsely populated, the eye is favoured over the ear. Robert Gray spent his childhood in the brilliant coastal spaces of the mid-North Coast of New South Wales, and he has spent his life looking at things, and in searching for the words for them.

Take time to read more poets searching for the words for things, in the sidebar - as Tuesday Poets, we post a poem we admire or have written on a Tuesday.

This week's editor, Jennifer Compton, was born in Wellington, emigrated to Australia in the early 70s and lives now in Melbourne. She is an award-winning playwright and poet, with 'Barefoot' shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award in 2012 and 'This City' (Otago University Press 2011) the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award in NZ.  She has also been awarded a number of residencies including one at the Randell Cottage in Wellington, and blogs here. 

The night I pierced my own belly button by Maria McMillan

Can’t wait to get out

of this hole of a town

she said. For years

we’d been planning

our escape. Had compiled

a list of compulsory

adventures involving

our own brilliant selves

and various disposable

sidekicks in locations

ranging from the giant

aquarium tank in

downtown Monterey

to a moonlit bridge

in Vietnam arched like a

bony cat’s back, to mountains

with names only we knew.

Our mothers, who were sisters,

would look from her to me

and sigh, letting breath out

slowly through the gaps

between their teeth like they’d

been forced to eat something

horrible. Emily

had a blonde bob, perfect

as a politician’s. Eyebrows

plucked exactly so they

lined up with the edges

of her eyes. Skinny.

They kept us close

hoping she would rub off on me.

C’mon, she said, our parents were out

she’d called a taxi. I’ll

do your make-up – like

it was another game or dare,

and when I wouldn't gave me

her practised lopsided smile

like I was a kid putting off

the inevitable. Really,

it’s nothing and left smelling

young and sweet looking

like a favourite daughter.

I was alone. Took

the biggest needle I

could find, poured boiling

water over it. It was

like getting into a

river on a hot day,

the pain, it was like laughing

until you couldn't stop

Everything folded tight

in a moment, hidden

in the seam of a dusty

pocket. Emily. Our mothers

out with their husbands.

Being eleven, being told

why I couldn’t wear shorts.

The bulbous staring eye

of a giant orange fish.

How I’d known

sterilising the needle

wouldn’t stop the pus but

I’d done it anyway.

Editor: Saradha Koirala

The night I pierced my own belly button is from Maria McMillan's much anticipated first collection 'The Rope Walk' published by Seraph Press and is reprinted here with permission. 

I have never pierced my own belly button, but I have definitely laughed until I couldn't stop. What strikes me about this poem is the disconnect between the fantasy of leaving  - "Can’t wait to get out/ of this hole of a town" - and the ultimate desire to be alone. When Emily leaves "smelling/ young and sweet looking/ like a favourite daughter." a space is created for the speaker of the poem to attempt something much more daring. The last lines, "I’d known / sterilising the needle / wouldn’t stop the pus but / I’d done it anyway." is a fantastic ending for this poem and a metaphor I'm left pondering.

Maria has described 'The Rope Walk' as "intergenerational persona poetry sequences that feature aerial performers, 19th century ropemakers and gloomy mountain cribs." Characters reoccur throughout the sequence and a story is woven across generations. The poems are about grieving, moving on and being bound to family and place. The books too are hand-bound - a limited edition of 150 hand-numbered copies - with a letterpress-printed cover designed and printed by Joe Buchanan. It will be launched this weekend.

Maria has studied politics, trained as a librarian and has a long history as an activist. Originally from Christchurch, she now lives in Wellington with her partner and daughters. She blogs at http://mariamcmillan.weebly.com.

Do check out the poems in the sidebar when you've read about Maria and her fine poem.

This week's editor, Saradha Koirala, lives in Wellington and teaches in Porirua. Her second collection of poetry, Tear Water Tea, will be available this month from Steele Roberts Ltd and all good bookshops.

planchette by James Norcliffe

at night the rats
are bigger than rats

they race back and forth
like typewriters
across the lath and plaster

like good little rats
they have taken their poison
and now grow large with thirst

where are their pretty girlfriends
or love, the magician?

cannot one of these
offer them solace or slake?

oh qwerty they clatter
oh qwerty qwerty

as the night grows hard round them
desperate in their scrabble

and the stars
set like teeth


Editor: Keith Westwater

The poem

planchette first appeared in Psychopoetica 64 (UK) in 2000 and then in Landfall 201 in 2001 and in the New Delta Review (USA) in 2002. It was subsequently included in Contemporary Poets In Performance ed Jack Ross & Jan Kemp Auckland University Press in 2007 and in Nurse To The Imagination Ed Lawrence Jones Otago University Press in 2008.

This poem appeals to me on several levels. Initially, it had me searching for a thesaurus, as I didn't know that the title referred to a triangular-shaped scribble board mounted on two castors with a pencil mounted in the third corner. When lightly touched, it traces 'writing' with its movement. And, if I hadn't been tripping down to earthquake-ravaged Christchurch for the now nearly last three years, I wouldn't have known what 'lath and plaster' is - a type of ceiling construction prevalent in older Canterbury houses. So, with my education complete, I was able to relate to the poem my own relatively recent experience with poisoning rats in our ceiling. I had heard the same sounds that James describes in the extended typewriting metaphor he has used through this tight, taut poem with language that strikes home like a laser.

The poet

 

The New Zealand Book Council states that "James Norcliffe is a poet, fiction writer and educator. He has written collections of poetry and short stories, and several books for young adults. His writing has been featured in journals and anthologies, and he has also worked widely as an editor. Norcliffe has won awards and prizes, and has been the recipient of key fellowships, including the 2006 Fellowship at the University of Iowa."

The Council's biographical notes then go on to quote more extensively from The Oxford Companion To New Zealand Literature and provide additional information about James' writing career and impressive number of achievements.


James has published six collections of poetry, more recently Rat Tickling (Sudden Valley), Along Blueskin  Road (CUP) and Villon in Millerton (AUP).  His latest collections are: Shadow Play (Proverse), which was a finalist in the 2011 Proverse International Writing Prize and includes a CD of the poems; a book of selected poems, Packing a Bag for Mars (Clerestory Press), which is a collection for younger readers with writing prompts and illustrations by Jenny Cooper; and a new novel for young readers Felix and the Red Rats which has just been released by Longacre Press/Random House.

James lives at Church Bay near Christchurch and more about him can be found on his blog.

Two degrees of separation

I met James socially (once) through a mutual friend about 20 years ago, well before I started writing poetry, then re-met him again (through the same mutual friend) in 2011, a few years after I had been knocked on the head by the muse. It was only then I began to appreciate the quality, breadth and depth of James' literary work (see above). Since then, I have intermittently sought his advice on poetry-writing so now also greatly appreciate his sagacity and counsel which he has given unstintingly.


planchette is published on Tuesday Poem with permission. After you've read it do check out the other poems in the sidebar.

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

Oh Dirty River by Helen Lehndorf

The town where I grew up

was small, ugly and smelled
like burning blood.

Most of the dads and 

a lot of the mums and
heaps of the big brothers and sisters 

worked at the Freezing Works.

Thousands of cows and sheep 

and even a few hundred pigs 

would get trucked in, slaughtered,
chopped up and packaged 

in cling film each day.

The burning-blood smell 

came from the incinerator
where they would burn
the bits left over.
Though, some of it got pumped 

right into the river
which ran through the town.

In our town, 

people called the works
‘The University’ 

because it was where most of us
ended up going after we left school.

People also used to
call our town ‘Lavender City’ 

because of the burned-flesh stink.
So you can’t say
we didn’t have a sense of humour.

Yeah. You could make a joke 

about it. But only if you’re
from there, eh?

Otherwise, you’re just

getting smart.

Editor: Tim Jones

Credit note: "Oh Dirty River" was first published in Kaupapa: New Zealand poets, world issues, edited by Hinemoana Baker and Maria McMillan (Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara: Development Resource Centre, 2007), and is included in Helen Lehndorf's poetry collection The Comforter (Wellington: Seraph Press, 2011). "Oh Dirty River" is reproduced by permission of the author, Helen Lehndorf, and the publisher, Seraph Press.

Tim says: I like "Oh Dirty River" for a number of reasons, one of which is autobiographical: I spent part of my childhood in another freezing works town, Mataura. My Dad worked at the New Zealand Paper Mills plant which was directly across the Mataura River from the freezing works, and that smell of burned flesh Helen describes in this poem was all too familiar to me as I walked or biked to visit him.

A few years later, I had a Varsity holiday job that involved measuring the paper mill's effluent stream. That took me down to the riverbank, where, opposite me, I could see the blood-rich, blood-red untreated freezing works effluent that burst from the cliff on which the freezing works stood and plumed into the river, adding a red stain to the multi-coloured stains produced by the paper mill. There were some very large eels in that river.

But I also love Helen's poem because it catches both the matter-of-factness of life in a small town that makes its living from the death of thousands of animals, and the half-proud defensiveness of anyone who's grown up in such a town and heard it mocked by the rest of the country. It may be a dump, we think to ourselves - but it's our dump.

After you have read "Oh Dirty River", check out the other Tuesday Poems in the sidebar!

Tim Jones is a Wellington author, poet, editor and anthologist. His most recent book is poetry collection Men Briefly Explained (IP, 2011). He is currently, with P.S. Cottier, co-editing The Stars Like Sand, an anthology of Australian speculative poetry that is due for publication in 2014. You can find out more on Tim's blog Books in the Trees.

Palmy by Jennifer Compton

Some injudicious thoughts about this city. Nothing else can be written.

I perch in my flat on top of the Square at that dullest hour before dawn,

wreathed in Happy by Clinique For Men from Farmers in the Plaza.

I lurk in the mirrored department of luxury and when the girls go off

to mend their hair and drink tea I spray at random. I love perfume

but don't want to smell the same night after night as the bed warms.

The gay club across the yard has spilled the revellers out into the street.

Their music woke me up, the old tunes I remember like 'Dancing Queen.'

I've had the best time ever! - as the barman dumps bottles in the skip.

So now it is just me and the night, and you, and soon the big old moon

riding the clouds of gathering light behind the glass in my high window. 

This used to be all forest, not so long ago, and I could tell by the sorrow

that haunts the wide, flat roads, that seeps out of the sense of openness,

something is missing, something is wrenched askew, as the river runs.

The wind blows through, in rolling gusts, baffled, and almost angry.

The wind is searching for the Papaioea Forest. How beautiful it was.  

Tonight, behind the necklace of glittering lights below, is the darkness

which is the hills. Upon them, when it is light, like many crucifixions,

the wind farm. Then the long, ungainly arms swoop and seem to bless.

I will admit, to you, that I have found Palmerston North disconcerting.

It is the only word which fits, and I have rummaged the Thesaurus.

The thing that throws me most onto the wrong foot and unnerves me

is that I think the father of my first grandchild must be Rangitāne.

He is adopted, doesn't know his kin, nobody we know looks like him.

But here I see his way of walking up ahead of me in Rangitikei Street, 

and then the gesture of his hand at the wheel of a car as I cross now,

or he is stooping in a shop door, fitting tiles. His very particular smile.

He has cousins living here. But the link is broken, everything is lost.

We don't know them and  they don't know us. There's no way back.

It's a secret we can't unravel. And soon I will be gone. Meanwhile

the wind searches out the last of the autumn roses and shakes them. 

from THIS CITY by Jennifer Compton (Otago University Press 2011)  

Editor - Mary McCallum

I launched the collection This City in Wellington two years ago. I'd met Jennifer Compton back in 2008 when she was the Randell Cottage writer in residence and been following her career ever since. We claim her as a New Zealand poet and she took the six month stint in the historic Thorndon cottage as a kiwi (the other six months a French writer moves in), but she's lived in Australia since 1972.

When I met Jen she was living in rural Wingello in New South Wales, but she has since moved to Melbourne. She is one of those artists with a foot planted on both sides of the Tasman - publishing poetry, plays and short fiction here from the age of 15 and winning some of our top awards including the Katherine Mansfield Award for short fiction (1997) and the Kathleen Grattan Award (2010); and publishing and performing her poetry and writing plays in Australia, where she's won the Robert Harris Poetry Prize (1995).  A true trans-Tasman writer, then. Or as poet Joanna Preston would say, a Tasmanaut.

The Kathleen Grattan Award was for a whole collection of poems - which led to publication of This City, a book divided into three parts: Italy, New Zealand and Australia. Jen has also been an actively contributing Tuesday Poet ever since she got her blog up and running and continues to support Australian and New Zealand writers through that medium as well as through the many poetry events she takes part in.

Apart from the Randell, Jen has been writer in residence in other exotic distant spots including Rome and Bogliasco ... and Palmerston North (2010). I stayed with her for a night in the breeze-block apartment in Palmy that was her home for three months. She'd embraced the place - a Visiting Artist, no less - with enough time and money to write, and lots to look upon from those high white walls. She also ran to two hot water bottles for a Wellington poet not used to the cool Palmy nights.

In her usual generous fashion, Jen hosted a regular Tuesday poetry evening at a local cafe. She simply announced she'd be hanging out there if poets wanted to turn up, and she'd sit at a table in the corner and knit and do crosswords and write poems until the other poets came along - and if they didn't, she kept knitting, writing poems etc.

One day local writer Johanna Aitchison came to the cafe with a poem called Jun which, with Jennifer's encouragement, went on to beat 621 other entries to win the 2010 NZ Poetry Society Competition. Elsewhere in the city, there was a reading of Jen's play The Third Age by a local theatre troupe.

It wasn't all plain knitting. While in Palmy, Jen missed the birth of her precious first grandchild, which explains why her mind went where it did in Palmy.

I think this poem is an audacious piece of work and a hugely satisfying read for the huge, at times, eccentric swoops it takes - like the Quixotic arms of the wind farm. From a whiff of perfume to the lie of the land - from the past living in the present and, the tentative secret joy of that, or not, and therefore a roaming grief - and some fantastic images that have stayed with me since I first heard Palmy read, especially the absent trees, the baffled winds, the benevolent wind farms ...

Tonight, behind the necklace of glittering lights below, is the darkness
which is the hills. Upon them, when it is light, like many crucifixions,
the wind farm. Then the long, ungainly arms swoop and seem to bless.
I will admit, to you, that I have found Palmerston North disconcerting.

Hah! Don't we all. And yet, in Jennifer Compton's hands, glittering too.

This City is a book to savour. Kathleen Grattan judge, Vincent O'Sullivan says that Jennifer's collection, 'sustains a questing, warmly sceptical mind's engagement with wherever it is, whatever it takes in, and carries the constant drive to say it right.' I like that scepticism and warmth and the way the poet searches and probes... and I very much like the playfulness.

More on Jennifer Compton here. And some fabulous notebooks of hers.

And after you've read Palmy, do check out the other poets in the sidebar!

This week's editor, Mary McCallum is the founder and co-curator of Tuesday Poem with Claire Beynon and blogs at O Audacious Book. She has published a novel The Blue, a chapbook The Tenderness of Light and is publishing a children's novel in 2014. Mary has also just started up Makaro Press in Wellington which has a small number of projects on the go including some poetry.