Tuesday Poem: Supplication to Our Lady of the Dumpster by T Clear

~ for Rachael Maxi

O lid of clang & wheels of clatter,
O collector of rubbish & swill, O Holy Mother
of great pickings, of dreck & slop: Hear our prayer.

O saint of litter & scrap, protect us
from the banana peel, the Styrofoam chunk,
from all that defies reduce/reuse/recycle.

O divine casting off, O sacred decay!
Hallelujah to the Hefty Ultra-Flex 33 Gallon,
the drawstring, the twist-tie.

You hold dear everything
everyone never wanted or wanted once,
a sack or a heap tossed & tumbled.

Praise to those who dive into the belly
of your dump — the urban foragers, the hungry,
scraping a meal of crust & bone.

Consecrate them, O Queen of rubble
robed in graffiti. Watch over them,
that they may not themselves become waste

to be managed, a cubic yard of flesh
primed for front-loading. Now,
and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

© T. Clear 2010 

Big White Rusty, by Rachel Maxi © 

This poem is by fellow Tuesday Poet T Clear who lives in Seattle and who blogs here.  She's an Irish-Catholic American who works with glass and who has a fine eye for the glory in the ordinary. This poem is published with her permission. One day I plan to go to Seattle and say kia ora to this amazing woman. 

I've had another dumpster poem on this blog - NZ poet Airini Beautrais'  poem called A Good Story which starts: 'My friend likes to find things in skip bins...'  

After reading these two fine poems please pop to the Tuesday Poem hub for a wonderful Sam Hunt poem - thrilled to have him there. 

Tuesday Poem: Love Poem for Mark by Airini Beautrais

Mark follow your heart.
Over seas to the girl
who hung all your doors.
A floating dream
is better than sinking awake.
It is time the great apes
reconsidered the trees.
A world of wood is waiting
in bins and garages.
To be fastened by nail and trunk.
To be three sided.
To move in the muscle of the wind.

_______
Airini told me once that I could do whatever I liked with her poems. So here's another one from her collection 'Western Line.'  They get their hooks into you these Airini poems. No, that's not right, they circle around, touching my elbow, tickling my feet. So I think, where's that book gone? And I get up to go and find it. It's in the upstairs study.

As Mark is bidden to do, Airini floats outside of the usual stuff of poetry - this is a romantic poem but in a fairytale way rather than a cheesy 'romantic' way. She writes often and unselfconsciously of hearts, especially young men's hearts, and travelling and trees. Airini watches people a lot, and loves them. This is her skill.

I'm not quite sure I get this poem, in fact, but I like it all the same. You can read some of the other Love Poems here (there are more - and Curses and Tricks and Charms!)

Then do go to the Tuesday Poem hub where Janis Freegard is editor and her poet this week is Wellington poet Viv Plumb with a very Wellington poem!

Tuesday Poem: Love Poems by Airini Beautrais

from Book 1: Love Poems in Western Line (VUP 2011)

LOVE POEM FOR VAL

Val, lately you are resplendent
in your ideology.
I see you cycling across an intersection
with an orange basket
the sun bright on your hair.
Val, lately you wear black
a lot and laugh through your nose.
Words march out of your mouth
in tight formation.


LOVE POEM FOR
A QUEER BOY

Your tummy hangs out of hot-pants.
A new freedom propels
you around the room.
May you be lucky tonight.
May you be happy tomorrow.
May your tummy rest
in the small of a beautiful back.


LOVE POEM FOR
A FELT-TIP PEN

Pete said 'I love felt-tip pens.
I want to marry a felt-tip pen.'
And then there was a smudgy drawing
of him beside his smiling bride.

When I first posted an Airini poem I said her poems had 'enchantment' - and I believe her new collection Western Line (VUP) holds true to this. Her poems enchant because they are enchantments, and curses and love poems and prayers and fables and fairytales....  I kid you not. This is a book packed with people Airini has blessed and cursed and written a fairytale about.

Look here we have Val and 'a queer boy' and Peter who loves 'felt-tips' - each one resplendent in their own way. There are many more of these short love poems - as I'm writing this, I see that Helen Heath posted some of them a couple of months back as part of Tuesday Poem.  Funny how we both fell on the love poems.

Airini's poetry breathes as she breathes:  a woman who watches the world up close and loves the 'queer' people she sees in it and their queer little ways (even as she's cursing them.) Who else could write with love about a tummy hanging out of hot-pants and give it a future tucked into a beautiful back? There is a series of poems called 'Travelling with Us' at the end of the book about people seen on a Wellington train  - but I'll save one of those for another day.

Here's a link to another post from me on my friend Airini and the poems in her award-winning first collection Secret Heart. She really is one out of the box.

For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar here or click THIS. 

Tuesday Poem: Penelope the Mythic by Vana Manasiadis

I love this poem - for the Greek at the beginning without translation, for Penelope 'putting the book down' after reading her own story, for the way the poet plays with the word 'myth' and with myth-making (mythopoios) and storytelling (mythologos) in a collection of poems that is all about words and myth and story and history and biography, the way the translation of the text is knitted into the poem,  the way the colloquial is mixed with the mythic is mixed with the Greek.... which only just skims the surface. An understanding of individual poems in the collection Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: a mythistorima (Seraph 2009) is achieved only through reading them all.

Born in 1973, Vana is part-Greek, part-Celt (which is me with a bit more Anglo-Saxon thrown in), has a degree in Classics and English and was part of the same MA class I shared with Airini Beautrais who wrote last Tuesday's Poem. Vana is one of those writers who had clever, insightful and 'intimate' things to say about every piece of writing put before our class. Her own work unfolded in a way that surprised her, but the result is something that feels both sure and tentative in the way of all exploration, and both visionary and intimate in the way of all good stories. Vana explains in an interview on Tim Jones' blog what this collection really is.

"Although mythistorima specifically means ‘novel’ in modern Greek, and also more generally ‘fairytale’ or ‘fantasy’, the etymological meaning (perhaps not surprisingly), is myth and history combined - from the time when people disseminated myths and (his)stories by word of mouth. I really like the fluid and undisciplined nature of speech and so I decided to kind of unfix the form of Ithaca and assume oral language with its tangents, fillers and pauses, as the governing concept. I tried to make sense of all the different forms in the book as transcripts, or fragments, then pieced them together so that they might ‘tell’ a kind of story while still remaining a little elusive."

Like Airini, Vana experimented with the prose poem, but she also produced a range of poetic styles to suit particular 'fragments'. There are alternating lines of dialogue, couplets, long sprawling poems, short compact poems as well as prose poems. Interesting to have another prose poem after Airini's last week - which stirred up a range of responses, among them a view that prose poems are not poems at all. Interesting, too, that Vana is influenced by the inimitable US poet Anne Carson who is well known for disrupting genres. Here Vana explains in the Tim Jones interview why she likes Carson ...

"...for her play with forms, and the unpredictable, magical, moving, powerful combinations of those forms, and times, settings, and voices. And, she knows a lot of stuff. When I read Anne Carson I feel in the presence of both raw heart and razor-sharp mind."

Which is what I feel about Vana's work. 
A NZ poet who teaches, Vana is currently living in Crete working on a collaborative play and hopefully another poetry book. Ithaca is available from Seraph Press (I'm sure her publisher would do an overseas order) or all good independent NZ bookstores using ISBN: 978-0-473-15235-2 and Vana has given permission for Penelope the Mythic to appear on my blog. Thanks to her, and to her publisher Helen Rickerby for organising the jpg of the poem. More from Vana's Tim Jones interview.
And here's more on Carson for those who are interested. It makes me want to go back to read her, especially the magnificent verse novel Autobiography of Red which blew me away in my MA year and which I am pretty sure was recommended by Vana. 

"Carson's works of verse and prose are characterized by several unique formal and stylistic qualities. Most notably, Carson blurs traditional categories of genre, constructing hybrids of the essay, the autobiography, the novel, the verse poem, and the prose poem. Carson's background as a classics scholar colors all of her writings, which feature frequent references to Greek mythology and such ancient poets, philosophers, and historians as Sappho, Plato, and Homer. She routinely renders elements of history and mythology in contemporary terms and modern settings, often conceptually closing the distance between the past and the present. Her verse places references to modern popular culture, such as film and television, side by side with references to ancient Greek culture. Her pastiche approach to genre, form, and subject matter, as well as the strong element of irony that pervades much of her work, have earned her the designation as a postmodern or post-structuralist writer, although the terms metaphysical, surrealist, and magical realist have also been applied to her work."

Tuesday Poem: A Good Story by Airini Beautrais

My friend likes to find things in skip bins.  I don't have  time

to  list all  the  things  he has found. Put  it  this  way - when

you drive past one, you have to stop.

       The story, as I have  heard  it, is  that he  once found a

 girlfriend in a skip bin. She was  scrabbling  around  looking

for  things,  and  when  he  climbed  in,  they met.  This was

before  she met the  banjo player and the drummer.  But this

is  just  the  story  as  the  drummer  tells  it, and he may not

necessarily be  trusted. He has this way of  smiling when he

talks that suggests he could easily be lying. And he has been

known  to  eat  daffodils. The  truth  doesn't move  people to

do  things  like this.

_____
I was one of the first readers of this poem ever, and for most, if not all, of the poems in the Montana award-winning book Secret Heart from which A Good Story comes. The collection was published in 2006, the year after Airini and I each completed an MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University of Wellington. Secret Heart was Airini's thesis and I was lucky enough to be in her tutor group.


Airini listened interestedly to all our feedback but made very few changes - except to play around a little with form and deciding on the prose poem. Later, her marker commented favourably on 'the casual tossed-offness' of the poems, and that is certainly it. They have a cool, wry, downbeat kind of feel to them, as if someone's just at that moment tossing words over a (leather-jacketed) shoulder or, as in one poem, spitting them like toothpaste out of the car window.

There is enchantment in these poems too - whether it be a guy finding a girlfriend in a skip bin or sisters walking through Cuba Mall with a full-length mirror or trees 'turning folktale' as dusk falls. This is Wellington 'off-centre' (and the South Island, too, in a road trip sequence) and it's a nice place to be. The truth is, as Airini read out her poems in class, we all sat there smiling and then scrabbled round for useful things to say. They are what they are. And we loved them.

[Google books insert with more of Airini's poems removed ]

A science teacher, Airini is currently on maternity leave caring for her new baby and working on her second book of poems.  She's given me permission to run this poem on my blog. 

Do try more Tuesday Poems. Bryan Walpert is the editor this week. 

Hue & Cry

Love this cover. Love the editorial by Chloe Lane which starts 'Monet flung himself into the Seine...', love the crazy piece What Depressions Look Like by Amy Howden-Chapman which ends '... We may have to build ourselves back up and out with green jobs, toothpicks and gum. I can see a new skyline of saliva bubbles, ladders, and clean smiles.' Love that Amy - one of the most creative thinkers but worst spellers and grammarians I know - has an Oxford comma inserted between 'ladders' and 'and'.

Love that Anna Taylor with her fresh first collection of stories out has The Beekeeper in here which starts 'When she was seventeen, my mother saved her own life just by walking across the lawn to the washing line...'

Love that there's a lot of 'Adams' in there [got a son with that name so it jumps out at me] - Pip Adam [the writer] with a piece called Pushing, Pulling and a series of Charlotte Simmonds' poems one of which begins: 'Before 6.30, Adam eats a pie, cracks a bourbon, smokes pot and a couple of cigarettes and/listens to punk rock...' Love that when I read it aloud to my boy, he nods 'yeah, that sounds about right...except for the punk rock...' Love that there's a poem by funky Johanna Aitchison called what seagull wants and a series of poems by my Montana-winning friend Airini Beautrais all about tricks of various sorts with her lovely off-centred view of the world: ' While you are stopped on a street corner/your future lover cycles past you/and does not notice you there...'

Love that Lawrence Patchett talks about 'Hawera and the Morrieson question' - which includes how Ronald Hugh's cousins Shirley and Heather threw away his papers without thinking 'because he wasn't as famous then' and how his writing attic is now stored in a paddock. Love that Hue and Cry calls itself a 'literary slash art journal'.

Love that it has cheered me up.

Because my friend Kirsty Gunn, who has cut a swathe through literary Wellington with her cry of 'death to the narrative arc' and 'I am not a writer, I am an artist' , and who has been so wonderfully stimulating and opinionated and generous as Randell Cottage fellow, and made life such fun for the winter she's lived here, is soon to head home to the UK and Scotland.

I just want to hue and cry.