For Colin
erupting from a flock of birds
arms wide open
that great heart pumping
so hard so hard
that great heart pumping
so hard
Mary McCallum
A poem about my friend Colin Webster-Watson, a sculptor, whose great heart gave out nearly five years ago. He'd feed the gulls every day down on the beach near my place, and oh they knew he was coming! What a noise - what a sight. His arms would be flung out like the wings of the birds that flocked to him. But then he was always like that, arms flung wide ready to embrace.
Do check out a powerful sensuous arresting poem on the Tuesday Poem hub this week by Bill Nelson. It will stay with you I promise.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Tuesday Poem: The Barn
Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, the gate –
on a slant – the paint pulling
from the wood – closes –
we let it,
let go of the road,
the run of fences, the tin-cut
tilting hills, the world’s rim, let
the dog out to run,
and we drive
with the windows wound
down - lavender -
olive trees - cypresses.
The barn, at last. Blushes! – there
you are.
Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, and not much
more than a breath this time,
not much more than skin
and bone,
rubbed thin by all
our comings and goings, all this
living in the light. We can see
through our scraps of selves
to paint the colour
of ox-blood wrinkling
like the skin on milk around
the double-hung windows.
In the exposed
wood, in the beginnings of
rot, in the rare blushing light.
Here, it is – (breath outwards)
a glimpse (returning) – that time –
when the paint clung so
tightly the timber groaned,
and in the stampeding wind –
in the hot sun – under the welt of stars –
the barn was an instrument
filled with our spit and wild
breathing. Daughter, plump
as a pigeon,
flapping on the ground
by a tree in a bag for planting,
and her brothers
snickering like ponies
on their way back from the frogpond –
their tins and string and
percussive boots.
Light is trickery.
The paint
blisters and peels,
and it’s all we can do
not to help it off.
My knuckles
rest
on the warm wood.
I lean close.
I feel it - or someone - humming.
Mary McCallum
This is a poem I worked on over the summer up at the place we call The Barn. It's ours and it's blssful - as a place to be alone and with family, and to write. There are some photos of our summer here with a glimpse of The Barn.
The poem was written to contribute to an exhibition as part of the Fringe Festival here in Wellington. It's called Translucent Landscapes and it's opening March 1. There are 11 of us involved: a number of visual artists (including installation artists, videomedia artists etc), a composer, and me. I have written four poems for the exhibition so far and am wondering how to present them now (follow the link to Translucent Landscapes above for some thinking on that.)
In this poem, the theme of the exhibition is concentrated around the line: 'Light is trickery' - the way light can 'show' us what's real and what's not - shining onto the present and yet somehow 'lifting' it like paint - summoning the past as real as if it's there in front of us - the paint - the wood - the paint - the wood - and the way light, too, can wear away at what's there now - 'too much living in the light' - so, again, the past comes through - bidden and unbidden ... these things preoccupy me...
At the Barn there's no internet connection - although I can use my phone when I need to. There's also no Mac computer, just an old laptop which is rather slow. So, I write a lot by hand at the Barn without interruption, which means poems written there are different somehow.
Do go and read the Paul Green poem taster at the Tuesday Poem hub - and the fascinating commentary by Helen Rickerby. Truly it's worth it.
a breath outwards
returning, the gate –
on a slant – the paint pulling
from the wood – closes –
we let it,
let go of the road,
the run of fences, the tin-cut
tilting hills, the world’s rim, let
the dog out to run,
and we drive
with the windows wound
down - lavender -
olive trees - cypresses.
The barn, at last. Blushes! – there
you are.
Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, and not much
more than a breath this time,
not much more than skin
and bone,
rubbed thin by all
our comings and goings, all this
living in the light. We can see
through our scraps of selves
to paint the colour
of ox-blood wrinkling
like the skin on milk around
the double-hung windows.
In the exposed
wood, in the beginnings of
rot, in the rare blushing light.
Here, it is – (breath outwards)
a glimpse (returning) – that time –
when the paint clung so
tightly the timber groaned,
and in the stampeding wind –
in the hot sun – under the welt of stars –
the barn was an instrument
filled with our spit and wild
breathing. Daughter, plump
as a pigeon,
flapping on the ground
by a tree in a bag for planting,
and her brothers
snickering like ponies
on their way back from the frogpond –
their tins and string and
percussive boots.
Light is trickery.
The paint
blisters and peels,
and it’s all we can do
not to help it off.
My knuckles
rest
on the warm wood.
I lean close.
I feel it - or someone - humming.
Mary McCallum
This is a poem I worked on over the summer up at the place we call The Barn. It's ours and it's blssful - as a place to be alone and with family, and to write. There are some photos of our summer here with a glimpse of The Barn.
The poem was written to contribute to an exhibition as part of the Fringe Festival here in Wellington. It's called Translucent Landscapes and it's opening March 1. There are 11 of us involved: a number of visual artists (including installation artists, videomedia artists etc), a composer, and me. I have written four poems for the exhibition so far and am wondering how to present them now (follow the link to Translucent Landscapes above for some thinking on that.)
In this poem, the theme of the exhibition is concentrated around the line: 'Light is trickery' - the way light can 'show' us what's real and what's not - shining onto the present and yet somehow 'lifting' it like paint - summoning the past as real as if it's there in front of us - the paint - the wood - the paint - the wood - and the way light, too, can wear away at what's there now - 'too much living in the light' - so, again, the past comes through - bidden and unbidden ... these things preoccupy me...
At the Barn there's no internet connection - although I can use my phone when I need to. There's also no Mac computer, just an old laptop which is rather slow. So, I write a lot by hand at the Barn without interruption, which means poems written there are different somehow.
Do go and read the Paul Green poem taster at the Tuesday Poem hub - and the fascinating commentary by Helen Rickerby. Truly it's worth it.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Peeling the Onion
Oh my, this book. So exquisite to hold - fat and heavy in the hand, thick creamy paper, ochre onion sketches. One of the most pleasurable books I've read in a long time for its sheer physical beauty. My pictures don't do it justice. And the writing - also. How to do justice to that?
These are words chosen with exquisite precision and care, the words of a fabulist, an exaggerator, a storyteller, placed on the page via an Olivetti typewriter, translated, printed onto creamy paper... The writing of Nobel Laureate and 'Germany's most celebrated writer', Gunter Grass, author of a seminal novel about Nazi Germany, the disturbing, astonishing The Tin Drum.
Peeling the Onion (2006) is a memoir which covers Grass' life from birth in 1927 until the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959. In it is the revelation that shocked Germany: that Grass - only 17 and one day to become 'the conscience of the nation' - was a member of the Waffen SS, in a tank division fighting a rearguard action in the last months of the war.
Here is one reaction when the memoir was published in 2006:
Germany - Der Tagesspiegel. Gregor Dotzauer expressed shock: "Whoever hears this, whether disbelieving or stunned, may think it is a bad joke even after seeing it in convincing black and white, both in the literary recollection and in the interview. Günter Grass, Germany's most celebrated living writer, the Nobel Prize winner, the conscience of the nation, the writer of legends, was a member of the Waffen-SS... A cheap joke of history? Or a truth whose bitterness cannot yet be fully measured? The categories flounder, because it gives rise to so many tones of meaning: for the work of Günter Grass, for his role as bearer of left-wing precepts, for the entire intellectual balance of the country, which his inner struggle and questions on foreign policy still fought out, against the backdrop of 12 long years under Hitler."
I can imagine the profound shock to the German reader. Grass knew what that would be, knew it was time to tell the truth before others told it for him, and he writes with inordinate care, skilfully revealing and obscuring at the same time - winding in and out of the onion metaphor which evokes the tricky layers of memory, shifting from first to third person, telling anecdotes as if they are stories to be told or fairytales, even, and therefore an author's enlargement of the truth. It is hard to know what exactly to trust - Grass rightly asks himself the same question.
No doubt his method of writing the memoir infuritated the German readership, but it cannot be disputed that this is memoir-writing of the most literary and astonishing of its kind, and even - paradoxically - the most honest, and that the reader is witnessing something marvellous. For who knows for sure anything of the past, of that other person - the youthful self? Does the reader want it? Need it? Or perhaps Grass is dissembling? Covering his tracks? I don't know quite honestly, and I prefer to think not.
There are stories in this beautiful book that I have repeated over and over to my family and friends - the one on the pages at left, for example, which talks of the closing months of the war and the young Grass in SS uniform with half a dozen other soldiers hiding out from the Russians in a cellar. They can hear shots outside, The cellar is full of bikes, the Sergeant tells them all to grab a bike and on his command to ride. Grass can't ride, his mother couldn't afford to buy him a bike. He gets to stay and 'cover them' with a machine gun. He can't use one but he doesn't say so. He stays. The others are mown down by machine gun-fire. Then see the picture below of Grass riding a two-seater bike with his second wife Ute. After years of not being able to ride, she gets him on the saddle, but only - safely - on the back.
It is also clear that this way of 'storytelling' his life is the way for Grass to live with what happened during the war. Who's to say there isn't more than a nugget of truth in there? Grass comes back over and over again to his unforgiveable silence, his self-centredness, and the guilt he has had to live with.
The latter part of the book unravels a little - less focused, more the winding of spools of threads - and Grass' ego starts to bother me. He asserts a nothingness at core - someone who struggles to be something - but still we are regaled with the success that seems to come at him from all directions once he's on his feet: this man can dance beautifully, play music beautifully, cook beautifully, sculpt beautifully, write beautifully. The early vulnerability of the boy at home and fighting in fairytale forests and finding his feet is more compelling, easier to bear.
However, it is in the final chapters that I liked reading about the emergence of the writer - the way words hammering Grass' brain finally pushed their way out through his skin, became poems, a novel, more novels ... The Olivetti Lettera typewriter he uses standing up, the need to leave a work rough-hewn like sculpture-in-progress so the writer doesn't mistakenly think it's finished, how he chews up the fodder of his life and makes it into fiction, a memoir.
There is a Book 2 called The Box which begins in 1960. I would like to read that too. I wonder if it is as beautiful to hold.
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Sunday, January 1, 2012
2011 - best of books and music
Music 2011
West Coast singer Mel Parsons is one of my musical discoveries of 2011, thanks to my friend Simon Burt who had a fabulous house concert for Mel. She's got a terrific voice and presence and writes pop-edged country songs with some interesting lyrics and lovely layered arrangements. After enjoying her first album Over my Shoulder, I looked forward to Mel's second album Red Grey Blue launched in September last year. Put it this way, it didn't let me down.
I've also enjoyed working out the bass for Mel's song 'Bones' which you can hear with some of the other Red Grey Blue songs on her website. I was interested to read there that ex-Cat Stevens bassist Bruce Lynch plays double bass for the album - and a number of other excellent musicians come along for the ride.
You'll find all the songs here to download or go to Cuba Street's Slow Boat.
Some other albums I've been playing and enjoying below - by no means the whole lot.
Books 2011
[in no particular order, as they say on X-Factor - but all published in 2011]
Fiction
From Under the Overcoat, Sue Orr (Random) - highly imagined, tightly written stories using classic stories from the past - Gogol, Mansfield, Chekhov etc - my favourite is the one based on KM's The Dollhouse using a a real estate Open House to do what KM did with a dollshouse, you have to read it!
La Rochelle's Road by Tanya Moir (Random) - strong historical fiction set on Banks Peninsula, lovely language, well-rooted in place and apposite following the Christchurch Quake
By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham ( )-- some bad reviews suggesting he's overdoing his literary referencing in novels (first Virginia Woolf, now everyone from Joyce to, well, Joyce) but I liked it ... Art, New York, mid-life crisis, Joycean epiphanies, what's not to love? The Trouble with Fire by Fiona Kidman (Random)- short fictions in the style of Munro - with the stretch and weight of longer fiction and linked by fire in all its permutations - metaphorical or otherwise - written by a woman who knows what it is to be a woman in NZ from the 1950s onwards, her women are rooted in this country and its history and politics - gender and otherwise - they are not adrift in the limited domestic worlds so loved by short story writers.
The Beauty of the Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb - beautiful story set in Vietnam grounded in, well, humanity in all its manifestations - beautiful and otherwise - love the way the language and narrative feel weighted and grounded - a little like Gilead to read, a meditation ... and the end is that celebration of life that's so hard to achieve in fiction without seeming chocolaty.
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (finished it this morning!) - a taut sexy read that circles as only Enright can around the carcass of family, in this case families, picking at the eyeballs, the balls, the flesh... This is the story of the adulterer and the adulteress and the victims of their coupling. Enright is astonishing in her psychology and the way she scoops out the core of the way people are - the endings of her novels are brilliant.
Non-Fiction
Little Criminals by David Cohen (Random) - great read for those, like me who live in or near the Hutt and regularly drive past what was the Epuni Boys Home, and for those who are interested in the history of 'teen delinquency' in this country and how we've dealt with it. Wonderful writing of time and place.
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal - as someone said somewhere, it's a family memoir that comes from the 'existential hum of things' and in turn becomes a history of a people that moves and horrifies.
The Violinist by Sarah Gaitanos (VUP) - the story of a woman who survived the concentration camps to be at the beginnings of our national orchestra - a stunning story of survival and the wonder of music
The Exercise Book ed. by Bill Manhire, Ken Duncum, Damien Wilkins and Chris Price (VUP) - inspirational writing exercises from inspirational writers for use with classes or individual writers needing a pick-me-up.
The Exercise Book ed. by Bill Manhire, Ken Duncum, Damien Wilkins and Chris Price (VUP) - inspirational writing exercises from inspirational writers for use with classes or individual writers needing a pick-me-up.
Poetry
This City by Jennifer Compton (OUP) - funny, smart, quirky poems that go for the jugular, this collection was the winner of Kathleen Grattan Award, by an eccentric NZer living in Oz.
Thicket by Anna Jackson (AUP) - deliciously subversive, unexpected, fairytale, clever, fun.
The Movie may be Slightly Different, Vincent O'Sullivan (VUP) - Andrew Johnson calls him 'the defrocked priest of New Zealand literature' - and these are more of O'Sullivans reverent irreverent poems - wonderful
In/let by Jo Thorpe (Steele Roberts) - really 2010, but right at the end of the year and being feted this year, really, textured, sensuous, joyous, intelligent poems - LOVE THEM
On Mutability by Jo Shapcott (Faber) - tough, tender, stunning poems
Western Line by Airini Beautrais (VUP) - poems that enchant because they are enchantments and curses and love poems and prayers and fables. Airini watches the world up close and loves the 'queer' people she sees in it - you will too.
The Comforter by Helen Lehndorf (Seraph) - domestic and fierce in a way you don't expect, honest and emotional in a way you don't expect. Read and be surprised.
Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 by Kathleen Jones - fierce and honest,too, these are the poems of a woman holding her shoulders high through grief and tragedy and the stuff of family.
I'm bound to have missed something excellent off these lists. Apologies to the writers and musicians if I have. What I realise I need to do this year is try and read more fiction - and at least one classic - I was rather waylaid by poetry in 2011.
Bring on 2012!
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Facing up to it
In this city of furrows, we fall over ourselves
tripping down
Devon Street, tipping down
Bolton,
and a return trip at such
an angle that
our foreheads kiss
the pavement.
Some days, it’s not furrowed at all,
rather
a flung thing that’s caught
the wind:
a blanket,
a swag of kelp, newspaper balled
in
a good-sized fist. On
a good day, it is
all dimples,
this city. Ample, it dips
here,
and here, and here -
the harbour (the smile )
the place we fall
in.
Mary McCallum
So Happy Christmas everyone -- and may you have more good days than bad, more smiles than furrows, more poems than not in the coming year. Thank you for coming to visit my blog and the Tuesday Poem blog and I'll be back on deck here in the New Year after a time away at our place in the Wairarapa - a place of flatness and rivers, big sky, sharp blue mountains.
Do please click here for the Tuesday Poem hub and the blissful A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. In the sidebar there, more festive treats from the wonderful bunch of poets that make up TP - the community that I co-ordinate with the help of Claire Beynon in Dunedin.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Who by socks - the sequel
Socks
I'm sick
of socks
the losses.
Jenny Bornholdt
Visited my friend Mia the day after I posted Jenny Bornholdt's poem Socks for Tuesday Poem. By the back door: the basket of socks waiting to be matched up by her 'willing' daughters, and behind it, a bag of what the family calls 'orphans' - the socks that have lost their other half.
On the kitchen bench, the list of jobs for the family to do and at the top 'Who - Socks?' Which brought to mind Leonard Cohen's 'Who by Fire' song ....
And who by fire, who by water, / who in the sunshine, who in the night time, / who by high ordeal, who by common trial, / who in your merry merry month of may ...
Looking at Mia's basket of needy socks and thinking of the matching basket here at my house, the matching bag of 'orphans', too, and I can't help but wonder - who by socks ?
of socks
the losses.
Jenny Bornholdt
Visited my friend Mia the day after I posted Jenny Bornholdt's poem Socks for Tuesday Poem. By the back door: the basket of socks waiting to be matched up by her 'willing' daughters, and behind it, a bag of what the family calls 'orphans' - the socks that have lost their other half.
On the kitchen bench, the list of jobs for the family to do and at the top 'Who - Socks?' Which brought to mind Leonard Cohen's 'Who by Fire' song ....
And who by fire, who by water, / who in the sunshine, who in the night time, / who by high ordeal, who by common trial, / who in your merry merry month of may ...
Looking at Mia's basket of needy socks and thinking of the matching basket here at my house, the matching bag of 'orphans', too, and I can't help but wonder - who by socks ?
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Exercise Book
Terrific exercises in this book for the beginning writer, for teachers of creative writing courses to plunder, and for established writers who want a pick-me-up. It's been put together by the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington to fund their scholarship programme.
I've already used some of the exercises with an adult writing group I'm running locally and had huge success with them - tried a few myself, and been excited by the results. Some of the exercises are old chestnuts, others are brand new, and range from the randomly crazy e.g. Hinemoana Baker's 'Remix Mashup' to get to a poem -- to a careful unlayering of writerly craft e.g. Laurence Fearnley's exercise on writing the Big Scene in a novel.
There are warming up exercises, exercises that 'steal' from other writers, memory prompts, script writing and performance exercises and much more. Something like 60 writers contributed from Baker and Fearnley to David Vann from the US. Highly recommended.
Thursday update: My heart goes out to Radio NZ staff as they mourn the death of their colleague Phil Cottrell murdered in the weekend. While I was doing the book review, Kathryn Ryan was handed the media release about two young men being charged with his murder. You can hear the paper crackling while I'm talking. She was visibly upset as she read it out after the review ended, but being a consummate professional she continued on with the show.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Socks by Jenny Bornholdt
I'm sick
of socks
the losses.
__________
Socks was published in Mrs Winter's Jump (Godwit 2007) - a beautiful limited edition book to celebrate Jenny Bornholdt's poet laureateship. Two thousand copies were printed and I have book no. 1415.
There are many entrancing poems in this book - Jenny entrances, it's what she does -- but this one had me at 'socks'. They are the musak of my life - there are so many socks in an almost grown family of five: so many to wash, to dry, to roll together in pairs (the 'spares' going into a almost full grocery bag) and to put away. But look, there are two stories inside this poem: the story of common everyday lost socks, and the uncountable story of loss - all loss, universal loss, mine.
It's the leap over the white that keeps the two stories both together and apart. 'Socks' and 'losses' echo each other across the divide - sharing 's' and 'o' sounds, emphasising the bathos, and note how the socks are kept together in a pair (of lines) held together by half rhyme, while 'the losses' are - as one would expect - out on their own. I think this poem is pure genius.
of socks
the losses.
__________
Socks was published in Mrs Winter's Jump (Godwit 2007) - a beautiful limited edition book to celebrate Jenny Bornholdt's poet laureateship. Two thousand copies were printed and I have book no. 1415.
There are many entrancing poems in this book - Jenny entrances, it's what she does -- but this one had me at 'socks'. They are the musak of my life - there are so many socks in an almost grown family of five: so many to wash, to dry, to roll together in pairs (the 'spares' going into a almost full grocery bag) and to put away. But look, there are two stories inside this poem: the story of common everyday lost socks, and the uncountable story of loss - all loss, universal loss, mine.
It's the leap over the white that keeps the two stories both together and apart. 'Socks' and 'losses' echo each other across the divide - sharing 's' and 'o' sounds, emphasising the bathos, and note how the socks are kept together in a pair (of lines) held together by half rhyme, while 'the losses' are - as one would expect - out on their own. I think this poem is pure genius.
I have a lovely story about it. I was working in the Rona Bookshop one day four years ago, and an elderly woman was brought in by her relatives who left her sitting in a chair while they browsed the books and paintings. I went over and started talking. Turns out the woman was from one of the homes for the elderly. She was right by the poetry section and I asked if she liked poetry. I can't remember if she did or not, to be honest, but she was certainly open to trying one or two.
I found 'Socks' and said, listen to this, and read it to her. She burst out laughing as soon as I'd finished, so loudly - the other people in the shop looked round. She was lit up, transformed. We both agreed it was a magnificent poem about socks and loss, and were still talking about it when the woman's relatives came along and took her quickly off for morning tea or something.
A few days later, I wasn't at the shop and a call came through from a wavery uncertain voice wanting the book about the socks. No-one on deck that day knew which book she was talking about, but they asked which day she'd been in and realised she'd talked to me. I was at home. A phone call later and the book was found and sent off to the home for the elderly with an invoice. Shortly afterwards a cheque arrived with a little note in spidery writing, which I have still, somewhere - about how much the woman loved the book and most especially the socks poem. I've promised it to Jenny, when I find it.
The poem 'Socks' is published with permission. Do go to the Tuesday poem hub to read Lyn Hejinian and the thirty poets in the sidebar.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Tuesday Poem: 'Wabi-sabi' by Helen Lehndorf
I was thirty-three before I learned
people stuck in snow
can die from dehydration.
I would melt icicles
on my tongue for you, resist
the drinking down, drip it
into you. Then repeat, repeat
until my lips were raw.
can die from dehydration.
I would melt icicles
on my tongue for you, resist
the drinking down, drip it
into you. Then repeat, repeat
until my lips were raw.
________________
I have long been a fan of Helen Lehndorf's poems - seeing them on the net and hearing them at poetry readings, and now at last I can own her first collection The Comforter (Seraph Press).
I have long been a fan of Helen Lehndorf's poems - seeing them on the net and hearing them at poetry readings, and now at last I can own her first collection The Comforter (Seraph Press).
Her publisher Helen Rickerby says, 'This poem, as people at the launches will have heard me say, epitomises what I love so much about Helen's poetry. It is sharp-eyed and specific. It introduces a number of interesting ideas and has more than one thing going on at once. When it talks about life and love, it's authentic and fierce, not clichéd. And it is impossible not to be moved by it.'
Sadly I missed Helen's launch in the weekend, but she reports on it on her blog here. I wrote on this post earlier that Helen's reading at Blondini's in Wellington on Wednesday, when in fact she's not! Got my Helens muddled.
Still, Blondini's (The Embassy Theatre in Campbridge Terrace) at 6pm this Wednesday will be terrific fun with Helen Rickerby, Vana Manasiadis, Stefanie Lash and Emma Barnes . What a feast! And I have to be there this time come what may, I am the MC. Do join us, with these women poets it can only be stimulating and fun.
And to check out more Tuesday poems, visit the Tuesday Poem blog
Still, Blondini's (The Embassy Theatre in Campbridge Terrace) at 6pm this Wednesday will be terrific fun with Helen Rickerby, Vana Manasiadis, Stefanie Lash and Emma Barnes . What a feast! And I have to be there this time come what may, I am the MC. Do join us, with these women poets it can only be stimulating and fun.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Tuesday Poem: What they don't tell you on Food TV
the best fish is handed to you over the side
of the boat, the best fish is fried, bones and
all, and eaten in a sun so bright it’s white,
snapping off the ends of beans is like lips
popping, a pork cookbook is the best place
to find that picture of you and your mum
at Taupo in summer, a turkey too late
into the oven can make a grandmother
cry with hunger, come Easter in Crete
lambs are bloody sacks, here, their milky
mouths butt your hip, eggplant is purpler
when you call it aubergine, aubergine
is purpler when you call it melitzane, another
thing again when you call it Mellie-Jane, crack-
ing eggs is an act of belief whichever way
you look at it - each time the epiphany, there’s
no better breakfast than a three-dollar special
in a New York diner, watching her swallow
every shred of yellow from the yolk - every
lick of milk - every crumb, fasting is not all
its cracked up to be unless it’s in a monastery
in Stokes Valley under a gold stupa and dawn
brings porridge and bells, at the end of a long
day in the city there’s nothing better than
meat and tomato and oregano walking you
up the path and the eldest son at the kitchen
bench grating cheese, no better rice than his
brother’s unmoulded from a bowl to a white
plate, risotto is best measured in handfuls by
Marielle - uno due tre cuatro, zucchini flowers
must be carried in two palms like a prayer,
father and feta are from the same family of
words, you cannot make yorkshire puds as
good as your gran’s no matter how hot the oil,
an apple is sweetest from a tree, and if not that
then untucked from its tissue, its wooden box,
oysters are sweetest swallowed like shots
of seawater, beef is best on charcoal tended
by laughing men, ginger needs to be grated
in finger not thumb lengths, crushed olives
are the smell of the earth – all that history
of heating cooling burying spitting up, oil
rising of its own accord from the purple crush
is named after the yolk of the egg, asparagus
is just what asparagus is, those apricots she
makes every summer are apricots blooming
in a bowl, and spooning yoghurt and honey
into a mouth on white-washed steps with
a turquoise sea and a donkey crowing and
someone calling kali mera into the bleaching
light, is like scooping up the sun and eating it
Mary McCallum
I've been wanting to write a list poem ever since I set it as an assignment for my creative writing students at Massey University. I got the idea at one of our first Tuesday Poet drinks at the Library Bar. Helen Rickerby - poet and publisher of poets - had been talking there about a successful workshop she'd had with the students of Harvey Molloy's (also a Tuesday Poet) at Newlands College. She'd read the kids a list poem by Helen Lehndorf called Poem without the L Word and got them to write list poems of their own.
I asked Helen to promise to send me the poem as soon as she got home (she's publishing it in Helen L's out-this-week collection The Comforter), and the next day, I set my students the list poem to do and got some lovely stuff.
So last week, with uni over, I started up an adult writing workshop here in Eastbourne. The first assignment: the list poem. This is mine. There were seven others, every one different and astonishing in its own way. What impressed us all was the way the power of each poem grew with each listed thing, and the real subject of the poem elbowed its way through. It is what poetry's all about, really.
What's this poem really about then? Food and family - how they feed and make each other. How simple both can be, how complicated. It's about my family history too, how it spreads itself across many countries and generations, and how food in all those places and times is both different and the same.
Do check out the hub poem on Tuesday Poem. It's by Wellington poet Harry Ricketts.
of the boat, the best fish is fried, bones and
all, and eaten in a sun so bright it’s white,
snapping off the ends of beans is like lips
popping, a pork cookbook is the best place
to find that picture of you and your mum
at Taupo in summer, a turkey too late
into the oven can make a grandmother
cry with hunger, come Easter in Crete
lambs are bloody sacks, here, their milky
mouths butt your hip, eggplant is purpler
when you call it aubergine, aubergine
is purpler when you call it melitzane, another
thing again when you call it Mellie-Jane, crack-
ing eggs is an act of belief whichever way
you look at it - each time the epiphany, there’s
no better breakfast than a three-dollar special
in a New York diner, watching her swallow
every shred of yellow from the yolk - every
lick of milk - every crumb, fasting is not all
its cracked up to be unless it’s in a monastery
in Stokes Valley under a gold stupa and dawn
brings porridge and bells, at the end of a long
day in the city there’s nothing better than
meat and tomato and oregano walking you
up the path and the eldest son at the kitchen
bench grating cheese, no better rice than his
brother’s unmoulded from a bowl to a white
plate, risotto is best measured in handfuls by
Marielle - uno due tre cuatro, zucchini flowers
must be carried in two palms like a prayer,
father and feta are from the same family of
words, you cannot make yorkshire puds as
good as your gran’s no matter how hot the oil,
an apple is sweetest from a tree, and if not that
then untucked from its tissue, its wooden box,
oysters are sweetest swallowed like shots
of seawater, beef is best on charcoal tended
by laughing men, ginger needs to be grated
in finger not thumb lengths, crushed olives
are the smell of the earth – all that history
of heating cooling burying spitting up, oil
rising of its own accord from the purple crush
is named after the yolk of the egg, asparagus
is just what asparagus is, those apricots she
makes every summer are apricots blooming
in a bowl, and spooning yoghurt and honey
into a mouth on white-washed steps with
a turquoise sea and a donkey crowing and
someone calling kali mera into the bleaching
light, is like scooping up the sun and eating it
Mary McCallum
I've been wanting to write a list poem ever since I set it as an assignment for my creative writing students at Massey University. I got the idea at one of our first Tuesday Poet drinks at the Library Bar. Helen Rickerby - poet and publisher of poets - had been talking there about a successful workshop she'd had with the students of Harvey Molloy's (also a Tuesday Poet) at Newlands College. She'd read the kids a list poem by Helen Lehndorf called Poem without the L Word and got them to write list poems of their own.
I asked Helen to promise to send me the poem as soon as she got home (she's publishing it in Helen L's out-this-week collection The Comforter), and the next day, I set my students the list poem to do and got some lovely stuff.
So last week, with uni over, I started up an adult writing workshop here in Eastbourne. The first assignment: the list poem. This is mine. There were seven others, every one different and astonishing in its own way. What impressed us all was the way the power of each poem grew with each listed thing, and the real subject of the poem elbowed its way through. It is what poetry's all about, really.
What's this poem really about then? Food and family - how they feed and make each other. How simple both can be, how complicated. It's about my family history too, how it spreads itself across many countries and generations, and how food in all those places and times is both different and the same.
Do check out the hub poem on Tuesday Poem. It's by Wellington poet Harry Ricketts.
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Sea Grapes by Derek Walcott
A friend of mine was taught poetry by this man. In fact, as with all the best students, he said he didn't teach her at all, she already had it in her, which I can believe. The 1992 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Derek Walcott reads his poem Sea Grapes from "Collected Poems 1948-1984". To learn more about Derek Walcott, visit:http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/index.html
Do check out the Tuesday Poem hub for an Iain Britton poem.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Magical realism and Dybek
Chicago short story writer and poet Stuart Dybek on the sensibility in his writing which feels European or could be Latin American or could just be magical realism....
Dybek: I shy away from a term like magical realism because it somehow implies to me that I read Marquez and decided, well, I'll take some of these supernatural elements and graft them on to what I've been working with. And in my case anyhow that is not the way it came about at all. It came about more out of a feeling like this:
You're walking down a street, Twenty-Fifth Street say, and right on the corner there's a candy store and a bunch of kids are coming out of it. They're arguing about candy, calling each other sonofabitches. On the other side of the street there's a tavern. You can hear the jukebox music, and you see someone sneaking in for an early drink. Coming towards you is someone eating a bismarck, dripping jelly on their shirt, and there's a whole bunch of cars, guys cruising up and down, gunning their engines. A truck is going by, loaded with something that's making a clanking sound. And then there's a church. In it, a bunch of old ladies are saying the rosary in Polish--or in some language that you think might be Polish, you can't exactly figure out what it is--and there's this smell in that church that smells like something out of the fifteenth century. You look up. It's Lent. There are these crazy statues standing there with their eyes bulging with all kinds of weird visions, except now they've got purple shrouds over their heads. That jump from walking off that street and into that church and then back out again, I think, has made my style the way it is. After that, you read Kafka and you say, "Oh my God! Of course, I understand this." Or I read Ed Hirsch's poem about his grandmother's Murphy bed, that when she folds it back into the wall it's like putting away the night. I see that if I'm writing about my grandmother, who really believed that the dead came back and needed to nibble breadcrumbs off her table, then maybe instead of saying, "My grandmother thought so and so," I could have a dead person, in the middle of the story, sitting at her kitchen table.
From an interview on Artful Dodge - more here. Stuart Dybek is the author of a particularly wonderful short story called Pet Milk that is a set text for the students I tutor at Massey. Every year I get more out of it, and this year a student wrote a great essay on Pet Milk complete with a link to this interview. What a find!
I am a big fan of magical realism in fiction and Dybek's explanation is as good a reason as I can think of for why...
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Tuesday Poem: All Together Now - A Digital Bridge for Auckland and Sydney
In Auckland and in Sydney, in March and September last year, there were two poetry symposiums, and up online the nzepc (NZ Electronic Poetry Centre) built a DIGITAL BRIDGE between the two.
The site is PACKED WITH POEMS: text, video and audio from a stunning array of poets, and includes images and writings from the two meetings on either side of the Tasman.
The builders of this bridge appear to be NZEPC editors Michele Leggott and Brian Flaherty, Pam Brown and Martin Edmond. As they say on X-Factor - 'props' to you four. It's a stunning achievement. And what I love best is the fun everyone seems to be having!
I am especially in love with the poetry videos -- I was just thinking this week how we have too few of our NZ poets on film. Well here they are in full and glorious flight with the Aussies.
HERE it is. The videos here. Enjoy.
And another must-see Australian poet video is linked to from the Tuesday Poem hub - this time a performance poet posted by Australian Janet Jackson. This is poetry as you might not imagine it to be. Go and see.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Ever fresh with praise
'Let my mouth be ever fresh with praise.'
'Each morning new/each day shot through...'
'We inhale the frozen air/Lord send me a mechanic/ if I'm not beyond repair...'
I've had churches on my mind this week -- human mortality -- illness -- loss, so this song is a natural one to hunt for on youtube. Love those lyrics, the raw screamy way John Darnielle delivers them into corners of this beautiful church.
I was at a funeral at the local Presbyterian church for a woman called Nell Manchester who died aged 87 - hence the church thing. An autodidact and writer who always looked a million dollars and whose mind was crisp and curious until the moment she died, Nell went into the hospice with her favourite volume of Keats and the new Peter Bland collection 'Coming Ashore'. The last thing we talked about was the latest Woody Allen movie, and she told me how much she'd laughed at the first Woody Allen movies all those years ago (remember, before cell phones?). Manhattan was on Sky last week, so I watched it for Nell.
It was a lovely send-off at the local church masterminded by her daughters Anne and Catherine. I sat by the stained glass windows beside the woman from the 4-Square supermarket who'd dashed in in her 4-Square shirt. She said Nell had given her the famous Raleigh bicycle with a basket on the front she used to ride around Eastbourne. I like sitting in pews - they remind me of all the churches I've ever been in. The smell of wood, the stained-glass light, the organ wheezing, the sense of being made to sit still for a moment and listen. There were readings from Nell's books, some Shakespeare, a sing-along to Blue Moon and an older Judy Garland singing Somewhere over the Rainbow in a crackle of a voice that John Darnielle would have approved of (Nell loved Judy and loved movies). We also sang the hymn Jerusalem - now that's a song to belt out. Afterwards we ate tiny delicious sandwiches and cake. Go well, Nell. We'll miss you.
Human mortality -- I haven't just been thinking about this because of Nell. This cancer thing is everywhere. Women and men I know and love of all ages are fighting it courageously. One of them Harriet or Hat as she's known, is only 18. Her blog posts are monumental feats of courage. Yesterday's is no exception. It's titled 'The Fight' and here's an extract:
It's hard. I will never be able to say it isn't. This week is testament to that. It was supposed to be my easy week and just no. It was not, at all. I wish I could just fast forward the next year but hey! Life isn't like that.
You get your ups, you get your downs. My life has been pretty easy. I can't believe the things I used to complain about. They seem so silly. So pathetic. Even now there are so many people who have it so much harder than me.
I tried to make a wish today as it was 11:11 on the 11/11/11. I ended up just being thankful for all the things that I have in my life. I can't tell you my wish but it wasn't for me. It never will be.
The Mountain Goats song - for you, Harriet.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Tuesday Poem: About
About four in the afternoon they said,
which could be wrong, but my boys,
both men, were in the kitchen then,
helping themselves to slabs of bread
and ham, laughing at something they’d
seen on Family Guy, their bodies filling
the whole of the space between bench
and stove, fridge and dishwasher. And I
was complaining from the family room
(it was nearly time for a glass of wine)
about how I’d worked all day to fill
their well-fed stomachs, and they, well,
what had they done? How they’d laughed
at that, laughed and eaten of the bread
and the ham, and drunk of the milk
(straight from the bottle), and talked
about the episode of Family Guy with
Jesus dancing – funny, this Jesus, not
miraculous – talked in the cartoon voices
of Pete, Stewie, Brian the dog. Outside
in the thickening day in the thickening
water, the young man, really a boy, had
probably already fallen from the kayak,
and was struggling to keep his head up,
water, the young man, really a boy, had
probably already fallen from the kayak,
and was struggling to keep his head up,
the salt water thicker with each pull of his
arms, the ragged bulk of the island dragging
him down, and back at the beach he’d left
behind – houses with windows flaring,
behind – houses with windows flaring,
kitchens with people eating bread
and cake and pouring wine and frying
onions and thinking dully about taking
in the last of the light walking the dog.
What did they do, my breathing boys,
my chewing men? They couldn’t have
heard the splash or cry, but saw perhaps
through the open window the failing
sun shining, as it had to, on white legs
in green water. Thought it a boy falling
out of the sky. Something amazing. But
the sun shining on water can be anything
when you’re tipped back swallowing milk
in an untidy corner with stacked dishes
and an empty cornflake packet, waiting for
your brother to recall the irreverent dance
moves of a cartoon Jesus. They’ve sailed
now, the young masters, vessels navigating
choppy waters with a calm that belies their
private concerns about disaster. When I ask,
they don’t recall the sunlight catching on
anything that day or if the exact time they
inhabited the holy space between bench
and dishwasher was the same as the time
of the drowning, or even why they hung
around longer than usual when they
nearly always had somewhere to get to.
Mary McCallum
The poem is closely tied to Auden's Poem Musee des Beaux Arts - one of those poems that is never far from the place in my head where I start to write. It begins:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
The rest of it here with the Brueghel painting that inspired the poem. Worth checking out. The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
Do go to the Tuesday Poem hub this week for a deliciously playful poem by Joan Fleming posted by Helen Heath.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Bill Murray reads Poems to Construction Workers at Poets House
I can't believe I went to Battery Park in New York only months before they opened an all-new Poets House. I missed it: a house dedicated to poets and poetry with a collection of over 50,000 volumes — including books, journals, chapbooks, audio and video tapes, and digital media.
Before it moved to Battery Park in 2009, Poets House was in a loft in Soho for 24 years, a self-proclaimed home for all who read and write poetry.
Bill Murray, it seems, is one of those. Here he is reading poems to the construction workers on the Poets House site back in May 2009 when it was nearly finished. Watch their faces when he reads the Emily Dickinson poem (find it at 2'38 on the movie) I Dwell in Possibility! And they applaud him when he finishes! It starts like this:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –
Another poem Murray reads is Poets Work by Lorine Niedecker (at 1'47) which starts 'Grandfather/ advised me:/ learn a trade...' and can be read here - it's brilliant and short, although it would have worked better for a bunch of poets than builders.
My son has just started a building apprenticeship after four years of on-again-off-again work and bouts of unemployment. He's all signed up. Those two sentences, now that's poetry.
Click on the Tuesday Poem QUILL in the sidebar for more Tuesday Poems.
Postscript
Just discovered a video of the Poets House dedication in 2009 with poems and song. More Bill Murray! And a terrific poem by Kay Ryan 'Lighthouse Keeping' at 2'13, which can be read on the page here.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Within every story another story is hidden
"Within every story another story is hidden, autonomous and unfolding though scarcely noticed except now and then, inadvertently, when, just as with a slip of the tongue a woman exposes a bit of the turbulent life under way in her unconscious mind, a rat scurries through an open window with a doll’s head in its mouth, or a man shouts a couplet from a passing bus ('o queens of urbanity, kings of the crush / let’s sing of convenience, importance, and plush')." Lyn Hejinian • Conjunctions
I use this quote a lot when I'm marking student fiction. I love it. Award-winning writer Craig Cliff (Man Melting), when he talked to the Massey first year creative writing students this year, had another way to describe these slips in a story when another story peeks through. He talked about layers. Sadly, I missed his lecture but one alert student in my tutorial reported back to me what he said.
The idea of layers works well to understand what a story should do I think. I immediately visualised geological layers -- maybe because I walk alot and earth and what it does beneath the feet, interests me. There's the grass and earth at the surface, dig down and there may be clay or sand or stones - and on you go through all the various geological layers - each one differently formed with a unique history and holding evidence of the impact of man and animals and movements of climate and earth, then, if you're lucky, you may come upon shards of pottery and glass, a bone or two...
I said to my students, it's as if you're walking along inside a story, and beside the path, the surface is scraped away to show the darker earth beneath, nothing much, not enough to notice; and then there's a small hole, barely there, big enough for a tent pole. Easy to miss, but you register its presence without realising. Your attention is on the walk, and it's a lovely day out there. Still further on - there's a ragged hole where a dog has buried its bone and dug it up again and left it there for some reason. It nearly trips you up. You can see the layer of clay under the earth, it's thick and yellow like plasticine. You stop and look at the bone, a little annoyed, briefly interested. What sort of bone is it?
A little further on, there is another scraping the size of a shoe showing the earth beneath the tussock grass. It puzzles you - didn't you see one of these before? What's made them? Puzzling, you continue on past a manhole with a man in it fixing the pipes underground. This gets your attention. You can hear him under there, see flashes of his torch, his tools hitting something - concrete? stone? You wonder, what would it be like to work underground like that? How deep he goes?
You keep walking. Another small hole for a tent pole. Strange. But you are almost upon the moat the children dug around a fort they were building in the school holidays. You remember them doing that, three boys and a dog, and all the wood they gathered from under the pines, you stop a moment and admire the collapsing fort and the depth of the muddy moat, think how wonderful that children are still building forts these days. Then you see it - stuck at the bottom of the moat, in a layer of dark stony earth, is a child's jandal. You wonder if you should fish it out and decide not to. It's muddy after all, you have nothing to wipe your hands on. And you must get on.
Finally, you reach a hole the size of a pond filled with water from the heavy rainfall the day before. You can't see the bottom because it's deep, and the water is murky with wet clay and soil and rotting plant life. There's something floating there, though. It's pale and too big to be a stone or a shoe ... It all comes back to you: the scrapes of earth, the holes, the hole with the bone, the man underground (was he working? or doing something else?), the moat and the jandal, and now this...
Which is only the beginning to the holes that must be dug and discovered and filled in and forgotten and found again to make all the layers of a story ... It's not easy work, but someone has to do it.
I use this quote a lot when I'm marking student fiction. I love it. Award-winning writer Craig Cliff (Man Melting), when he talked to the Massey first year creative writing students this year, had another way to describe these slips in a story when another story peeks through. He talked about layers. Sadly, I missed his lecture but one alert student in my tutorial reported back to me what he said.
The idea of layers works well to understand what a story should do I think. I immediately visualised geological layers -- maybe because I walk alot and earth and what it does beneath the feet, interests me. There's the grass and earth at the surface, dig down and there may be clay or sand or stones - and on you go through all the various geological layers - each one differently formed with a unique history and holding evidence of the impact of man and animals and movements of climate and earth, then, if you're lucky, you may come upon shards of pottery and glass, a bone or two...
I said to my students, it's as if you're walking along inside a story, and beside the path, the surface is scraped away to show the darker earth beneath, nothing much, not enough to notice; and then there's a small hole, barely there, big enough for a tent pole. Easy to miss, but you register its presence without realising. Your attention is on the walk, and it's a lovely day out there. Still further on - there's a ragged hole where a dog has buried its bone and dug it up again and left it there for some reason. It nearly trips you up. You can see the layer of clay under the earth, it's thick and yellow like plasticine. You stop and look at the bone, a little annoyed, briefly interested. What sort of bone is it?
A little further on, there is another scraping the size of a shoe showing the earth beneath the tussock grass. It puzzles you - didn't you see one of these before? What's made them? Puzzling, you continue on past a manhole with a man in it fixing the pipes underground. This gets your attention. You can hear him under there, see flashes of his torch, his tools hitting something - concrete? stone? You wonder, what would it be like to work underground like that? How deep he goes?
You keep walking. Another small hole for a tent pole. Strange. But you are almost upon the moat the children dug around a fort they were building in the school holidays. You remember them doing that, three boys and a dog, and all the wood they gathered from under the pines, you stop a moment and admire the collapsing fort and the depth of the muddy moat, think how wonderful that children are still building forts these days. Then you see it - stuck at the bottom of the moat, in a layer of dark stony earth, is a child's jandal. You wonder if you should fish it out and decide not to. It's muddy after all, you have nothing to wipe your hands on. And you must get on.
Finally, you reach a hole the size of a pond filled with water from the heavy rainfall the day before. You can't see the bottom because it's deep, and the water is murky with wet clay and soil and rotting plant life. There's something floating there, though. It's pale and too big to be a stone or a shoe ... It all comes back to you: the scrapes of earth, the holes, the hole with the bone, the man underground (was he working? or doing something else?), the moat and the jandal, and now this...
Which is only the beginning to the holes that must be dug and discovered and filled in and forgotten and found again to make all the layers of a story ... It's not easy work, but someone has to do it.
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