Tuesday Poem: Preparing for an Exhibition

All the talk today is about this.
Helen who lives in the house I used to live in,
who cooks in my kitchen, makes paper clouds
where we ate, alights on the word translucent,
but moves on – via the deception of clouds –
to what she wants to say all along,
the word I’ve been avoiding perhaps because
I say it vainly every day: clarity clarity clarity
until it sounds like a horse running
down the road without its rider. Helen
doesn’t hear the horses, she only hears the lick
of gauzy rain from gauzy clouds:
ity ity ity –
and is already imagining how hers might be –
layers of paper like onion skin. Really,
she wants to stop the dissembling. See the clouds,
you can touch them. Live in them, even.
Clarity, then. Not just the brilliance
of the tui clawing flax flowers outside
the kitchen window –
black feathers like embers, the comedy
of its throat, ty ty ty as it sucks –
but the way through to other side of the tui and
the flax where a luminous idea resides.
The tenderness of light.
Here at last in plain sight.



With thanks to ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ by Robert Hass


Yes, I have been Preparing for an Exhibition - for nearly three months now, ever since Helen Reynolds invited me to join the Workbook Collective for a Fringe Festival Exhibition Translucent Landscapes. 

There are nine artists (installation, oils, video-media etc), a composer, and me, and we aim to fill up an abandoned optometrist's premises in Ghuznee Street with works that evoke and react to light in various landscapes from the vast to the intimate. We open this Thursday night with readings and music (my son's in the trio: mandolin, guitar and violin), and then we're open daily 11-6 pm until March 22.

Our joint blog explains better than I can what everyone else is up to. My poems are gathered in a limited edition book The Tenderness of Light with the creamiest paper - and they are, without my expecting it, really a sequence of poems about summer in the Wairarapa - a place we go to every year, where we grow things, where there is a Barn, where I write... The poem posted here was a huge challenge because it was about ideas as much as a moment and a feeling - Robert Hass' brilliant poem was a direct inspiration, and I have Tuesday Poets to thank for that: Sarah Jane Barnett and Elizabeth Welsh - both huge fans of his - who have posted a few times on Hass.

The process of writing to a theme for an exhibition has been hugely challenging and stimulating - from working intensely over summer trying to get poems down on the page, to the intense editing process which included unexpected and hugely helpful feedback from two poets I admire - both Tuesday Poets -- Bryan Walpert and Helen Rickerby, to working through how to present the poems (for this I am grateful for the generosity of my printer friend Martin Schaenzel), to the time now when we are working intensely together to make the exhibition happen.

Today, for example, I took young Eddie to the premises to clean the windows and help him get a poster up on the outside wall, I found out about mobile eftpos and credit card zip zap machines, and negotiated with a real estate company to remove a 'For Lease' sign from a key window. I also met with the printer who's printing my book and discussed/designed our next move, and then I hung around a bit supporting the other artists I guess. They're an amazing lot - full of ideas and energy and playing with 'stuff' in a way that reminds me of Playcentre - which I loved when I took my children there. It's such fun to be back.

The print button will be pressed tomorrow on The Tenderness of Light, and then in the evening friends will gather at Helen's house to hand-sew the binding. That will still my nerves, I think. Do come to the opening if you're in town.

5.30 pm Thursday March 1 at 75 Ghuznee Street, performances at 6 pm. Wine and nibbles. Open daily after that until March 22 (11-6pm).

I recommend you check out the Tuesday Poem hub now - a terrific US prose poet is featured thanks to Susan Landry.

Tuesday Poem: Earth - For the people of Canterbury

Day 1
it mobs us
leaves us
immobile

we are aghast and naked in the doorway
clutching each other, where’s the dog?
we are flying for the children, calling
their names, we are the woman up to her neck
in it, scrabbling for a handhold, calling --
the child behind her on the path stay there
the one she’s rushing to collect stay there
we are the boy running to the grandfather, calling --
we are the family watching the capsizing house

stay               there

earth in our ears
earth in our eyes
earth in our hair


Day 2
it runs its fingers
along the fences
and power poles
leaves behind
the sound
anxiety makes


there are
early births
and heart attacks
sleep flies from
windows like
featherless birds


Day 3
the faultline is the

break
in the spine and the

back

and neck
hip

and shoulder bones

adjusting

are the
after
shocks


Day 4
it nudges
like
a dog does
makes
the child vomit
makes
his little brother
shake
and shake and shake

the looters take what they like

the homeless take what they can

the mother says she can’t take anymore

the dairy owner says take what you like pay later


Day 5
it changes
the way we
face the world
that shop we
knew that street
we grew up in
that church
in Little River
we drove past on the way to our holidays



Day 6
the crane            drivers        are having a           field day
  one saves                a chandelier and            bows      to the applause
one unpicks a     wall brick     by brick     and leaves small
      pyramids ready for       rebuilding     there are too many
toppled chimneys     too many buildings on their    knees
nothing can     be done about         Telegraph Road


Day 7
earth in our hair
earth in our ears
earth in our eyes

we are naked in the doorway
we are shaking like leaves
we are up to our neck in it

scrabbling for a handhold calling --


Mary McCallum

Written after the September quake 2010 and before the February quake 2011


I wasn't there in September 2010 or February 2011. I wrote this poem from the words of those who were there in September. The voices I heard on radio, on TV, in blogs, in Facebook. The voices of my friends and those I'd never met. It is about their language and their stories.

To me, it was like all the words were there scrabbling for a handhold in the ephermeral world of the media and internet - needing a place to rest and to hold each other up. I felt I had to at least try. Since then, we've had the terrible February quake and I found it more difficult to know what to do with all those scrabbling calling words. They were less happy to stay with me. Other people have, since then, found a place to put them - in books and articles. In poems.

Jane Bowron's Old Bucky & Me (Awa Press) is one that stands out, and now there's Martin van Beynen's book Trapped which survivors have applauded. Interestingly, Martin - a Press journalist - said he hoped the stories in the book would provide an 'everlasting record of what people went through.' As opposed to the other records of the day.


Reading words on the page about that earthquake is not an easy task for those who went through it. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman reviewed Trapped for the Listener.  He says he couldn't be objective about it, that it is a powerful read but that, in all honesty, he hasn't been able to finish it.  I can understand that. Jeffrey has written his own collection of poems about the earthquake which some will find difficult to read while for others it will be a way forward. A catharthis. And more will come...

'Earth' appeared on my blog shortly after the September quake and I've read it on radio twice - on Jim Mora's show and on the special Radio NZ show about the earthquake. It was also read at a Christchurch fundraiser in Geelong Australia, organised by Alison Wong, after the February quake.

There are other poems on Tuesday Poem this week that write about the earthquake a year ago and the time after it - written by Christchurch poets and others. Go here - and check out the sidebar.

My thoughts are with the people of Canterbury today.

Tuesday Poem: Class Discussion by Bryan Walpert

First snow falls
on the half-finished bridge.
-Basho

All afternoon snow falls, as on
Basho’s half-finished bridge. Light falls
through the half-opened blinds
onto the table, over which this poem
is disputed. Why does it seem
suddenly so difficult to me?
Perhaps the speaker is approaching
middle age, someone suggests,
so all things seem elusive.
Yes, another says, the snow
is the first hint of white
in the speaker’s hair, which
he has arranged in a comb-over.
I touch the top of my head.
And why falls, asks a woman,
her eyes closed in emphasis,
her head thrown back, as if
she planned to stick out her
tongue to catch the flakes,
so young she would not think
twice about a world arranged
to suit her taste: Why not just
have it all already sitting there
for the speaker to come upon:
the crest of a long hill,
snow covering the valley, ice lightly
on the river, from which only some
wood pylons, a few boards, extend
as the speaker stops to compose
himself. There is some place he had
hoped to reach, perhaps someone,
but even as the words
he had planned form in his mind,
as he writes them into the lines
of the landscape they slip
like scent into the cold air,
and anyway he is struck
by the beauty of the blossoms
of snow on his boots, or rather their
wabi-sabi, their imperfect beauty,
for even as he notices them
the vibrations of his steps
have settled the flakes into
less and no less satisfactory
patterns. He knows nothing
is less satisfying than resolution,
than having, something that now
seems only an idea, like the future
into which I like to think he will turn,
unbothered by disappointment
or anticipation, towards home,
where someone will be glad
to see him. Perhaps as he
approaches he will see smoke
from his own chimney etched
across the sky, which soon
will darken, as he sits by the fire,
the objects of his life arranged
around him, a sky from the greater
perspective of which one might
see students, the class over,
having smoked beneath the balcony,
one by one braving the weather,
the ghostly blossoms of their
breaths merging with the snow,
drifting to other buildings
or cars or the middle distance
into which this afternoon extends,
nearly complete.



This poem is a taste of Bryan Walpert's new collection A History of Glass (Stephen F. Austen State UP, Texas) due to be launched in March during NZ Book Month.  Bryan's first collection of poetry Etymology (Cinnamon Press 2009) and his short fiction Ephraim's Eyes ( Pewter Rose Press 2010)  I rated very highly, and I am looking forward to his new book very much. I reviewed Etymology on my blog, and on Tuesday Poem; and the review of Ephraim's Eyes is here. 

American-born, Bryan lives in Palmerston North - blogging on what it's like to do that cultural switch - and teaches at Massey University. He's won a number of awards for his writing including a manuscript prize by the publisher of History. I tutor at Massey University Wellington  and hence am a colleague of Bryan's - hence my choice of this poem. This is familiar ground. Not only the poetry discussion - and the teacher questioning the poem afresh for some reason - but the falling of the snow while the discussion goes on. I was teaching a first year creative writing class when the snow fell and we stopped and stared and then did a snow/poetry exercise. I had a lot of snow poems to mark later that term.

But back to Bryan - this is a marvellous poem for so many reasons but most of all for the winding curl of language from line to line to line as it picks up an idea (the Basho poem), opens it up, climbs inside it, explores it and -  by implication - the speaker of the poem (who, via a Walpert sleight of hand, slips inside the skin of the man in the poem - or vice versa) and, eventually, the students who are hauled in to complete the picture. Or nearly. Like the bridge.

There is always a welcome layer of clever word-play in a Bryan Walpert poem, and here he plays with the idea of something being more satisfying when it's unresolved/imperfect - whether it be the Basho poem or the discussion of the poem etc, and I also wonder if  Bryan's commenting quietly on his own previous poems which could tend towards wrapping things up too tidily at the end sometimes. It's certainly possible.

There's so much more here but I'll need to take more time to read the poem over, along with the full collection which I'm promised any day now. Looking forward to that - I'll post more on it in March. This poem is published here with permission.

Do check out the other poems on Tuesday Poem  with James Norcliffe at the hub.

Tuesday Poem: Wild

For Colin


erupting from a flock of birds
arms wide open
that great heart pumping
so hard so hard


that great heart pumping
so hard



Mary McCallum



A poem about my friend Colin Webster-Watson, a sculptor, whose great heart gave out nearly five years ago. He'd feed the gulls every day down on the beach near my place, and oh they knew he was coming! What a noise - what a sight. His arms would be flung out like the wings of the birds that flocked to him. But then he was always like that, arms flung wide ready to embrace.

Do check out a powerful sensuous arresting poem on the Tuesday Poem hub this week by Bill Nelson.  It will stay with you I promise.

Tuesday Poem: The Barn

Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, the gate –
on a slant – the paint pulling
from the wood –
closes –
we let it,
let go of the road,
the run of fences, the tin-cut
tilting hills, the world’s rim, let
the dog out to run,
and we drive
with the windows wound
down - lavender -
olive trees - cypresses.
The barn, at last. Blushes! – there
you are.

Here, it is that we are
a breath outwards
returning, and not much
more than a breath this time,
not much more than skin
and bone,
rubbed thin by all
our comings
and goings, all this
living in the light. We can see
through our scraps of selves
to paint the colour
of ox-blood wrinkling
like the skin on milk
around the double-hung
windows. In the exposed
wood, in the rot, in the rare blushing light,

here, it is – (breath outwards)
a glimpse (returning) – that time –
when paint clung so
tightly the timber groaned,
and in a stampeding wind –
a hot sun – under a welt of stars –
the barn was an instrument
filled with our spit and wild
breathing. Daughter, plump
as a pigeon,
flapping
by a tree in a bag for planting;
her brothers
snickering like ponies
on their way back from the frogpond –
their tins and string and
percussive boots.

Light is trickery.
The paint
blisters and peels,
and it’s all we can do
not to help it off.
My knuckles
rest
on the warm wood.
I lean close –
feel it, or someone, humming.


Mary McCallum


This is a poem I worked on over the summer up at the place we call The Barn. It's ours and it's blssful   - as a place to be alone and with family, and to write. There are some photos of our summer here with a glimpse of The Barn.

The poem was written to contribute to an exhibition as part of the Fringe Festival here in Wellington. It's called Translucent Landscapes and it's opening March 1. There are 11 of us involved: a number of visual artists (including installation artists, videomedia artists etc), a composer, and me.  I have written four poems for the exhibition so far and am wondering how to present them now (follow the link to Translucent Landscapes above for some thinking on that.)

In this poem, the theme of the exhibition is concentrated around the line:  'Light is trickery' - the way light can 'show' us what's real and what's not - shining onto the present and yet somehow 'lifting' it like paint - summoning the past as real as if it's there in front of us - the paint - the wood - the paint - the wood - and the way light, too, can wear away at what's there now - 'too much living in the light' - so, again, the past comes through - bidden and unbidden ... these things preoccupy me...

At the Barn there's no internet connection - although I can use my phone when I need to. There's also no Mac computer, just an old laptop which is rather slow. So, I write a lot by hand at the Barn without interruption, which means poems written there are different somehow.

Do go and read the Paul Green poem taster at the Tuesday Poem hub - and the fascinating commentary by Helen Rickerby. Truly it's worth it.

Peeling the Onion

Oh my, this book. So exquisite to hold - fat and heavy in the hand, thick creamy paper, ochre onion sketches. One of the most pleasurable books I've read in a long time for its sheer physical beauty. My pictures don't do it justice.  And the writing - also. How to do justice to that?

These are words chosen with exquisite precision and care, the words of a fabulist, an exaggerator, a storyteller, placed on the page via an Olivetti typewriter, translated, printed onto creamy paper... The writing of Nobel Laureate and 'Germany's most celebrated writer', Gunter Grass, author of a seminal novel about Nazi Germany, the disturbing, astonishing The Tin Drum.

Peeling the Onion (2006) is a memoir which covers Grass' life from birth in 1927 until the publication of The Tin Drum in 1959. In it is the revelation that shocked Germany: that Grass - only 17 and one day to become 'the conscience of the nation'  - was a member of the Waffen SS, in a tank division fighting a rearguard action in the last months of the war.

Here is one reaction when the memoir was published in 2006:

Germany - Der Tagesspiegel. Gregor Dotzauer expressed shock: "Whoever hears this, whether disbelieving or stunned, may think it is a bad joke even after seeing it in convincing black and white, both in the literary recollection and in the interview. Günter Grass, Germany's most celebrated living writer, the Nobel Prize winner, the conscience of the nation, the writer of legends, was a member of the Waffen-SS... A cheap joke of history? Or a truth whose bitterness cannot yet be fully measured? The categories flounder, because it gives rise to so many tones of meaning: for the work of Günter Grass, for his role as bearer of left-wing precepts, for the entire intellectual balance of the country, which his inner struggle and questions on foreign policy still fought out, against the backdrop of 12 long years under Hitler."

I can imagine the profound shock to the German reader. Grass knew what that would be, knew it was time to tell the truth before others told it for him, and he writes with inordinate care, skilfully revealing and obscuring at the same time - winding in and out of the onion metaphor which evokes the tricky layers of memory, shifting from first to third person, telling anecdotes as if they are stories to be told or fairytales, even, and therefore an author's enlargement of the truth. It is hard to know what exactly to trust - Grass rightly asks himself the same question.

No doubt his method of writing the memoir infuritated the German readership, but it cannot be disputed that this is memoir-writing of the most literary and astonishing of its kind, and even - paradoxically - the most honest, and that the reader is witnessing something marvellous. For who knows for sure anything of the past, of that other person - the youthful self? Does the reader want it? Need it? Or perhaps Grass is dissembling? Covering his tracks? I don't know quite honestly, and I prefer to think not.

There are stories in this beautiful book that I have repeated over and over to my family and friends - the one on the pages at left, for example, which talks of the closing months of the war and the young Grass in SS uniform with half a dozen other soldiers hiding out from the Russians in a cellar. They can hear shots outside, The cellar is full of bikes, the Sergeant tells them all to grab a bike and on his command to ride. Grass can't ride, his mother couldn't afford to buy him a bike. He gets to stay and 'cover them' with a machine gun. He can't use one but he doesn't say so. He stays. The others are mown down by machine gun-fire. Then see the picture below of Grass riding a two-seater bike with his second wife Ute. After years of not being able to ride, she gets him on the saddle, but only - safely - on the back.

 There is another wonderful 'fairytale' of a story on the pages to the right - running now, on his own, as the Russians advance. Grass is in a wood, it's dark, he can hear twigs breaking, someone's there. German or Russian? He starts to sing the first line of a German lullaby his mother sang him. Over and over he sings it, until at last a German voice answers him with the second line. It is the Lance Corporal whose name he never knows, but who - it is clear -  saves Grass' life.

It is also clear that this way of 'storytelling' his life is the way for Grass to live with what happened during the war. Who's to say there isn't more than a nugget of truth in there? Grass comes back over and over again to his unforgiveable silence, his self-centredness, and the guilt he has had to live with.

The latter part of the book unravels a little - less focused, more the winding of spools of threads - and Grass' ego starts to bother me. He asserts a nothingness at core - someone who struggles to be something - but still we are regaled with the success that seems to come at him from all directions once he's on his feet: this man can dance beautifully, play music beautifully, cook beautifully, sculpt beautifully, write beautifully. The early vulnerability of the boy at home and fighting in fairytale forests and finding his feet is more compelling, easier to bear.

However, it is in the final chapters that I liked reading about the emergence of the writer - the way words hammering Grass' brain finally pushed their way out through his skin, became poems, a novel, more novels ... The Olivetti Lettera typewriter he uses standing up, the need to leave a work rough-hewn like sculpture-in-progress so the writer doesn't mistakenly think it's finished, how he chews up the fodder of his life and makes it into fiction, a memoir.

There is a Book 2 called The Box which begins in 1960. I would like to read that too. I wonder if it is as beautiful to hold.

Tuesday Poem: Summer

Check out more Tuesday Poems - most likely more wordy than this one - at Tuesday Poem hub. 

2011 - best of books and music

Music 2011


West Coast singer Mel Parsons is one of my musical discoveries of 2011, thanks to my friend Simon Burt who had a fabulous house concert for Mel. She's got a terrific voice and presence and writes pop-edged country songs with some interesting lyrics and lovely layered arrangements. After enjoying her first album Over my Shoulder, I looked forward to Mel's second album Red Grey Blue launched in September last year. Put it this way, it didn't let me down. 



I've also enjoyed working out the bass for Mel's song 'Bones' which you can hear with some of the other Red Grey Blue songs on her website. I was interested to read there that ex-Cat Stevens bassist Bruce Lynch plays double bass for the album - and a number of other excellent musicians come along for the ride.

The Close Readers released their first album in June 2011. My friend Damien Wilkins is the songwriter, lead singer and powerhouse behind the band  - a Wellington novelist and once the member of a 1970s Lower Hutt, his songs are crunchy things with raw unexpected lyrics and a rough-around-the-edges arrangements that jangle and thrill.

You'll find all the songs here to download or go to Cuba Street's Slow Boat. 


Some other albums I've been playing and enjoying below - by no means the whole lot. 

Books 2011

[in no particular order, as they say on X-Factor - but all published in 2011]

Fiction

From Under the Overcoat, Sue Orr (Random) - highly imagined, tightly written stories using classic stories from the past -  Gogol, Mansfield, Chekhov etc -  my favourite is the one based on KM's The Dollhouse using a a real estate Open House to do what KM did with a dollshouse, you have to read it! 

La Rochelle's Road by Tanya Moir (Random) - strong historical fiction set on Banks Peninsula, lovely language, well-rooted in place and apposite following the Christchurch Quake

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham (    )-- some bad reviews suggesting he's overdoing his literary referencing in novels (first Virginia Woolf, now everyone from Joyce to, well, Joyce) but I liked it ... Art, New York, mid-life crisis, Joycean epiphanies, what's not to love?  

The Trouble with Fire by Fiona Kidman (Random)- short fictions in the style of Munro - with the stretch and weight of longer fiction and linked by fire in all its permutations - metaphorical or otherwise - written by a woman who knows what it is to be a woman in NZ from the 1950s onwards, her women are rooted in this country and its history and politics - gender and otherwise - they are not adrift in the limited domestic worlds so loved by short story writers.

The Beauty of the Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb - beautiful story set in Vietnam grounded in, well, humanity in all its manifestations - beautiful and otherwise - love the way the language and narrative feel weighted and grounded - a little like Gilead to read, a meditation ... and the end is that celebration of life that's so hard to achieve in fiction without seeming chocolaty. 

The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (finished it this morning!) - a taut sexy read that circles as only Enright can around the carcass of family, in this case families, picking at the eyeballs, the balls, the flesh... This is the story of the adulterer and the adulteress and the victims of their coupling. Enright is astonishing in her psychology and the way she scoops out the core of the way people are - the endings of her novels are brilliant. 

Non-Fiction               

Little Criminals by David Cohen (Random) - great read for those, like me who live in or near the Hutt and regularly drive past what was the Epuni Boys Home, and for those who are interested in the history of 'teen delinquency' in this country and how we've dealt with it. Wonderful writing of time and place.

The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal - as someone said somewhere, it's a family memoir that comes from the 'existential hum of things' and in turn becomes a history of a people that moves and horrifies.

The Violinist by Sarah Gaitanos (VUP) - the story of a woman who survived the concentration camps to be at the beginnings of our national orchestra - a stunning story of survival and the wonder of music 


The Exercise Book ed. by Bill Manhire, Ken Duncum, Damien Wilkins and Chris Price (VUP) - inspirational writing exercises from inspirational writers for use with classes or individual writers needing a pick-me-up. 

Poetry

This City by Jennifer Compton (OUP) - funny, smart, quirky poems that go for the jugular, this collection was the winner of Kathleen Grattan Award, by an eccentric NZer living in Oz.      

Thicket by Anna Jackson (AUP) - deliciously subversive, unexpected, fairytale, clever, fun.

                                                              The Movie may be Slightly Different, Vincent O'Sullivan (VUP) - Andrew Johnson calls him 'the defrocked priest of New Zealand literature' - and these are more of O'Sullivans reverent irreverent poems - wonderful

In/let by Jo Thorpe (Steele Roberts) - really 2010, but right at the end of the year and being feted this year, really, textured, sensuous, joyous, intelligent poems -  LOVE THEM 

On Mutability by Jo Shapcott (Faber) - tough, tender, stunning poems 

Western Line by Airini Beautrais (VUP) - poems that enchant because they are enchantments and curses and love poems and prayers and fables. Airini watches the world up close and loves the 'queer' people she sees in it - you will too. 

The Comforter by Helen Lehndorf (Seraph) - domestic and fierce in a way you don't expect, honest and emotional in a way you don't expect. Read and be surprised.

Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 by Kathleen Jones - fierce and honest,too, these are the poems of a woman holding her shoulders high through grief and tragedy and the stuff of family. 


Men Briefly Explained by Tim Jones (interactive press) - men are held 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. An engaging and provocative read.

I'm bound to have missed something excellent off these lists. Apologies to the writers and musicians if I have. What I realise I need to do this year is try and read more fiction - and at least one classic - I was rather waylaid by poetry in 2011. 

Bring on 2012!   

Tuesday Poem: Facing up to it

In this city of furrows, we fall over ourselves

tripping down

Devon Street, tipping down

Bolton,

and a return trip at such

an angle that

our foreheads kiss

the pavement.

Some days, it’s not furrowed at all,

rather

a flung thing that’s caught

the wind:

a blanket,

a swag of kelp, newspaper balled

in

a good-sized fist. On

a good day, it is

all dimples,

this city. Ample, it dips

here,

and here, and here -

the harbour  (the smile )

the place we fall

in.

                        Mary McCallum

I posted this poem right at the start of the Tuesday Poem project, and I was looking at it again after a trip up Bolton Street (I took the photo on the way back down). It's a poem that suits the festive season I think - a cheerful sort of poem with a (smile) in it and dimples. And it's a grateful poem which is partly what the great festivals, like Christmas, are about. 

Although I live on the flat bit on the other side of the harbour now, I am at heart a hill dweller like the two in the photo: what you see is a younger woman (red skirt) and an elderly gentleman who was already on a lean before he hit the incline of Bolton St. 

So Happy Christmas everyone -- and may you have more good days than bad, more smiles than furrows, more poems than not in the coming year. Thank you for coming to visit my blog and the Tuesday Poem blog and I'll be back on deck here in the New Year after a time away at our place in the Wairarapa - a place of flatness and rivers, big sky, sharp blue mountains.

Do please click here for the Tuesday Poem hub and the blissful A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas. In the sidebar there, more festive treats from the wonderful bunch of poets that make up TP - the community that I co-ordinate with the help of Claire Beynon in Dunedin. 

Who by socks - the sequel

Socks

I'm sick
of socks

the losses.   


           Jenny Bornholdt


Visited my friend Mia the day after I posted Jenny Bornholdt's poem Socks for Tuesday Poem. By the back door: the basket of socks waiting to be matched up by her 'willing' daughters, and behind it, a bag of what the family calls 'orphans' - the socks that have lost their other half.

On the kitchen bench, the list of jobs for the family to do and at the top 'Who - Socks?' Which brought to mind Leonard Cohen's 'Who by Fire' song ....


And who by fire, who by water, / who in the sunshine, who in the night time, / who by high ordeal, who by common trial, / who in your merry merry month of may ...


Looking at Mia's basket of needy socks and thinking of the matching basket here at my house, the matching bag of 'orphans', too, and I can't help but wonder - who by socks ?

The Exercise Book

Reviewed this fabulous book on National Radio Wednesday - you can listen to it by clicking on the player above (you need to jig the little dot on the left a little to get it moving for some reason).

Terrific exercises in this book for the beginning writer, for teachers of creative writing courses to plunder, and for established writers who want a pick-me-up. It's been put together by the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington to fund their scholarship programme.

I've already used some of the exercises with an adult writing group I'm running locally and had huge success with them - tried a few myself, and been excited by the results. Some of the exercises are old chestnuts, others are brand new, and range from the randomly crazy e.g. Hinemoana Baker's 'Remix Mashup' to get to a poem -- to a careful unlayering of writerly craft e.g. Laurence Fearnley's exercise on writing the Big Scene in a novel.

There are warming up exercises, exercises that 'steal' from other writers, memory prompts, script writing and performance exercises and much more. Something like 60 writers contributed from Baker and Fearnley to David Vann from the US. Highly recommended.

Thursday update: My heart goes out to Radio NZ staff as they mourn the death of their colleague Phil Cottrell murdered in the weekend. While I was doing the book review, Kathryn Ryan was handed the media release about two young men being charged with his murder. You can hear the paper crackling while I'm talking. She was visibly upset as she read it out after the review ended, but being a consummate professional she continued on with the show.

Tuesday Poem: Socks by Jenny Bornholdt

I'm sick
of socks

the losses.


__________

Socks was published in Mrs Winter's Jump (Godwit 2007) - a beautiful limited edition book to celebrate Jenny Bornholdt's poet laureateship. Two thousand copies were printed and I have book no. 1415. 


There are many entrancing poems in this book - Jenny entrances, it's what she does -- but this one had me at 'socks'. They are the musak of my life - there are so many socks in an almost grown family of five: so many to wash, to dry, to roll together in pairs (the 'spares' going into a almost full grocery bag) and to put away. But look, there are two stories inside this poem: the story of common everyday lost socks, and the uncountable story of loss - all loss, universal loss, mine. 


It's the leap over the white that keeps the two stories both together and apart. 'Socks' and 'losses' echo each other across the divide - sharing 's' and 'o' sounds, emphasising the bathos, and note how the socks are kept together in a pair (of lines) held together by half rhyme, while 'the losses' are - as one would expect - out on their own. I think this poem is pure genius. 

I have a lovely story about it. I was working in the Rona Bookshop one day four years ago, and an elderly woman was brought in by her relatives who left her sitting in a chair while they browsed the books and paintings. I went over and started talking. Turns out the woman was from one of the homes for the elderly. She was right by the poetry section and I asked if she liked poetry. I can't remember if she did or not, to be honest, but she was certainly open to trying one or two. 

I found 'Socks' and said, listen to this, and read it to her. She burst out laughing as soon as I'd finished, so loudly - the other people in the shop looked round. She was lit up, transformed. We both agreed it was a magnificent poem about socks and loss, and were still talking about it when the woman's relatives came along and took her quickly off for morning tea or something. 

A few days later, I wasn't at the shop and a call came through from a wavery uncertain voice wanting the book about the socks. No-one on deck that day knew which book she was talking about, but they asked which day she'd been in and realised she'd talked to me. I was at home. A phone call later and the book was found and sent off to the home for the elderly with an invoice. Shortly afterwards a cheque arrived with a little note in spidery writing, which I have still, somewhere - about how much the woman loved the book and most especially the socks poem. I've promised it to Jenny, when I find it. 

The poem 'Socks' is published with permission. Do go to the Tuesday poem hub to read Lyn Hejinian and the thirty poets in the sidebar. 

Tuesday Poem: 'Wabi-sabi' by Helen Lehndorf

I was thirty-three before I learned

people stuck in snow
can die from dehydration.
I would melt icicles
on my tongue for you, resist
the drinking down, drip it
into you. Then repeat, repeat
until my lips were raw.

Continues here... 

________________
I have long been a fan of Helen Lehndorf's poems - seeing them on the net and hearing them at poetry readings, and now at last I can own her first collection The Comforter (Seraph Press).

Her publisher Helen Rickerby says, 'This poem, as people at the launches will have heard me say, epitomises what I love so much about Helen's poetry. It is sharp-eyed and specific. It introduces a number of interesting ideas and has more than one thing going on at once. When it talks about life and love, it's authentic and fierce, not clichéd. And it is impossible not to be moved by it.'

Sadly I missed Helen's launch in the weekend, but she reports on it on her blog here. I wrote on this post earlier that Helen's reading at Blondini's in Wellington on Wednesday, when in fact she's not! Got my Helens muddled.

Still, Blondini's (The Embassy Theatre in Campbridge Terrace) at 6pm this Wednesday will be terrific fun with Helen Rickerby, Vana Manasiadis, Stefanie Lash and Emma Barnes . What a feast! And I have to be there this time come what may, I am the MC. Do join us, with these women poets it can only be stimulating and fun. 

And to check out more Tuesday poems, visit the Tuesday Poem blog

Tuesday Poem: What they don't tell you on Food TV

the best fish is handed to you over the side
of the boat, the best fish is fried, bones and
all, and eaten in a sun so bright it’s white,

snapping off the ends of beans is like lips
popping, a pork cookbook is the best place
to find that picture of you and your mum

at Taupo in summer, a turkey too late
into the oven can make a grandmother
cry with hunger, come Easter in Crete

lambs are bloody sacks, here, their milky
mouths butt your hip, eggplant is purpler
when you call it aubergine, aubergine

is purpler when you call it melitzane, another
thing again when you call it Mellie-Jane, crack-
ing eggs is an act of belief whichever way

you look at it - each time the epiphany, there’s
no better breakfast than a three-dollar special
in a New York diner, watching her swallow

every shred of yellow from the yolk - every
lick of milk - every crumb, fasting is not all
its cracked up to be unless it’s in a monastery

in Stokes Valley under a gold stupa and dawn
brings porridge and bells, at the end of a long
day in the city there’s nothing better than

meat and tomato and oregano walking you
up the path and the eldest son at the kitchen
bench grating cheese, no better rice than his

brother’s unmoulded from a bowl to a white
plate, risotto is best measured in handfuls by
Marielle - uno due tre cuatro, zucchini flowers

must be carried in two palms like a prayer,
father and feta are from the same family of
words, you cannot make yorkshire puds as

good as your gran’s no matter how hot the oil,
an apple is sweetest from a tree, and if not that
then untucked from its tissue, its wooden box,

oysters are sweetest swallowed like shots
of seawater, beef is best on charcoal tended
by laughing men, ginger needs to be grated

in finger not thumb lengths, crushed olives
are the smell of the earth – all that history
of heating cooling burying spitting up, oil

rising of its own accord from the purple crush
is named after the yolk of the egg, asparagus
is just what asparagus is,  those apricots she

makes every summer are apricots blooming
in a bowl, and spooning yoghurt and honey
into a mouth on white-washed steps with

a turquoise sea and a donkey crowing and
someone calling kali mera into the bleaching
light, is like scooping up the sun and eating it


                                             Mary McCallum


I've been wanting to write a list poem ever since I set it as an assignment for my creative writing students at Massey University. I got the idea at one of our first Tuesday Poet drinks at the Library Bar. Helen Rickerby - poet and publisher of poets - had been talking there about a successful workshop she'd had with the students of Harvey Molloy's (also a Tuesday Poet) at Newlands College. She'd read the kids a list poem by Helen Lehndorf called Poem without the L Word and got them to write list poems of their own.

I asked Helen to promise to send me the poem as soon as she got home (she's publishing it in Helen L's out-this-week collection The Comforter), and the next day, I set my students the list poem to do and got some lovely stuff.

So last week, with uni over, I started up an adult writing workshop here in Eastbourne. The first assignment: the list poem. This is mine. There were seven others, every one different and astonishing in its own way. What impressed us all was the way the power of each poem grew with each listed thing, and the real subject of the poem elbowed its way through. It is what poetry's all about, really.

What's this poem really about then? Food and family - how they feed and make each other. How simple both can be, how complicated. It's about my family history too, how it spreads itself across many countries and generations, and how food in all those places and times is both different and the same.

Do check out the hub poem on Tuesday Poem. It's by Wellington poet Harry Ricketts.

Tuesday Poem: Sea Grapes by Derek Walcott

A friend of mine was taught poetry by this man. In fact, as with all the best students, he said he didn't teach her at all, she already had it in her, which I can believe. The 1992 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, Derek Walcott reads his poem Sea Grapes from "Collected Poems 1948-1984". To learn more about Derek Walcott,  visit:http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1992/index.html

Do check out the Tuesday Poem hub for an Iain Britton poem. 

Magical realism and Dybek

Chicago short story writer and poet Stuart Dybek on the sensibility in his writing which feels European or could be Latin American or could just be magical realism.... 

Dybek: I shy away from a term like magical realism because it somehow implies to me that I read Marquez and decided, well, I'll take some of these supernatural elements and graft them on to what I've been working with. And in my case anyhow that is not the way it came about at all. It came about more out of a feeling like this: 

You're walking down a street, Twenty-Fifth Street say, and right on the corner there's a candy store and a bunch of kids are coming out of it. They're arguing about candy, calling each other sonofabitches. On the other side of the street there's a tavern. You can hear the jukebox music, and you see someone sneaking in for an early drink. Coming towards you is someone eating a bismarck, dripping jelly on their shirt, and there's a whole bunch of cars, guys cruising up and down, gunning their engines. A truck is going by, loaded with something that's making a clanking sound. And then there's a church. In it, a bunch of old ladies are saying the rosary in Polish--or in some language that you think might be Polish, you can't exactly figure out what it is--and there's this smell in that church that smells like something out of the fifteenth century. You look up. It's Lent. There are these crazy statues standing there with their eyes bulging with all kinds of weird visions, except now they've got purple shrouds over their heads. That jump from walking off that street and into that church and then back out again, I think, has made my style the way it is. After that, you read Kafka and you say, "Oh my God! Of course, I understand this." Or I read Ed Hirsch's poem about his grandmother's Murphy bed, that when she folds it back into the wall it's like putting away the night. I see that if I'm writing about my grandmother, who really believed that the dead came back and needed to nibble breadcrumbs off her table, then maybe instead of saying, "My grandmother thought so and so," I could have a dead person, in the middle of the story, sitting at her kitchen table.

From an interview on Artful Dodge - more here. Stuart Dybek is the author of a particularly wonderful short story called Pet Milk that is a set text for the students I tutor at Massey. Every year I get more out of it, and this year a student wrote a great essay on Pet Milk complete with a link to this interview. What a find! 

I am a big fan of magical realism in fiction and Dybek's explanation is as good a reason as I can think of for why...