The Poets' Birthday by The Tuesday Poets 2012

The shyest sparrow's supplications in the early evening trees

are a careful arpeggio - each note liberates a flotilla of leaves
fleeting, indeed, left scattered as archipelago in a dew-grass sea.  

The song's begun: feathered entreaties lift from every hedgerow, every

field, join in one great arc of beak and wing and downy plume --

brief benediction for the worker trudging home, a heart-lifted pause

at day's end. Summer's pages fall. Leaf by leaf, they shorten days,

strip bare the trunks, spill forth a concertina of split, sagging plums,

crimson globes -- Demeter's heart strung low against the blue note 

sky. Furrowed fields lie flat beneath the tramp of corn-fed feet.

The scene is set, two candles lit, another year opens a window 

through which we pass in streak of silver, burst of wheels' screech, breath

of horns' bright blasting. Inside, the chink of glass against china,

bubble of laughter tossed from one guest to the next draws us

to warmth, the blissful promise of shared experience. How it swells

the soul's bright plumage! A winking flame copies itself on the clean

slope of the knife before it passes. The reflection flickers: and beyond 

the window frame, a final guest hesitates in mauve-hued shadow, ghost 

of Keats maybe, listening still, reticent, reluctant to eschew 

autumn's arias. And hear now, along the bay, 

the pulse of song ticks out again in joyous iteration, a boy kicks 

a ball against a wall, a sole finch adds bebop syncopation. Gabble, 

and its consistency of warm honey dampen the tenor, the tune -- best

left out in the tang of sharpened daylight. Shadows unwilling to retreat

stand shoulder-to-shoulder and beat the day's thrum chanting come, cold,

come, dark, come firelight, we too have our part. Gladly, watch effulgence fade,

into this gentler glow of murmured crackle and spark-fed thoughts. Each year

is gathered and falls away in a clap of digits, up from nothing to where

we find ourselves surrounded. It's come to this: the riffle of breath, the winking

flame. One is out, then the other. Stay with us, poet, it's time to start over.  

A global birthday poem written line by line by 26 poets from six countries and 12 cities over two weeks: from Tuesday April 3 to April 17 2012. It has been written to celebrate our second birthday. 

The Tuesday Poets are (in order of their lines): Melissa Green, Claire Beynon, Saradha Koirala, Janis Freegard, T. Clear, Catherine Bateson, Renee Liang, Elizabeth Welsh, Alicia Ponder, Tim Jones, Kathleen Jones, Helen McKinlay, Helen Lowe, Eileen Moeller, Orchid Tierney, Susan T. Landry, Keith Westwater, Belinda Hollyer, Harvey Molloy, Bernadette Keating, Andrew M. Bell, Michelle Elvy, Catherine Fitchett, P.S. Cottier, Helen Rickerby, Mary McCallum.

Unable to post this year: Sarah Jane Barnett, Robert Sullivan, Zireaux, Emma McCleary 

It's up on the Tuesday Poem blog, but as a matter of record - and solidarity - I wanted it up here too! Our global birthday poem. It continues to astonish me... the way it unfolded, the richness of the language, the way it feels like it has one voice not 26 voices ... Look at all the poets attached to it! Very cool indeed. More on it here. 

Tuesday Poem: Penny Lane

– she says, I’ll get my hat 

We meet at Heketara Street

by the seawall but sometimes

if I’m early, it’s the lane

with the crabapple tree.

In truth, we meet where we

intersect. Sometimes I get as

far as her gate, she my door.

Penny’s always ripe in red

or orange wool, and old

Molly's at the end

of a Thai scarf, her hips

barely holding her legs in.

I’m scraped together, really,

bits of this and that – mended

boots, Adam’s jacket –

Ruby gasping on the lead.

– she says, there’s this poem

And there’s something in it

about being in labour

and the cabbage tree pom-poms
cheering her on but Penny 

isn’t sure it works. We walk 
under the power lines and the man

on the ladder, and we talk

about cooking cabbage trees.

Before we know it, we’re at the end

of the sealed road and touching

the gate and turning – back past

the car park and the spent condom

and the buses, back past the man

up the ladder and the woman

with the dachshund. At the lane

where we part

– she says, crabapples!

what a shame, Elsie could make

jam with them.  I get home 
and the phone rings. She's lost 
her hat, have I seen it?

I look, but we both know 
it’s not here. Within a week 
or two, she’ll arrive at  Heketara 
Street the hat on her head.

– she’ll say, I picked up a book

and there it was. And

we’ll turn into the wind.

                                  Mary McCallum

I used to treasure these walks with my friend Penny, when we were both writing and needing to talk about it. She left Eastbourne a year ago, so Ruby and I walk this walk on our own now.  I sometimes think I see Penny coming along that lane I think of as her lane. And for months, Ruby would pause and wait a moment where Penny and I used to intersect before moving on. When Penny returns for a visit, we try and do the walk. Hats and wind and all. 

Do please click here to enter the Tuesday Poem hub where our global birthday poem is posted. We had 26 poets from six countries and 12 cities posting a line at a time over a fortnight. It was terrific fun. And now it's done. Visit do. 

Happy Birthday to us. Ra Whanau ki a korua. 

Global birthday poem unfolds

At Tuesday Poem there is a global birthday poem unfolding. Our second birthday, our second global poem. It's an amazing undertaking that does my head in everytime I organise the roster and each time a line goes up. 


In a nutshell, 26 of the 31 Tuesday Poets living in six countries and 12 different cities contribute a line each over 14 days to create a single fabulous poem. Many of us have never met each other, and yet we do it - on trust, and in good heart, because we are a community  and it's our birthday. 

The poem kicked off at one minute past midnight on April 3, 2012 with a line from Boston poet Melissa Green, my Tuesday Poem co-curator Claire Beynon (a kiwi visiting Ibiza, Spain at the time) contributed the second line ten hours later, with Saradha Koirala from Wellington New Zealand posting the third. 


After that we bounced across the globe from Wellington to Canberra to London to Philadelphia to somewhere in Italy to Seattle to Dunedin and more.  I will post the final line at one minute past midnight Monday night from Wellington, NZ. There have been so few glitches - sometimes the poem disappeared off the blog due to some scheduling issues, but it was no biggie. It popped up again in no time at all.... 


And how do we post? We're all administrators for the Tuesday Poem blog, so we log in, add the line, and then add our name to the list of poets at the bottom, before passing the baton to the next poet in this roster.

Our first global birthday poem was Tuesday written last year. This year we've called it Birthday Poem (working title). And it started like this:

"The shyest sparrow's supplications in the early evening trees
are a careful arpeggio - each note liberates a flotilla of leaves
fleeting, indeed, left scattered as archipelago in a dew-grass sea." 

It's many lines past that now. 

Here's what I said on Beattie's book blog last week: 'It's an exciting process watching the lines go up one by one - seeing the thinking behind each line - the language, the line-breaks, where it's left for the next poet to pick it up. It's like watching one poetic mind at work, with each poet like one of the many competing voices that a poet hears as s/he writes: 'break the line there' 'no don't' 'rhyme it' 'don't you dare' 'how about plums to echo plume' 'what are you thinking?' and so on. "

What I love most of all is thinking of the poet who is next on the roster mulling over his/her line - while drinking a coffee in Dunedin, perhaps, or eating dinner in London, or walking past spring bulbs somewhere in Italy ... 

It's Penelope in Canberra at the moment pondering on Catherine Fitchett's line posted from Christchurch. Helen Rickerby tomorrow. Then me. The final poem is published on Tuesday Poem on Tuesday April 17. 

Grass, acid, vanilla: the chemistry of book smells

The Missing Sock

San Francisco Laundry, photo by Mia

My friend snapped this photo and sent it to me yesterday. It's a laundry in San Francisco - and look at the name! It was Mia whose basket of socksand accompanying bag of 'orphan socks' featured in an earlier post here Who by Socks? Which in itself was a sequel to Jenny Bornholdt's brief but brilliant poem Socks posted here prior to that.

So if those two posts were the question, this - thank you dear Mia - is the answer.

Tuesday Poem: Just to Say by Bryan Walpert

I came to that old poem,

folded in the leaf of a book,

and meant merely to take

a peek, like visiting a home

I’d lived a few years in long ago,

curious what had changed,

but of course it was the same,

and I couldn’t help but linger

in that meadow where we still sat

as lovers. The air rippling through

the grass carried a thought

I could nearly catch,

and still hushed the bees,

busy as always laying gold amid

the buds, while the sun slid,

endlessly of course, behind

cherry trees whose petals

fluttered like a feeling

I’d forgotten, as I’d forgotten

the scent of dusk that settled

along azaleas, the pond,

even the blanket somehow

that you had forever spread

beside the river for us to lie upon,

and it was only the foolishness

that seemed new, the kind

you feel when you find

you’ve come late to the obvious,

that even a first-time reader

should have known how soon

the end was approaching when

the jays, weaving shadow braids

between branches, sealed

the seam of the horizon,

descending to wherever it is

our oldest best selves are stored,

so forgive me if I’ve remained

too long in this poem. I’ll leave

you asleep now by the river,

murmuring the memory of my name. 

My friend Bryan Walpert, will be launching his second collection of poetry, A History of Glass at the fabulous Palmerston North City Library this Wednesday 11 April at  7.00 pm, starting with drinks at 6.30 pm at the Bruce McKenzie bookshop next door. The event is free and open to the public, so do get along and take a friend.  

I am wondering if I can get myself up there - a bit of a road trip - a bit of poetry - wind my way home.... I'll see, I have some projects needing attention this week, ones that actually involve getting paid. Hah! Now there's a thing.  

A History of Glass is beside my bed at the moment - and I dip into it regularly - a poem at a time - having read it through in one reading when it arrived in my letterbox. It is a stunning collection, each poem a complex and tasty treat, and I will review it next week. 

Another poem from Bryan's collection featured on my blog here and Bryan's No Metaphor, from a previous collection, was the first poem on the Tuesday Poem blog, so it's a fine thing to reference it this week when we're in the middle of our second birthday. 

There's a global poem going on at TP to celebrate - so far a dozen poets have posted a line each and there are more than a dozen to go, with the final poem posted next Tuesday. Do have a look! It's fun to see where it goes...  

Tuesday Poem: Translucent

Crossing the Rimutakas, going home,

and the scraped landscape is in the thick

of it – although thick isn’t the word, really

– tender the cloud stroking the cut earth,

tender the light as it feels its way through.

All is gauzy. Filtered. The blue

of the sheep truck we lose on the bends

the only colour. See, Helen, you can

touch clouds. Live in them, even. Tenderly,

we make our way up and over. So

light, so lit, we’re luminous. It’s like flying,

and all we talk about on the way down. 

Mary McCallum

Flax by Mary McCallum

On this, Tuesday Poem's second birthday, here is the final poem in my book The Tenderness of Light which, I am delighted to say, is fast selling out. You can watch me read it in the video at the top of the left sidebar here. It's right at the end...

I like this poem. I wrote it quickly but had been thinking about it for weeks - the best sort, really. They have a lightness of being these heady devil-may-care poems. The others - written slowly after a burst of inspiration - can do your head in. 

The Helen in the poem is mentioned in the first poem in the book, too. She's crazy about clouds, makes them, wants to live in them, and curated the fabulous exhibition Translucent Landscapes of which my poetry was a part. 

What I love in Translucent is the feeling of joy and family and nature and home. 

Now do go to the Tuesday Poem hub to see the excitement of the global birthday poem unfolding over two weeks. The first line is up this morning and others will follow. Very exciting! 


We're two! And it started here! I can't quite believe we've got to this. But we have. I am so grateful to all the Tuesday Poets who join me each week, especially Claire Beynon - artist, writer, angel. 

Finally, Happy Birthday to Melissa Green Tuesday Poet, and to little Carter who is one today and sometimes comes to play. 

Adrienne Rich public intellectual and poet dies

Described as one of America's foremost public intellectuals, award-winning poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, has died aged 82.

'A poet of towering reputation and towering rage [who] brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century" says the New York Times. Rich published more than 20 collections of poetry as well as essays, articles and lectures.

More here at Bookman Beattie who links to an article at The Guardian.

Tuesday Poem: Sycamore Tree

see me see me

by the sycamore tree

each child a propeller

sorry each child has a

propeller and is throwng

it up and the dead seeds

spin and spin and spin

& they shriek my

little ones & pick up another

one & anothe one & spin & spin

& spn sory I was right

at th beginning each child

is a propeller & I

stand at th still point on

th warm path & th world

spins round me shoutng

& whoopng & spittng

its ends tied up in its

beginnings & bits & pieces

lost in the spinnng

I know yu’re watching us

frm a room with a desk

by the window usualy we

jst pass by sometimes u wave

today we’ve stopd here right

n front f you

but I can’t move the childrn on

not while they’re spnnng

like little propellers like

little worlds

fallng over & gulping &

laughing & spinning agin & I

& I know you’re watching

can see you’re there frm

the way the light settles

inside th glass & I

& I guess u must be writng

& I have no idea what it is

you write bt I wish I could see

those whol words those

complete sentences laid out

neatly on a page like seedlngs

in soil with all

their beginnngs & end-

ings &  all their tendril possibilities

I can – shh – see the hush

around you – smell the

coolness of your room – feel

the pen in my hand rubbing

that callus I've had since

primer 2 & I pic up

a handful of seeds throw

them highr than the childrn

cn go faster than the children

cn go & the childrn

fall ove themslves & ove me

& they shriek

do it agen do it agen &

I’m maddened with

the spinnng & the shriekng

& the sun & th warm path

& the seeds in m hands &

th vegetable love

I hav for thm & I want nthng

els right thn

nthng else wll do but somthng

happens wth th sun cmng

throu the leaves & fallng

on the glass & I see

your face in th window lit

frm brow t chin stretchd

in its own wild shriek  

& I throw the sycamor seeds

one  mor  time as high as

they can go & wish

Mary McCallum

I was sorting through things the other day and found an old poem I don't remember writing called Sycamore Tree. It's scrawled on the page as if I barely had time to write it, which I didn't with two small children - which is what I had then.  What I wrote was skimpy and traditional in its language and form. It captured a moment. I decided to write it again yesterday - and this is what came out - the poem behind the poem, the real poem, winded and spinning. And the wish at the end? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Do check out Tuesday Poem this week. Such a stunning long poem by a poet doctor and a write-up by Tuesday Poet Renee Liang. Worth every second you spend reading it. 

Plums and things

A lovely post on my book has popped up on Fiona Kidman's website - along with a recipe for the little plum cakes which I baked once when Fiona and our mutual friend Maggie Rainey-Smith came for coffee. It's a Lois Daish recipe I've had for forever and I used just-picked plums off our burgeoning tree. And now Lois - alerted to it - wants a copy of Tenderness. Which fills me with joy (no plums in it though! only apricots).

Lois Daish was such a hero of mine when the children were small, her Listener recipes and advice on cooking a highlight of my week. Everything was simple, sensible, heart-warming, delicious, useful. I was devastated when the column stopped. One thing she said that has been gold with our family, is to let children cook and to happily clean up their mess until they get to love cooking, then gradually introduce the idea of cleaning up the mess. Her point being that too many kids get put off cooking seeing it as a chore.

It's worked brilliantly with mine. Both my sons have a night on the roster each and it's heaven. This week, middle son made Goan Prawn Curry and eldest made lasagne. How good is that? THANKS LOIS.

And thanks, too, to Fiona, who is a loyal friend of the first order. I love her post most because it is a record of that friendship, that cup of coffee with plum cakes, the way she buys my poetry book for herself and her friends and takes the time to visit the exhibition associated with it and to write about it for her website. THANKS FIONA.

Tuesday Poem: The Problem of Descendants by Tim Jones

They reassort your genes

and sort through your things when you're gone.

They ask: why did he keep that ridiculous hat, those

palaeolithic music magazines?

Half to the tip, half to the Sallies,

plus a small urn on the mantelpiece,

three photos, the fading diaries

they can’t quite bear to throw away.

They remember you at birthdays, Christmas.

You recede into scrapbooks,

the photos growing foxed, your children's children

forgetting why they know your name.

File formats are rendered obsolete.

Anthologies go out of print.

In a provincial library, behind a rack of shelves,

your last book battles silverfish.

Ashes, vanity. The years

scroll past like autocues. Yet,

scavenging the ruins, or terraforming Mars,

still someone somewhere has your nose.

From Men Briefly Explained (Interactive Press) published with permission.

This poem keeps popping into my head - perhaps because noses are strong identifiers in my family: a certain Grecian nose that comes from my father's side and has turned up diluted in me and my daughter, and in full flight in my eldest son. 

I like the ordinary feel of this poem at the start - the stuff that's so familiar - trotting down the page, and I like the way its held together and made compelling by strong sounds that echo within stanzas e.g. 'shelves' followed in the next line by 'silverfish' and then 'ashes'. Then the whole thing pushes out of the up-close-and-provincial with the wonderful image of time passing (the scrolling autocues) and then kicks off into the future and outer space before circling back and zooming in on the almighty inherited nose. 

I laughed out loud when Tim read the poem at Rona Gallery while on his poetry tour  - it was a great finish to his reading segment, and you'll find this sort of humour and playfulness and smartness throughout the book, along with poems of a more serious bent. Looking through my blog posts, I realise I missed Men Briefly Explained off my Best of 2011 list, when I shouldn't have. Apologies Tim. Now rectified. To order the book go here. 

Do check out a terrific post at the Tuesday Poem hub written by T Clear of Seattle about one of her fellow poets. 

The Tenderness of Light, the reading

Posted on Translucent Landscapes this morning:

The reading of my book The Tenderness of Light at the opening of Translucent Landscapes was recorded on video by Mike Ting, and I edited it with images from the book and the place the poems talk about: our property in the Wairarapa over summer. Making the video has felt like an extension of the book-making and the poetry.

It's been a challenge - watching myself and listening to my own voice reading over and over (!), learning how to delete unwanted sounds/interjections etc and putting the video together with images that are evocative without being dominant -- and by that, I mean evocative of both place and book. I feel I could improve on the reading and hope to do so in the Wairarapa before long.

Meanwhile, Tenderness is selling well to poets, poetry readers, friends and family (thank you!)  ... Here is one happy customer! Copies are going off to San Francisco and Boston and London, to Dunedin and the Wairarapa, and many places in between. Wonderfully, I have gone over the 50 mark in terms of sales, so just under 50 more to go.

You can still buy the books from Translucent Landscapes at 75 Ghuznee St, Wellington until March 22. I am there tomorrow (Sunday) 11 am - 6 pm, if you want to talk about the poems and have me write your name in the book. They are already signed and numbered. Or click the button in the sidebar of this blog. Or email makaropress@gmail.com. Details below.

The Tenderness of Light 

Poetry, signed limited edition of 100 books. Six poems.28 pages. Garamond font on uncoated 100 gsm Munken paper with flax photograph on Gilclear insert, 240 gsm Munken cover, and hand-sewn linen thread binding. $15

Tuesday Poem: Summer

Toenails freshly pink, washing on the line held by the last
of the pegs, apricots the colour that can only be called
apricot (perfect for picking but rotten by noon). Bees sip
the lavender, the dog has – after a small performance –
swallowed her pill, the girls are up at last cracking eggs
for pancakes. Ian’s making coffee. Blitz of the grinder,
chuckle of fledglings on the roof wanting breakfast – one
being taught how to fly – an asterisk of a cloud dissolving
in the time it takes to walk to the compost bin. Summer
here – a held – breath –         Now a thousand trees
exhale – now the deep greening that sussurates, resuscitates
– this! pixilated sunlight – leaves startled into silver.


Mary McCallum

Another one from The Tenderness of Light (see previous post). For more Tuesday Poems go to our excellent hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com. Cheers!

Tuesday Poem: The Tenderness of Light (my new book)

Mary McCallum

1. The Tenderness of Light

poetry, signed limited edition of 100 books. Six poems.28 pages. Garamond font on uncoated 100 gsm Munken paper with flax photograph on Gilclear insert, 240 gsm Munken cover, and hand-sewn linen thread binding. $15 



This is how The Tenderness of Light is written up in the catalogue of the Fringe Festival exhibition Translucent Landscapes which opened on Thursday March 1.  


At 5.30 pm that night, a hundred or so people crowded into the abandoned optometrist's premises on Ghuznee Street to celebrate the work of our 'pop-up' community of nine visual artists, one composer and myself. 







The artists and their work: installation art, photography, oils, drawings, videomedia and more, were there to interact with and enjoy (see end of blog for images), and at the appointed time, I stood in front of the gathering and read The Tenderness of Light in its entirety! After that, Iain Gordon's composition Ice was performed with him on mandolin, my son Paul on guitar and Slava Fainitski on violin. 


Gorgeous. All of it. And not just the art or poems or music that were out there in front of people, but the community we'd formed - the work we'd done together to get the exhibition up and running, and the work we'd done in our own discipline that bounced off everyone else's work, in one way or another, and off the place itself. We are all in awe of curator Helen Reynolds who made it happen. 

 


I sold about 20 copies of my book that night, and each sale was an unexpected and unbelievable gift. In all the writing and designing and printing and handbinding, I hadn't thought what it would be like for someone to open Tenderness and read it and want to keep it, or for someone to hear me read and want to own the poems to read again. Yes, I've sold fiction, but this is different - far more personal, an offering of self. Perhaps, too, because I've waited so long for this. 


Of course my lovely family and friends bought the book without even so much as opening it - and thank God for those people, how could a writer or artist exist without them? - but I was deeply touched when I stopped reading
and a man who owns a barn in the Tararua foothills brought a copy of Tenderness to me to write his name in it (they're already signed). He said my poems about the Wairarapa - just over the hill from him - spoke to him and encouraged him to write. Then there was the elderly woman who squeezed my hand when she took the book from me, and the violinist in the trio who clutched a copy to his chest as he left. The next day a woman with flame red hair bought a copy to send to friends in San Francisco, because she wanted something New Zealand. 

The Translucent Landscapes exhibition is on at 75 Ghuznee Street, Wellington from March 1-22, open daily 11am -6 pm. Free entry. The Tenderness of Light is available there or you can email makaropress@gmail.com to order a copy from me direct. 


















Below are some photos from the exhibition, but first here is my lovely team of bookbinders who worked away like elves into the night. 
That's me, grinning away at the back with dark hair and pale shirt, on my left (going round the table) Alexandra, Carrie, Helen (the host and bookbinder extraordinaire wearing the red shawl), Issy (my daughter), Fifi, Ayliffe, Heather. 

Legs by Poppy Lekner from her Lightness of Being series

Installation by Kath Joyce-Kellaway

Clouds by Helen Reynolds

Video by Mike Ting