Tuesday Poem: In/let by Jo Thorpe

This is a sluicing place.

Today, through the open door

of the Boathouse where I write,

Alan the builder works quietly and well,

puts sand in the concrete, fills yellow

plastic bags with mix to make the compound wall.

I don't want to think about work or plastic.

I want to cast back to the sandspit at noon,

how I stood on its bright neck, tide muscling in,

its heedless pulse finding every scooped-out

glyph and groove, each dry-channelled grainy place,

and sand so white that shallows could be seen right through

to aqua, turquoise, then the deep-rushing, deep-flushing

cerulean centre, doing what beauty does -

lifts us past the perpetual scrap

into largo of width - estuary, ocean -

into 'blue and a blue and a breath'.

I did not sit on the ribbed sand.

I did not turn back, nor follow the watermark's

inland loop, but stood till the inlet took everything -

sky, bush, reflecting even the echo of an answer found

I am because you are in the vast harem of its eye.

I'm out there, treading the edge

as it's re-shaped - as we've been,

by Sirens, the poet's dome, lucent days like this

that take the watching heart and throw it open.

-

Like music, I get crushes on poets and my current crush is poet, dancer and dance history teacher Jo Thorpe, whom I know as a co-Trustee of the Randell Cottage Writers Trust. 

I was intrigued by her new collection in/let (Steele Roberts) when I read Hunt the slipper which was posted on the Tuesday Poem hub on December 7 last year. Who could resist lines like these:

recalling a tale of that chaste ballerina

stopped by a highwayman wanting

not gold, but demanding she dance

on her black panther skins

spread out on the scintillant snow ...

I finally bought in/let last week and have already posted a little on the glittering/fairytale, muscular/dancing, instinctive poems within, and am posting here the title poem with permission. Here we find surely the perfect first line about a place of water, and the perfect end, and such as this in between:

I want to cast back to the sandspit at noon,

how I stood on its bright neck, tide muscling in,

its heedless pulse finding every scooped-out

glyph and groove ...

-

The image is powerful, glittering ... and the sounds fill the mouth – dance in the mouth - flood, spill. After the lapping double 'l's' in the half-rhymes at the end of lines at the start, hear here the 'st' and 'sp'  and 'sc' sounds - like the 'sh' of water coming over the sand (which does indeed become 'sh') - opening up to the smooth 'oo' of 'scooped' and 'groove' - which becomes eventually the open 'o's' at the end of the poem, as everything - the body, the water, the mouth - opens up.

This is a poem of an inlet (the blissful Awaroa Inlet in the Marlborough Sounds) and of letting in. Letting in water and light and colour and language and poetry. The 'poet’s dome' could be Shelley's: ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity.’ 

This is a poem of the body – a builder’s body at work, a body of water at work, a poet/dancer watching. Gorgeous.

For more Tuesday Poems, including Poem for a Hard Time by Canadian poet Lorna Crozier at the hub, click on the quill in the sidebar or click here . TP, too, is a sluicing place of sorts.

Write it: embrace the beautiful danger

I have been Rousseaud into the day by the work of poet Jo Thorpe. This lovely verb 'To Rousseau' is in her new collection in/let: 'some ringlet of music/might Rousseau me into the day.' (Twlight and melancholies)

A dancer, dance reviewer and teacher of dance history, the elegant Jo writes poems that do indeed 'dance' - in their language, their musicality, the way they move... Poet Bill Manhire comments on the way Jo's poems 'notice' movement and follow it, and go between 'between stillness and frenzy'.

Amongst other things - not least sinewy/rich poems on being a mother, on being alive, on attending to things, on writing - Jo writes about the stuff of dance and what makes it. How to dance your own body's legend is one of those.

It begins 'Choose the site carefully. Find one that will hold you/ in-side nuance. Create your own mise-en-scene...' It could be a poem about writing just as easily.

Jo continues describing how the dancer enters the 'Now', moves 'through the animal', makes 'room for the bird', follows 'the wind-spool'. She bids the dancer/reader to 'embrace the beautiful danger' at the core:

Watch how it grins and glares at you, that blur

at the edge of field, blur on the edge of shape -- find the

keel of it, the red that pecks, the claw angling for the back.

Brilliant advice for the writer - too many of whom take the safe and familiar path, the place they think they should put their feet or where they think other people want them to go (I read a lot of novel manuscripts...) And even if they (hurrah!) 'find the keel of it', one of the biggest weaknesses in manuscripts I find is that too many writers let it go in the latter quarter of a novel, the boat founders, the red becomes pink, the claw wears a glove, and - god forbid - they start to tidy up (think claw as duster), heading for a tidy end, a 'satisfactory' end .... or maybe they just run out of steam or imagination. Poets do this too.

Jo, rightly, bids the dancer (the reader, the writer) not to give up at this point. 

Back, safe, from the flight through the intuitive

resist even now the wanting-to-be-calmed,

the 'clear-lit custody of knowing'. Furrow-up the stone path.

Lick your way through the glittering city (its fabled glass).

Play in the slipstream. This is how the story opens. 

This is how the necessary heat rolls in.

Bravo!! (Note: there shouldn't be gaps between the lines - blame blogger formatting)

Oh I love this poet. Her book is only $20 at good bookshops or online at Steele Roberts. And you can read one of her find-the-keel, glittering poems about a dancer here on Tuesday Poem.