Tuesday Poem: Grandmother by Kate Duignan

When I was five

you taught me how to separate an egg.

I watched you tap it on the rim

of the bowl,

press your thumbs to the spot

and crack it clean in two.

You let me take the speckled shell 

in my own hands

and rock the yolk back and forth,

quivering

as it slid from one half to the other,

a tiny yellow sun.

We put the splintered pieces

in the brown bin

for the compost

and the empty carton

in the red bin

for the incinerator.

In the garden,

the light went out of the golden elm.

We stood at the window.

The moon was a white cup.

The birds had gone to their nests, you said

and tomorrow would be a good day.

I spread my fingers on the dark glass.

Our cake, you said, would rise.

___________

I heard Kate read this poem up in Palmerston North last month. We were both tutoring an Honours course in writing fiction at Massey University, and spent the weekend there with the students who were learning extramurally and had come for a 'contact' weekend from all over NZ and overseas. The course 'captain' Thom Conroy (who writes award-winning fiction as Thomas Gough) had us all doing an 'Open Mic' on Saturday evening - with wine flowing and loads of food. 

It was a terrific event - very relaxed (as Thom likes it) -- and Thom, Kate and I all read, as well as the students. Kate's poem was the stand-out for me.

I think it is wonderful the way she builds the love and intimacy in the relationship through the simple task of baking a cake. There's a contemplative beauty in every line, and a lovely evocation of child vs. ageing grandmother shown through the grandmother's teaching, the things the grandmother says, the child spreading her fingers on the dark glass. Throughout there is a feeling of inevitability - of a cake rising, the day turning to night, life passing. 

Kate's grandmother has passed away now and although she thought she'd be okay reading the poem, it was still emotional for Kate. The rest of us felt it. It could be any of our grandmothers or our children's grandmothers. It gives me a lump in my throat reading it now. And the last line - fantastic. 

This poem is posted with Kate's permission, it first appeared in Sport. Kate has published an excellent novel called Breakwater which is set in Wellington, and is a teacher of short fiction at Victoria University and book reviewer. Until we went to Palmerston North together I didn't know she was a poet. 

I gestate

Had a great day up at Massey University, Palmerston North, last Thursday working as an author/tutor with a group of extramural creative writing students. I was given a whole hour to talk about my writing  - which felt both indulgent and exciting - and then I led a workshop on writing characters in fiction. 

The theme of my talk was 'I gestate' which I took from a great essay by Andre Dubus called The Habit of Writing. Dubus talks about the need to let stories and characters come to the surface and how that may take some time, some thinking  ... and lots of scribbling in notebooks. 

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it's there. I don't think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

Some discussion of the whole essay here and here. 

Since The Blue came out in 2007, I have indeed been gestating: an adult novel Precarious, a children's novel (nearly finished), a play (in bits and pieces - trying to ignore it) and, just recently, some poems. I read the Massey students extracts from all three novels - it was the first outing for the children's book. Reading work out loud is a marvellous way to see what is good and bad about it as well as helping you believe that what you have is something that's 'alive'.  At the end of the Precarious extract, Massey writer-in-residence Jennifer Compton clapped her hands spontaneously, and told me later how much she liked it. Which helps me to push on. 

Here are the sorts of things I shared with my workshop group on the art of writing characters. And here again is the review of my Massey colleague Bryan Walpert's collection of short stories. It didn't get a lot of air play on the blog when I posted it, and these are great pieces of fiction for students and readers alike.

***

These stories are extraordinary things. Each one is centred around a single character who grieves for a loss that is usually withheld until the story plays out. Memory and the unravelling of it, and the way people try to make some sense of the apparently senseless by remembering - always a faulty business - is at the core of the book. So too is the questionable power of love to save us.

Author Bryan Walpert is an award-winning US writer who is a NZ citizen and teaches creative writing at Massey University, Palmerston North. As such, that makes him a colleague of mine (I teach at Massey Wellington). His poetry collection Etymology was launched last year and his poem No Metaphor kicked off our Tuesday Poem blog.

As his poetry does so wonderfully, Bryan's stories use language and the prism of science and philosophy to try to rein in and explain the vicissitudes of life and the resulting anguish of the people who suffer at its hands. Bryan has said: 'I think for me, as a writer, the way to the heart is often through the head.' Hence the lack of sentimentality, hence the careful, erudite and skilful writing that gives you deep rivers of emotion but without once leaning in from the important task of rowing the boat to trail its hand in the water.

In discussing No Metaphor on Tuesday Poem, I talked about the interior struggle of the man in the poem to both remember and forget, and the same struggle is to be found in Ephraim's Eyes. The characters' thoughts swirl around philosophy or mushrooms or magic tricks as both a distraction and as a way to explain what has happened to them; and in the same way they also tell stories that they believe to be true and that are sometimes clearly fiction. But Ephraim's Eyes is most emphatically not a bunch of cerebral ramblings. The  muscle of the stories is in the well-wrought complex characters who pitch-perfect voices who live ordinary lives alight with detail (in NZ and the US), and undertake work that is both authentic and fascinating.

Whether it be a man damaged by war who owns a magic shop and finds himself teaching tricks to a needy boy, a man whose job is to check billboards for damage but who is wholly taken up with checking the perceived wreck of his own life, a teenage girl who finds numbers beautiful but is diverted into a destructive sexual relationship, a woman with a secret who needs a new cupboard and gets a mycologist in as a housemate to help pay for it, a girl whose Hawkes Bay olive grower step-father is making her uncomfortable, a man who thinks he's the incarnation of the comic book character Flash.


more here

Limber Tongue

Few of the stories one has it in one’s self to speak get spoken, because the heart rarely confesses to intelligence its deeper needs; and few of the stories one has at the top of one’s head get told, because the mind does not always possess the voice for them; and even when the voice is there, and the tongue is limber as if with liquor — loud, lilting and Irish, or soothing and French, liquid and Italian, sweet as the Spanish lisp — where is that second ear? No court commands our entertainments, requires our flattery, needs our loyal enlargements or memorialising lies.

Literature once held families together better than quarrelling. It carved a common ancestry from mere air, peopling an often empty and forgotten past with gods, demons, worthy enemies and proper heroes, until it became largely responsible for that pride we sometimes feel in being Athenian or Basque, a follower or a fan. It’s no small gift, this sense of worth which reaches us ahead of any action of our own, like hair at birth, and makes brilliant enterprises possible.

William Gass

Couldn't resist this - it has been sent out just now in the regular newsletter from the International Institute of Modern Letters here in Wellington which is where I did my Creative Writing MA. Nice to be told literature is 'no small gift' when you're slogging away at home to get down two hundred words you're happy with by close of day.

William Gass's words are also apposite now with the United States waiting on the results of the polls with history ringing in its ears. Also ringing will be the stumbling words, the stories, the slippery language, the pleas, the assertions, and the oratory of politicians. One especially, Barack Obama: he of the 'limber' tongue.

2b or not 2b? Texting might be good for us after all.

Texting has not been the disaster for language many feared, argues linguistics professor David Crystal in the Guardian. On the contrary, he believes it improves children's writing and spelling.

Interestingly, I asked my creative writing students this year at Massey to write text poems on their first day. One job of poetry, after all, is to do away with dross and another is to focus on a clear and tangible expression of the intangible. Texting in a nutshell, really.

They had to write a poem on their phones about a thing they were like and why and then text it to me. The results were revelatory.

There was the young woman who said she was like a rubbish bin because she hoarded unwanted things and was constantly hungry, another who said she was a second hand dress 'Beautifl in al my imperfctins', and another who was a window 'open minded wen I wnt 2 b/Closed minded wen I wnt 2b'.

And this included people who had never written a poem before, dreaded it even. For weeks I thought of them like that: the bin, the dress, the window, the hula hoop, the lightbulb, the radio. Then all the other work intervened along with course requirements and assessments. Life got more complicated.

Going back over the text poems now I think how surprising and beautiful they were.

How true.

They have a wonderful tossed-off, caught-in-the-act energy. They kick aside consonants, elide vowels, and try to do away with the very things they are reliant on to get the message across. They are down to, what Anne Enright calls, their 'clean white bones.'

Whatever else my students wrote over the semester the text poems still shine as some of their best work. They did what texting does best: spoke directly from the mind to the hand to the eye of another, and in embracing metaphor (grudgingly, furiously, curiously) also made a good fist of that thing poetry does best -- expressing the inexpressible.