Tuesday Poem: Bill Murray reads Poems to Construction Workers at Poets House

I can't believe I went to Battery Park in New York only months before they opened an all-new Poets House. I missed it: a house dedicated to poets and poetry with a collection of over 50,000 volumes — including books, journals, chapbooks, audio and video tapes, and digital media.

Before it moved to Battery Park in 2009, Poets House was in a loft in Soho for 24 years, a self-proclaimed home for all who read and write poetry.

Bill Murray, it seems, is one of those. Here he is reading poems to the construction workers on the Poets House site back in May 2009 when it was nearly finished. Watch their faces when he reads the Emily Dickinson poem (find it at 2'38 on the movie) I Dwell in Possibility! And they applaud him when he finishes! It starts like this:

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

continues here

Another poem Murray reads is Poets Work by Lorine Niedecker (at 1'47) which starts 'Grandfather/ advised me:/ learn a trade...'  and can be read here - it's brilliant and short, although it would have worked better for a bunch of poets than builders.

My son has just started a building apprenticeship after four years of on-again-off-again work and bouts of unemployment. He's all signed up. Those two sentences, now that's poetry. 


Click on the Tuesday Poem QUILL in the sidebar for more Tuesday Poems. 


Postscript
Just discovered a video of the Poets House dedication in 2009 with poems and song. More Bill Murray! And a terrific poem by Kay Ryan 'Lighthouse Keeping' at 2'13, which can be read on the page here.

Within every story another story is hidden

"Within every story another story is hidden, autonomous and unfolding though scarcely noticed except now and then, inadvertently, when, just as with a slip of the tongue a woman exposes a bit of the turbulent life under way in her unconscious mind, a rat scurries through an open window with a doll’s head in its mouth, or a man shouts a couplet from a passing bus ('o queens of urbanity, kings of the crush / let’s sing of convenience, importance, and plush')." Lyn Hejinian • Conjunctions

I use this quote a lot when I'm marking student fiction. I love it. Award-winning writer Craig Cliff (Man Melting), when he talked to the Massey first year creative writing students this year, had another way to describe these slips in a story when another story peeks through. He talked about layers. Sadly, I missed his lecture but one alert student in my tutorial reported back to me what he said.

The idea of layers works well to understand what a story should do I think. I immediately visualised geological layers -- maybe because I walk alot and earth and what it does beneath the feet, interests me. There's the grass and earth at the surface, dig down and there may be clay or sand or stones - and on you go through all the various geological layers - each one differently formed with a unique history and holding evidence of the impact of man and animals and movements of climate and earth, then, if you're lucky, you may come upon shards of pottery and glass, a bone or two...

I said to my students, it's as if you're walking along inside a story, and beside the path, the surface is scraped away to show the darker earth beneath, nothing much, not enough to notice; and then there's a small hole, barely there, big enough for a tent pole. Easy to miss, but you register its presence without realising. Your attention is on the walk, and it's a lovely day out there. Still further on - there's a ragged hole where a dog has buried its bone and dug it up again and left it there for some reason. It nearly trips you up.  You can see the layer of clay under the earth, it's thick and yellow like plasticine. You stop and look at the bone, a little annoyed, briefly interested. What sort of bone is it?

A little further on, there is another scraping the size of a shoe showing the earth beneath the tussock grass. It puzzles you - didn't you see one of these before? What's made them? Puzzling, you continue on past a manhole with a man in it fixing the pipes underground. This gets your attention. You can hear him under there, see flashes of his torch, his tools hitting something - concrete? stone? You wonder, what would it be like to work underground like that? How deep he goes?

You keep walking. Another small hole for a tent pole. Strange. But you are almost upon the moat the children dug around a fort they were building in the school holidays. You remember them doing that, three boys and a dog, and all the wood they gathered from under the pines, you stop a moment and admire the collapsing fort and the depth of the muddy moat, think how wonderful that children are still building forts these days. Then you see it - stuck at the bottom of the moat, in a layer of dark stony earth, is a child's jandal. You wonder if you should fish it out and decide not to. It's muddy after all, you have nothing to wipe your hands on. And you must get on.

Finally, you reach a hole the size of a pond filled with water from the heavy rainfall the day before. You can't see the bottom because it's deep, and the water is murky with wet clay and soil and rotting plant life.  There's something floating there, though. It's pale and too big to be a stone or a shoe ...  It all comes back to you: the scrapes of earth, the holes, the hole with the bone, the man underground (was he working? or doing something else?), the moat and the jandal, and now this...

Which is only the beginning to the holes that must be dug and discovered and filled in and forgotten and found again to make all the layers of a story ... It's not easy work, but someone has to do it.

Tuesday Poem: Lassoed

Loose on the beach, the dog and I, and drawn up beside
the still pool of fresh water. Spilt down the hillside, it's piped

here, pools here. Two silent ducks on the surface. We watch
the silent ripples they make. Limitless. Rebounding. The way

the ripples become light and climb them, ring by ring by ring,
until the ducks are lassoed. One is dull, the other glossy.

The dog moans and pulls. Out on the edge, beyond the pool,
beyond the beach stones, I can hear the matey voice of the man

with the big red backpack talking to Bill with the jandals.
I can hear the jandals. I can hear the King Charles Spaniel yap

in his garden, one yap every three seconds. I can hear the tap
of the sticks of the woman who had the stroke, I can hear the feet

of the woman with lean legs and white-blonde hair - she
has a particular way of running. I can hear the shuffle of the man

who walks as if he's leaning into a strong wind. In the distance,
coming towards us, I make out a family: a man, a child with thin

shoulders, a woman reaching for the child, a dog running rings
around them. The ducks break away, swim, consider flight.

My dog and I walk again. Each stone is separate and porous in the light.
I make them crunch and spatter. I rattle the dog chain. Itself a kind of lasso:

the dog at one end, me the other. Noisily, we re-enter the beach
from wherever it is we have gone. Still, I hear the sea sighing. I hear the sea sighing.



                                             
                                                                    Mary McCallum


Another Tuesday and a poem 'found' from notes in my Moleskine (posted yesterday, revised today). Please go to the Tuesday Poem hub to read a poem about a birthday goat by Kendrick Smithyman.You won't be disappointed.  And then the TP sidebar has some more treats.... Just click on the quill to the left.

Tuesday Poem: Baxter-Curnow Band Live At Hyde Park 1969 by Tim Jones

Nobody smiles on the gatefold sleeve
(though that might be a smirk from the drummer) -

this is art, not pop, from the summer when love
curdled to discontent.

It surely wasn't easy,
playing behind those two:

Curnow always demanding, Baxter
perfecting the prophet's penetrating stare.

Four sides, nine tracks,
no singles and no flash photography.

Over-long, we'd call it nowadays, overblown -
cowbell and mellotron, zither, Hammond organ,

Marshall stacks and London Philharmonic;
odd metres, broken rhythms, two voices

straining for harmony, their differences
as much musical as personal.

Within six months it would all be over,
Allen going solo, Jim

in a different hemisphere, getting his head
together in the country.

Let this stand as their monument,
these two vinyl slabs

of pretension and achievement.
Lift the tone arm. Lower the needle.

Be transported back
to granny glasses, new-mown grass,

two voices high and rising
above the restless crowd.

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

Tim Jones is a Tuesday Poet who lives in Wellington. His new collection is out and about on the internet and is starting to make its way into NZ bookshops. In fact it's on a national tour with Keith Westwater's Tongues of Ash, or rather the poets are, and the bookshop where I work Fridays - Rona Gallery - is hosting the Hutt Valley leg next Friday at 6 pm. A POETRY tour. How wonderfully rock music. Next thing they'll be playing at the Westpac Stadium.

I'll be at the Rona Gallery gig, not least because I read Tim's manuscript some months ago and provided one of the many glowing recommendations on the cover. It goes like this:

Tim Jones' new collection holds men up to the light with poems that are intimate and playful, smart and satirical. He focuses on the rituals and carapaces of men and the relevance of that gender in the future. Men Briefly Explained is an engaging and provocative read.

I know Tim enough to know he likes music and poetry and has a sharp sense of humour and likes to be playful with facts -- imagining real people in unusual settings, for example. So it seems perfectly fitting that the poem I've posted here has two of the fathers of NZ poetry gigging together in Hyde Park in the year - I think I'm right - Baxter started writing the Jerusalem Sonnets. Which seems more than a little audacious.

It surely wasn't easy,
playing behind those two: 

Curnow always demanding, Baxter
perfecting the prophet's penetrating stare.

I love these two stanzas which seem to refer to both the other NZ poets writing at the time, and those who came after them chronologically, including Tim himself.

I'm sure there are a raft of allusions in the poem that I'm not getting, but the great thing about a poem like this is the way it sends you off to explore. I've read a bit about James K. Baxter in the past but not much about Curnow, and don't know enough about how they got on (or didn't). However, I did meet Curnow once, when he won the Queen's Medal for Poetry. I was a young radio reporter and went to Parliament to report on it.

I was charmed by the tall thin poet with the twinkling eyes who seemed very modest and more than a little emotional about his win. And the poet's poems charmed me too. Before I interviewed Allen Curnow, I bought one of his lovely books and got him to sign it.

There's an interesting piece here in the Britannica online about the time in NZ poetry Tim Jones writes of in Baxter-Curnow Band - an extract below. When I have a minute, I'll go a little further afield. Before you go, remember to visit Tuesday Poem itself, to read a post by Tim Jones himself of another very interesting poet: Majella Cullinane.

Britannica online on NZ poets:

By the end of the 1950s—when his second and more comprehensive anthology, The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), was about to appear—Curnow was already a major figure on the literary landscape against whom younger poets felt the need to rebel. The decade of the 1960s, however, was dominated by Baxter’s poetry and charismatic presence. Baxter was a very public and prolific writer whose Collected Poems (1979), which appeared after his death (in 1972 at age 46), contained more than 600 pages; it was said that possibly three times as many additional poems remained in unpublished manuscript. He was effortless and natural in verse—a modern Byron—while Curnow was all conscious skill and contrivance. 

It was in the year of Baxter’s death that Curnow began publishing again, extending his reputation at home and, through the 1980s, establishing a reputation abroad. Curnow received many awards, culminating in the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, a rare honour he shared with such poets as W.H. Auden,Robert Graves, and Ted Hughes.

Tuesday Poem: Love Poem for Mark by Airini Beautrais

Mark follow your heart.
Over seas to the girl
who hung all your doors.
A floating dream
is better than sinking awake.
It is time the great apes
reconsidered the trees.
A world of wood is waiting
in bins and garages.
To be fastened by nail and trunk.
To be three sided.
To move in the muscle of the wind.

_______
Airini told me once that I could do whatever I liked with her poems. So here's another one from her collection 'Western Line.'  They get their hooks into you these Airini poems. No, that's not right, they circle around, touching my elbow, tickling my feet. So I think, where's that book gone? And I get up to go and find it. It's in the upstairs study.

As Mark is bidden to do, Airini floats outside of the usual stuff of poetry - this is a romantic poem but in a fairytale way rather than a cheesy 'romantic' way. She writes often and unselfconsciously of hearts, especially young men's hearts, and travelling and trees. Airini watches people a lot, and loves them. This is her skill.

I'm not quite sure I get this poem, in fact, but I like it all the same. You can read some of the other Love Poems here (there are more - and Curses and Tricks and Charms!)

Then do go to the Tuesday Poem hub where Janis Freegard is editor and her poet this week is Wellington poet Viv Plumb with a very Wellington poem!

Tuesday Poem: After the Tsunami

For Japan 2011

So, the obliteration of the snow –

and with it the iteration of this thing

we know: ‘this too will pass’ –

the sweet lives, the sour lives, their 

sweet-and-sour obligations, their 

trappings, brought down 

by a wall of water, blanketed now.

In time - always time - lifted from
the winter vault, 

washed, caressed, and laid to rest 

where the earth breathes fresh

again. We know only what we know.

We know not whence the water, 

we know not why the snow. 

Mary McCallum

I have been 'collecting' my poems together for various publications and applications and in the hope of doing more with them, and I realise I write too many poems about personal tragedy and disasters of various kinds. Here's another one. For more Tuesday Poems click on the quill in the sidebar. 

Yearning and the epiphany in fiction: Robert Olen Butler

"James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means "a shining forth." He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel.

What I would suggest is that there are two epiphanies in any good work of fiction. Joyce's is the second, the one often called the climax of crisis of a story. The first epiphany comes very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. The reader responds in a deep visceral way to that first epiphany -- and that's the epiphany missing from virtually every student manuscript I've read.

It is an element also, of course, missing from much published fiction. Various stories you read may leave you a little cold, distanced -- you may admire, maybe you have a kind of "smart" reaction -- but nothing resonates in the marrow of your bones, and the reason is that the character's yearning is not manifest.

This lack is interesting, because writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction -- entertainment fiction, let's call it, genre fiction -- have never forgotten this necessity of the character's yearning ....  The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other. But that there must be yearning the genre writers never forget. We do.

Desire is the driving force behind plot. The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfil that yearning. The character will respond to the force in some way, go round or through or over or under it, and continue the pursuit. The dynamic beneath the story is plot: the attempt to fulfil the yearning and the world's attempt to thwart that."

Extract from, 'From Where You Dream: the Process of Writing Fiction' by Robert Olen Butler.

I have been reading about fiction and how it works because I am marking Honours papers in creative writing and the end of year portfolio arrives soon, because I am working with first year students on fiction after weeks of poetry, because this year I have been forcing my first years to buy notebooks and to observe the world and write it down and share it and to use it every week, because a student turned an average story into something with real potential using an observation of dead flowers in a vase - the look of death, the smell, the way they turned a place loved into a place less welcoming; because a student said defiantly the other day that she 'likes cheesy', because we're doing PLOT this week and PLOT is tricky.

The two epiphanies. Thinking about them has taken me back to my novel The Blue. I know exactly where the epiphany comes near the end, and I am reminded again of the shock of that:  it came as much as a surprise to me as it did to Lilian. And I'd say there was an epiphany near the beginning - a meal of fish pie, the family eating together, the simple stuff of family, the thing she'd chosen -- but really it's a little way in, and is it really about what she yearns for? When I think about an epiphany right near the beginning, one based on yearning, I need to pause a moment, and I have a couple of false starts.

I realise eventually that it is where Lilian emerges from feeding the chickens (a responsibility/crowded/demanding/society of sorts) and looks down from her home at the beauty of the place she loves (and fears) - the deep water Sounds - 'drowned valleys' where the land feels for a handhold - all that expanse of water is quite simply purity and beauty and freedom and escape from familial responsibilities and the demands of love.

This is evoked a little later on when she's out fishing with her son and looking back at the island where they live, and which holds their whole complicated history, and she says something about liking to go out on the boat and fish because things look different from out there. I knew all this instinctively when I was writing the novel, but hadn't thought of it the way Olen Butler puts it. I certainly hadn't focused on the need to have the epiphany based on yearning near the start to orient and engage the reader.

This is wonderful stuff. I realise my favourite readers like Alice Munro do the epiphanies (two of them) exquisitely. That is what I read them for.  All very useful for teaching plot. Clearly, my student with the dead flowers in a vase needs an earlier epiphany with strong sensual details, and she doesn't. And very useful for writing my own fiction too...

The next chapter of Olen Butler's book is called 'Cinema of the Mind', and I will discuss it here next week sometime.

Tuesday Poem: So sweet, so cold

The thing is, and this
is the thing,

you think you know
a person, then

you turn up one day
and she’s

on the phone.
Tucking

it under her chin
she gestures for you

to follow, opens the freezer,
takes your hand, places on

the palm a single lolly
heart. Closing

your fingers around it with hers,
she takes another for herself

and leaves you alone,
aniseed on your tongue --

cold, very cold.

There's a tin of catfood on
the kitchen bench, a half-made

pie, a list of things to buy,
a child's drink bottle (pink).

You can tell by the way
the conversation’s going

that when you’ve finished
the heart, she’ll still be

talking, and you’ll have
to go. A half wave,

extravagant eyebrows,
pointing at the wrist. It’s

easy enough to find the bag,
between the frozen

peas and a haunch of beef.
You say later you were

in two minds:
maybe it would be kind

to leave a note
like that guy

with the plums.
But you couldn't

find paper
or pen


Mary McCallum

Another old poem given a facelift - old as in sitting on the computer for a little under a decade. Happy with it now, and thrilled too that my poem 'Bidding' posted last week has been selected for an upcoming edition of Poems in the Waiting Room - a fantastic project that began, I think, in the UK, and has been taken up in NZ with gusto by Ruth Arnison.  I have also been asked by another poetry visionary, Mark Pirie, to send some poems to him for an upcoming edition of Broadsheet.  Must get onto that. All pretty bloody exciting. 


Go and visit the Tuesday Poem hub and find a whole host of other wonderful poems in the sidebar there. 

Tuesday Poem: Bidding

My friend finds the dresses on Trademe, they’re
hung on a door or laid out tragically on a bed,
near an exercycle or a half-drunk cup of tea.
She shows me the wedding gowns – the deleted
faces, the arms spread like hostage victims,
buy now $80. Not that she wants one. She’s
after something in a floral, with bodice,
pleats, buttons of mother-of-pearl.
Each time she bids, it is an act of liberation:
wresting the dress from the cheap duvet,
from the hands of the woman who’s ballooned,
from the disenchanted wife. The packets arrive
in the arms of the courier man who whistles
the Marseillaise, and stays a moment too long
on the doorstep. She can’t wait to rip
them open, watch the dresses tumble out,
a garden right there on the table, but no
whiff of rose or lavender, the scent
is old duvet. Straight away,
she feels the seams, tugs and tugs the buttons,
washes by hand with Sunlight Soap, drapes them
in the garden in the sunshine to breathe. At dusk,
they come inside to the bedroom to join the others.
They have a lot to talk about.


Mary McCallum


Do pop to the Tuesday Poem hub for a fantastic video of poet Rives and his poem 'Rives controls the internet' selected by Sarah Jane Barnett. And a host of other wonderful Tuesday Poems in the sidebar. 

Violin Lessons by Arnold Zable

This is my Radio NZ review of a collection of stories Violin Lessons (Text) by Australian Arnold Zable of Greek/Polish Jewish descent. They are true stories, written 1970-2011, peopled by those who've lived or continue to live in places like Iraq, Poland, Greece, Germany, Vietnam, Estonia -- refugees, immigrants, people displaced, dispossessed, devastated.

Zable is a human rights advocate and performance storyteller, and I met him at the Christchurch writers' festival a few years back.

Many of the stories in Violin Lessons are linked back to Zable's family history -- his mother was a Polish Jew whose family ran in terror from their burning village in WW II, and all are linked by music. As Zable explains it,  music "comes unbidden when all else fails us", awakens memory and feeling, restores order, is an exorcism, an act of defiance in a partisan song, a lullaby to comfort a child.

From the stories:

'You get inside music and the music gets inside you. You see? There is no politics in it. Only music.'

Regarding Egyptian diva Umm Khultum: 'each performance was an act of renewal – building in intensity to an exalted state known as tarab …'

“There was a time when language and song were one, when to speak was to sing, a cry of rage against an unforgiving sea, an impassive sky.”

This is a powerful collection that builds its power story by story. Many of them shave set up camp in my head especially the story of Iraqi refugee Amal Basry and 'Threnody' about the death of Zable's nephew.

More details in the review. 

–       

Whitcoulls withdraws from NZ bookscan - Bookman Beattie calls for boycott

Graham Beattie, former publisher and bookseller, leading book blogger and arch supporter of the NZ book industry, is furious. His blog's banner headline today is: "Whitcoulls pull the plug and let down the whole NZ book trade."

Nielsen Bookscan has advised that "Whitcoulls will stop contributing sales data to the NZ Bookscan panel from Week 37" -- which is next week. Nielsen Bookscan uses book-buying statistics from a panel of NZ booksellers from Whitcoulls through to independent booksellers to show trends in book sales. These are vital for the book industry in making strategic decisions about publishing, promoting, getting support for and selling NZ and overseas titles. 

The Nielsen statistics are also used to draw up the weekly bestsellers list published by Booksellers NZ. This list influences many New Zealanders in the books they buy. As a bookseller myself, I know this for a fact. (I work Fridays at Eastbourne's Rona Gallery.)

In the same way many people choose the wine with the gold and silver award stickers, so they often select books that are already selling well because there's less risk involved and the outcome is more predictable. The book will at some level be a worthwhile read and the $30, $40 plus investment won't be wasted. Without the input of stats from bookselling giant Whitcoulls, the Nielsen scan and resulting bestsellers lists will have less meaning and less impact here. What will buyers do? Look at the greater safety of the overseas bestsellers? Where does that leave NZ books?  

Graham Beattie: "This is a very sad day for the NZ book trade and The Bookman suggests that Whitcoulls are being hugely irresponsible by withdrawing their participation in the Nielsen BookScan programme. Shame on you Ian Draper. (Whitcoulls MD)

I for one shall register my dismay and disappointment by never buying a book at Whitcoulls again. If enough book buyers also take this action then the absence of their sales figures would become irrelevant."

Auckland University Press’s Sam Elworthy: “Whitcoull’s lack of participation in BookScan is very disappointing for the whole book industry really.”

Publishers' Association NZ President Kevin Chapman: "I have told Ian that I consider it no less than industry vandalism. It doesn’t take us back to the Dark Ages, but it certainly gives us less light to see our way ahead.”

Boycotting Whitcoulls is one way to fight back. I don't go there anyway, so I'm happy to join Graham's crusade, and urge other book buyers to do the same. Nielsen's advises, that as of next week the NZ panel for the bookscan will include the following retailers:

Dymocks

K Mart

LS Travel Retail

Paper Plus

The Warehouse

Independent – general, specialist and Internet retailers

                                                 If you're got a choice, pick one of those. 

Tuesday Poem: Adrift

Mad Mary sits beside

the Buller River

talking talking talking.

She’s lucid as a bird call -- 

She’s opaque as a bird call -- 

Down the river she
hunts the greenstone

she lost all those years

ago -- its pale green
horizons the dreams 
she can’t remember.

He gave it

she wore it 
she lost it 


like that. Adrift on the river,
the sun slapping her back.
Now her sleeves are pushed

to the elbow, her hands
bitter cold. The children
used to help

but they’re long since
gone. There’s only
her now, green water

and enough light for catching
by. 

The kahurangi, oh -- 
The kahurangi, oh -- 

The river, she says, 

see
it's sheltering stones.

                                            Mary McCallum



Kahurangi is a highly prized translucent greenstone or pounamu. In my experience, pounamu pendants are attracted to river water, they often end up back where they started, which is in part the trigger for this poem. Only in part.

Do check out the Tuesday Poem hub - I am editor this week and I've chosen a film of US poet Deborah Garrison reading four poems about New York linked to 9/11. 

Flash hakas: this is New Zealand

Can't stop watching these flash hakas popping up all over Auckland with the Rugby World Cup starting this week. They give me the shivers. Love these guys in their high vis jackets and shorts and headphones leaping in, and the way they mosey off at the end. Where else in the world eh?

Tuesday Poem: Fifteen and flying (on a Honda 250)

straight the road
straight as long as
any road to
anywhere
as black
blacker still
with my eyes
tight shut
arms tight
around
his waist
fingers tightly
interlaced
my chin on
the cold
of a leather
back
and the air
as cold
as I
could bear
and
the speed of
that bike
more than
I could take
long
that road
long as
straight as
any road to
anywhere
and all the
homes
shut tight
              at that bend
                 at the end
before it takes the hill
I leaned my
cheek, and
held a
breath
and out of
nowhere –
behind
the line of
my eyes
in my unlit
throat
our
father
which art in
heaven
hallowed
bethyname
thykingdomcomethywillbedone
we were
nowhere
and
everywhere
all
sound as one
sound all
bodies as
one body
all lights
one eternal
line
of light
on
earth
as
it
is
in
heaven


__

And do check out the other Tuesday Poems on www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com. There's a terrific yoga poem at the hub by Helen Lehndorf this week., and much more besides.

Tuesday Poem: Happiness Bowls

Pink and blue and lavender, poured glass
no bigger than a hand, not round but
pinched on either side like small boats,
and they seem to be brimming with water
but they’re not. Inside, incised on the thick
glass, there are letters and lines,
a chemical formula, I suppose.
                                I wait for the woman
to finish with the customer who wants
a piece of art small enough to carry in a pocket.
As I wait, I decide the woman doesn’t love
her job. She wears her unhappiness. Hear
the way she snaps off words like new
asparagus, and how she opens the cupboard
which has pots fit for a pocket, and holds
the door as if she wants to shut
it on a hand. The customer looks and looks
and shakes his head. The cupboard door
is closed. He leaves, hand in a pocket. Please,
                                 I say, what is this
written in the happiness bowls? Seratonin,
says the woman,with no love for the word
or the bowls. She’s gone back to the table where
she watches people enter the shop. She stands
like a teapot – one hand ready to what?
It’s the chemical equation, she says. Oh, I say.
I never knew it was like that. I stare
at the hexagon, the pentagon, lines
linking letters, NH2 – HO –HN, inside the pale
poured bowls. He’s done more serious work,
                                 she says, I’ll get it,
and she walks up the stairs and brings
down a larger bowl like the happiness bowls
but this one is in the colours of fire and has no
equation on the glass. Is still angular, still
brimming. It looks heavy, primordial, like
a wedge of something precious cut from a rock
and polished. She places it in the natural light
by the window and the colours lighten and
redden, rise and fall, burn like a brazier. I
am enthralled.
                                 She says the artist
makes a wax shape and, from that, a mould, and
pours the molten glass into it. He fires it, cools
it, uses acid to make the outside opaque.
Against artificial light, the red flares, she says.
The word ‘flare’
sounds like it’s flaring in her mouth. Even
the word ‘light’ has a lightness. The ‘t’ just
the merest tip of something. I imagine her
upstairs on her own under the lights
watching it flare.
                                 Oh! she says,
fingermarks! She picks up the bowl in both
hands and takes it to her table. I go back to
the happiness bowls. They are less serious
now: just pastel, glib. Something to carry
in a pocket, to bring out when conversation
flags. What are they here for? To give
happiness or to hold happiness? Or perhaps,
and I feel this might be it, the bowls are happy.
And what is that when it is so small a thing,
so easily etched? I thank the woman
who is back behind the table again, polishing
the red bowl with a soft blue cloth, her whole
attention on it. I wish her good afternoon.
                              


                                                   Mary McCallum


This is a poem that tells a story which I think is a pretty fine thing for a poem to do. Some people tell me poems shouldn't tell stories like this, but why not? It could easily be a short story, but I love it as a poem. So here it is.

When you've read it, there is a poem on the Tuesday Poem hub by Peter Bland who just won the PM's Award for Poetry, with a wonderful write-up on him by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman. I was at the awards, and Peter's speech was a fascinating paean to NZ poetry and what makes it different from English poetry. He was born in the UK and came here in the 50s.

The next night, I went to Peter's book launch for his collection Coming Ashore and was privileged to meet him for the first time.  I have seen his name in poetry books for as long as I can remember, and have a feeling he won a Louis Johnson Award thirty years ago which a poem of mine was runner-up for, but had never met him. His readings were wonderful - as an actor, he delivers them so damn convincingly!

Do go to Tuesday Poem, and then check out the wondrous poems in the sidebar by other Tuesday Poets including a poem about Hurricane Irene by Melissa Green and a video of Sharon Olds ...

The coy - and not so coy - mistress, courtesy of damien lewis

I posted the poem itself the other day by Mr Marvell (such a great name for a poet! and such an interesting guy - one of those poets from another time I'd love to meet... ) and then discovered this version online, when I was looking for interiors of lighthouses for 'novel research'.

What youtube offers up eh? There was a more formal version of the poem which sounded nice but then I found this which sounded just right. Even though it ends a little early, sadly. I love the last line about making the sun run....

Other news: I saved a starfish, I'm sure I did.

A White Hyacinth

No there is no white hyacinth in the painting, this is NZ bush painted on a piece of slate by an artist friend Stacey O'Neill who lives 5 minutes away from me. I love her work because of its detailed loving often spiritual evocation of the bush that hugs the hills behind us, the bush I walk in and watch. She is a generous artist, too, whose donated work I have often looked at on the walls of hospitals while going through a family crisis. I can see those murals in my mind's eye now, and am again deeply grateful to her.

And the white hyacinth? Well, my Mum always said to me that if I had two pennies, I'd spend one on bread and the other on white hyacinths to feed the soul - she'd adapted a Persian saying, which due to the joys of google I've found. 

"If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves
alone to thee are left,
Sell one & from the dole,
Buy Hyacinths to feed the soul"- Muslihuddin Sadi,
13th Century Persian Poet

Anyway, I was given a little money for a recent birthday from my parents-in-law, and I've also been earning some good money writing stories for a government agency, and after buying, well, groceries, I found myself in a local shop staring at Stacey's painting: glowing on slate, the size of my hand.  So beautiful, so replenishing. Definitely a white hyacinth. I bought it. 

Tuesday Poem: Wind Dog

how the wind howls:

an enormous dog with jowls, heaving

its wet sides around the harbour, salivating

on the shore’s lap, pissing

like a bull, nipping

         with sharp teeth,

dare

to open

the door, snap

back as in it sails – all tongue and air and tail

batting and blowing and licking your face

water all over the place

                                      Mary McCallum

Wildly appropriate for the sort of weather we're having. I wrote this poem a few years back but last night cleaning my teeth I thought - bloody hell, it's like a creature out there. And not just wind, dear reader, not just rain, dear reader, but snow - and we live by the sea! 

Earlier in the day in the Wellington CBD, I stood as soft flakes landed on my shoulders and hair. Everyone was so excited, standing outside like children exclaiming.  

More poems on Tuesday Poem here including a lovely poem on memory by Tim Jones at the hub.  

Had we but world enough, and time

I was rushing this morning from one thing to another and the first line of Marvell's To His Coy Mistress leapt into my head. I had to find the whole thing and read it then and there. How marvellous it is (excuse the pun) - how modern - how funny. Isn't this unbeatable? The grave's a fine and private place,   But none, I think, do there embrace Marvell's message in the poem,  to seize the day and 'sport ... while we may', is not why the first line line popped into my head you understand. I was just thinking how I'd like to hear less of 'time's winged chariot' and have more time to gobble up my own vegetable loves: writing, lying around with a book  ... Oh well, taking a sliver of time to read and think about one excellent poem is a welcome pause in the headlong rush of a Friday morning. I recommend it. Now, better get on... To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell. 1621–1678

HAD we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side	5
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.	10
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,	15
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.	20
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,	25
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:	30
The grave 's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires	35
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.	40
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun	45
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Stella Duffy on the UK riots

A thoughtful piece on what's going on there by Duffy who's NZ born ....

Here's an extract:


I hate that the news is reporting “London on fire” – it’s not. Not all of it. Not even most of it. Small pockets. And yes, those pockets are ghastly, terrifying, nonsensical (Croydon? Really – Croydon?! why??), but it’s still not the whole city and it isn’t anarchy and no, we do NOT need troops on the streets, or water cannon, or any of those other extreme far-right tactics that have worked so well in Libya and Syria this year.




UPDATE 1.27 pm: Here's another interesting post on the issue by UK author, Kathleen Jones, who incidentally has family here in Christchurch and wrote the most recent KM biography.