Tuesday Poem: Curtains by Helen Rickerby

I believe my parents are immortal
They will live forever
in the same house
they have lived in
for the whole of my life
they will stay
at the end
of a phoneline
answer when I call
to ask them questions
to which they will always
know the answers

I believe my parents will never get sick
I mean of course
that they might get
the odd cold maybe
a stomach bug once
in a while but they will always
be able to walk further
and faster
than I can
they'll never be slowed
or stymied by dodgy
hips or feet or hearts

I believe my parents will always be able to look after themselves
They'll stay in the house
up the long steep driveway
with their lifetime of treasures
they'll eat what they like
go to sleep and wake up
as late as they want

I believe my parents will always be together
like a pair of curtains
that overlap
at their edges


First of all - it's the 3rd birthday of the Tuesday Poem! Three years we've been going with Claire Beynon (Dunedin) and me curating. What a ride it's been! So many many poems, so many many poets. As with other years we're celebrating with a communal poem which has already started and goes over three weeks. Do check it out.

Now, I promised my blog readers Curtains last week when I posted Just Fine to celebrate my 25th wedding anniversary. I explained I'd been casting around for the ideal poem and that Curtains leapt into view - or rather, opened in front of me. But then I found my way into an old file of poems and there it was:  Just Fine. A low-key poem about an ordinary family Saturday, my ordinary family Saturday, and it did the job, and I posted it.

I saved Curtains (My Iron Spine, Headworx 2008) for this week, and people have been asking...

Curtains is a poem about the everydayness and longevity of love -- love in a relationship (of 25 years or more or less), love we have for our parents, and they for each other. There is the feel of a fairytale about it. The house with the steep driveway and treasures evokes a castle to me - and there is immortality here and a type of perfection and an absence of rules. But the curtains are vintage rule-bound time-locked imperfect suburbia!

I love the line: 'like a pair of curtains that overlap at their edges.' It evokes the way people who are together for a while lose their edges, and how they hang out day and night (what better than curtains to show clearly when it's night and day). 'Overlap at their edges' also brings to my mind lapping in a running race and water lapping, both of which feel like the stuff of long term relationships.

Now my silver wedding has come and gone, I dedicate this poem to my parents, of whom I believe the same.

Curtains is published with permission (thanks Helen!)

Helen Rickerby is a Tuesday Poet, publisher at Seraph Press, and co-managing editor of the JAAM literary journal. She also has a cool day job working on the Encyclopaedia of NZ Te Ara. Abstract Internal Furniture, was published by HeadworX in 2001 and her second collection, My Iron Spine, followed in 2008. More on Helen  on last week's blog and another poem from My Iron Spine, here. 

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.

Continues here... 

________________
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

The Three Helens

Up at the Ballroom Cafe - a place where people danced once upon a sprung floor - it is very hot, and crammed with poets and poetry supporters.  I arrive, and there are only two spare chairs and the poetry's begun. I sit at the back. Behind me, the rumble of pipes, the splosh of water - in front of me, the 'open mic' part of the event, except there is no mic (shame, the water is insistent - I am right at the back.)

It is a fun community entertaining thing - an open mic - but it is hard to thoroughly engage with a poem delivered this way, simply because it's hard to hear all the words. I've, thank goodness, already read Tim Jones' terrific earthquake poem published in the Dompost and on his blog - although his voice carries well so I don't miss much. Robyn Fry gives me a copy of her poem to read later.  I wish I'd asked Maria McMillan for a copy of hers too.

A quick break for a stretch and a refill, and it's time for the music. Blue Vein are a relaxed trio who do some gorgeous (their word is 'cheesy') covers by all sorts of artists e.g. one by Meatloaf and another by Doris Day (love that DD shake of the head Kate does - or is it Liz?)! I've (sneakily) moved my chair to the front for the second half of the show, and realise I'm sitting beside Hinemoana Baker. I can hear her in some of the songs - a sweet barely-there third part to the harmony.

Then it's the Three Helens, or 'Helen Cubed' as the publicity has it. These three women are Tuesday Poets - albeit that Helen L is on sabbatical (come back, Helen!) - so I know their work and admire all three for their poetry and the life they construct around it. Helen L is a tutor of creative writing, Helen H works for the publisher VUP, and Helen Rickerby is a publisher (and civil servant). All the Helens are up to their elbows in poetry and generous in their support of other writers.

They stand up in front of a bay window with the sun streaming in, dressed head-to-foot in Canterbury colours - no, Helen L is wearing bright blue tights.

They tell us they're going to weave their work in front of us. Helen H will lead with a long poem, stop after a bit, then Helen L will read, and Helen R, and then more of Helen H's long poem, and onwards ... Turns out the weaving idea works well because all three are are smart writers with strong personalities, and they clearly have a kind of cross-Helen-poet friendship going on. Helen R has published Helen H, Helen H and Helen L have blogged together... Although Helen R is quick to point out that she is not 'crafty' (in the weaving sense) like the other two.

Helen H's poem is about finding the Greek in herself and herself in Greece. At one point she describes lying with her ear to the earth of Ithaca and being ready to hear what it has to say - but it says nothing. Same thing happened to me in Rethymnon, Crete. I went there because my Yiayia (Grandmother)'s family came from there - like Helen H I didn't have much Greek in my upbringing. Ear to the ground: silence. When I saw Yiayia, I told her what happened, and she laughed, 'Well of course! we came from the village at the top of the hill.'

Helen's poem is an engaging narrative (wonderfully read) - full of a Greece that I recognise.  The style is conversational/epic, often funny, but the simplicity of the language belies the craft that's shapes this yarn. Sadly it's not yet published -I'll have to wait to read the rest.

Helen L's work is more domestic and 'lyrical', with the same humour and smartness of the Greek Helen. Helen L has a keen eye for what ticks in family life - what makes it and breaks it - and has the language to haul the reader in. One of my favourites is about moving house - writing of the anxieties involved and the hope that it will be a place of contentment - she nails it.

Helen R's poetry has found other lives to write about. Writers like the great Emily Dickinson are excellent fodder - and compellingly realised -- combining research/wit/imagination.  Interestingly Helen R brings together the outward looking 'epic' narrative feel of Helen H's long poem with the intimate/domestic stuff of Helen L's shorter works, which has hauled in readers since, well, that first Helen made an appearance in one particular long poem.

And so the weaving continues... next up is Helen H and so on. A lovely lovely evening.

The Poetry at the Ballroom Cafe event is on the third sunday of the month.

Postscript: A young Cantabrian Zeborah has written a simple guide on surviving a disaster which is well worth reading. She talks of the importance of a 'kit to go' in a backpack - my daughter's school is selling these fantastic backpack family kits for $189 each which would be just the trick. I'm getting one, we're right by the sea and need to run uphill as fast as possible after a big quake.

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."

Phone home Mr Pip

I've never done it before as an adult - or at least not that I remember - and not with an adult novel. I'm re-reading a novel. Mr Pip.

I'm chairing a session with Lloyd Jones down at the Christchurch Writers Festival so I thought re-reading Mr Pip would be useful. I didn't count on the feeling I'd get opening a book knowing what was to come. Knowing about Matilda and Pop-eye and Great Expectations and Dolores. Knowing about the disembowled dog and the story about the colour blue.

I got that rush I remember as a child opening a favourite book, or later, as a mother, opening The Secret Garden to read to one child or The Hobbit to another. No doubt it's the same rush my re-reading friends feel when they gather themselves for the annual assault on Persuasion or Master and Commander.

I haven't really understood it til now. I've always thought there are so many books and so little time I should not dare to look back.

Until this week and Mr Pip.

And re-reading has other advantages. I see more clearly now what Lloyd is doing - the fable he's created on this distant island, the stories he lays one on the other and the emphasis on the importance of telling them, the theme of the reliability of story over the unreliability of real life. Especially life on Bougainville, then.

It's interesting that Lloyd always seems to choose to read out loud the part in Mr Pip when the mothers come to the classroom and tell their stories to the children. Stories about fish and faith and remedies and luck. These stories sound like the threads in the fabric the people of Bougainville live by, but a white writer from Wellington says he totally made them up. Audacious or what?

Remember the way Mr Pip starts with a name - like Great Expectations, like Moby Dick? The magic of that: summoning the person by chanting his name. Waiting for him to arrive. Pop-Eye. And so the story begins.

Then I had to buy Nigel Cox's Phone Home Berlin: Collected Non-Fiction. Lloyd has been living in Berlin after all and I figured Nigel's essays could be useful. What a book. I've only skimmed it at this point. But it is a wondrous thing. A man thinking his way through a life stuffed with family and literature. The way he felt 'invisible' in Berlin as a NZer and so felt freed (in a way) to write. He talks of the importance of that thing he has no better name for than 'the solace of art'.

Damien Wilkins' interview of Nigel Cox at the end of the book is a tour de force and a must-read for every NZ writer. They discuss this strange 'handicap' of being a writer so far from the hub. Here's a quote from Nigel: 'I think it is a curse but I have also always thought that New Zealanders are very romantic and there is a romance about writing here because there is no money in it. And that I like.'

And speaking of the romance of writing. I went to the White Album winter poetry readings tonight at Wellington's City Gallery. These events are deliciously unpretentious and always fun. Poets are given space to read, organisers Mark Pirie and Michael O'Leary dress up (cricketing whites this year ) and smile alot, there's theme music (the Beatles White Album this year) and lashings of wine (asking what the wine was I was told 'white and red').

This week, Helen Rickerby and Harvey Molloy each launched a new book and read half a dozen poems. They were joined by Will Leadbeater and Niel Wright. The latter recently completed his 36,000 line epic poem The Alexandrians after 47 years of continuous composition.

Who knows how many books these poets will sell? To be a poet in this country - or anywhere, really - you have to not care. The main thing is to publish and to celebrate. Which a bunch of us did tonight.