Tuesday Poem: my stanza's up for the 3rd birthday poem

I've just added my stanza to the Tuesday Poem communal birthday poem - am rather pleased I am number 7. We're doing a kind of jazzy thing there ... so I've picked up sounds and stretched and repeated them - tried some syncopation. Before me is Keith Westwater of Lower Hutt and after me is T Clear of Seattle Washington. How cool is that?

here's my verse...

7.
catch the
(whispers)
it's time to
(latch the window)
catch the 
      grab it! the tail     oh boy



find the rest here. 

And here's a fabulous poem Death of a Bee  by Tuesday Poet Kathleen Jones.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead

Mario Vargas Llosa

... thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.


An extract from Mario Vargas Llosa’s acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The whole thing is free as a pdf download.


My thanks to UK writer Kathleen Jones for spotting this, and for her thoughtful discussion of it (and more quotes) on her blog. I love this about blogs - there you are on an ordinary day, contemplating walking the dog before heading out the door to work at the bookshop, and suddenly BAM - you find something that sends the brain cells in complex, satisfying loops. 


I don't have time to read the whole thing now, but Kathleen's given me a taste and a link and I can come back to it tonight - with a glass of wine - before American Idol.

mesmerising

Excuse me if this looks a little cosy - but after writing a post about Kathleen Jones' bewitching biography of Katherine Mansfield, I remembered Kathleen had reviewed The Blue a couple of months back. It's so very lovely to get a review of my book this late on in its life (it is three years old) - and a review by a writer as talented as Kathleen Jones - and a review in the UK.

Kathleen says some interesting and insightful things - although the comment about the book being 'mesmerising' is still buzzing under my skin (as a word like 'mesmerising' does - independent of its meaning.) And I am doubly delighted that she read The Blue while staying in Kaikoura - just south of where The Blue is set and where whales roam the bays.

I went to Kaikoura with my family to research The Blue. It is one of my favourite places in the world and the trip with my family - my youngest only 8 years old at the time - travelling by train and boat with backpacks, is one of my favourite ever. After Kaikoura, we caught the train up to Picton and a boat to Arapawa Island where The Blue is set. There we stayed for a while exploring one of my other favourite places in the world. How lucky am I.

Here's the review.

The bliss of Kathleen's Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield, The Storyteller by Kathleen Jones (Penguin NZ) is a triumph - I am still reading it and I am well and truly wound tight in its web. For a start the writing is so immediate, and then there are all those 'mysteries' resolved. I just had to share some of it ...

Here's an Extract at the very beginning: 

What, think you, causes me truest joy

Down by the sea – the wild mad storm of waves

The fierce rushing swirl of waters together

The cruel salt spray that blows, that beats upon my face . . .

The song of the wind as I stretch out my arms and embrace it

This indeed gives me joy.

KATHLEEN BEAUCHAMP, 2 MARCH 1906

 The first thing you notice in Wellington is the wind. A full southerly buster was blowing as I drove in around the bays of the harbour, hurling the waves onto the rocks. At the hotel on Tinakori Road, shutters slapped and banged in a crazy percussion, just as Katherine described in one of her earliest stories, 'The Wind Blows'. I recognised the way it blew the stinging dust 'in waves, in clouds, in big round whirls', heard the 'loud roaring sound' from the tree ferns and the pohutukawa trees in the botanic garden, the clanking of the overhead cables for the trolley buses. Clinging to the car door to steady myself, the street map levitating from my grasp, I experienced the exactness of Katherine's images – 'a newspaper wagged in the air like a lost kite' before spiking itself onto a pine tree; sentences blew away 'like little narrow ribbons'.

Tinakori Road, where Katherine was born and where her father occupied progressively larger houses as his status rose, runs along a steep hillside with spectacular views of the city. Above it, a tree- clad slope climbs upwards towards the ridge and below it, houses stagger downhill towards the brief fringe of level ground that edges the circular bay, enclosed by hills.

More here. 

Sixty thousand books and more

THIS WEEKEND SAT 9-5 PM, SUN 10-4 PM Wellington Events Centre


This post is partly for fellow Tuesday Poet and KM biographer Kathleen Jones who is visiting New Zealand from the UK, and is interested in Wellington's magnificent annual 60-thousand book book fair. Kathleen called to say she was in Wellington and could we meet up, so I suggested Saturday after a trip to the fair. 


I have never met her but have had the pleasure of getting to know her via the Tuesday Poem blog - a NZ-created hub where poets from all over post poems on a Tuesday. I also have, to my joy, a copy of Kathleen's brand new biography Katherine Mansfield The Storyteller (Penguin). Here she is on how her book updates what we already know about KM. 


“It’s the only biography to be written since all the documents relating to Katherine and her husband John Murry became available in the public domain. Katherine’s letters and notebooks have all been transcribed and printed and the diaries and letters of John Murry are now also in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Additionally I’ve had the help of the family who still have quite a lot of material relating to both Mansfield and Murry. There’s a lot of new information. It’s significant that most of the leading figures in the story are now dead, so information is less likely to be withheld to protect people.” More from the interview by Tim Jones HERE. 





There's more on Kathleen Jones I've gleaned: she lives in the Lake District with her sculptor husband and has written 11 books especially biographies of women writers like Catherine Cookson, appears to translate Spanish, travels a bit (Italy, Cuba, NZ) and writes poems. And here she is promoting her new book. All rather exotic, really. But on the phone she simply sounds nice and Lake District. 


Kathleen spoke in Wellington this evening to, I hope, a good-sized audience, but unfortunately I had another can't-be-missed meeting so wasn't there. Wonderfully, we have organised to meet the day of the Book Fair. She has to visit KM's birthplace first so isn't up for the all-important early fair forage (it's become a ritual), but later, she might. I wonder how much space she's got in her suitcase . . .