Tuesday Poem: Rae Armantrout - Making Poetry out of Crisis

Poets are expected to be contemporary and some even expect poetry to be subversive and offer solutions to (or at least analysis of) social turmoil.  Most of us remember, or carry around, scraps of poetry that have offered comfort or support in uncertain times, and some of us were maimed for life by having to learn the Charge of the Light Brigade at primary school!  But writing overtly 'political' poetry is very difficult and the results can be dire.   I found this fascinating video (link below) on the Poetry Foundation site.  Rae Armantrout, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, talks about how and why she writes about contemporary situations and reads some of the poems from her new collection 'Money Shot'.

The title has references only regular viewers of pornography might recognise - in these poems the financial 'exploitation and greed' that has ruined us all is identified as a different kind of pornography.  One reviewer writes that Rae Armantrout's poems  'work off the sleazy undercurrent of contempt and lazy petulance which one sees, or reads and hears expressed everywhere these days. The underlying quest of Armantrout's critique of our language is to identify and tag those elements which threaten to compromise our potential for goodness, or fulfillment, or ease.'  The poems themselves are deceptively spare.

Money Talks

1

Money is talking

to itself again

in this season's

bondage

and safari look,

its closeout camouflage.

Hit the refresh button

and this is what you get,

money pretending

that its hands are tied.

2

On a billboard by the 880,

money admonishes,

"shut up and play."

Interview and Readings here: - 

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/313

For more wonderful Tuesday Poetry, please check out the Tuesday Poem website by clicking here.

Tuesday Poem: Martin Figura's 'Whistle'

 This poem comes from the compelling narrative sequence of poems 'Whistle' by Martin Figura, published by Arrowhead Poetry.  For a full review of the collection and the context of the poem please click here.

Strange Boy

We believe there is a one in ten chance
the boy will inherit it from his father
The boy is top in maths
He is near the bottom of the class in everything else
He writes wild imaginative essays with little regard
for spelling or grammar
He cries easily
The boy’s house is Belmont 47 (a prime number)
We know he steals, but are letting it go for now
We also know he smokes
He pulls a face when he concentrates
The other boys have noticed this
The boy is left here during half-term breaks
He occupies himself with dice games of cricket and football
that can take days to complete
They are too complex for anyone else to participate in
The boy maintains a number of statistical graphs
He is a good goalkeeper
He has made some friends through football
He has invented an elaborate past
He carries a 1966-67 News of the World Football Year Book at all times
Father William lets him complete his pools coupon
He has had some small successes

Copyright Martin Figura
reproduced with permission.
www.martinfigura.co.uk

Martin Figura was born in Liverpool in 1956 and works part-time at the Writers’ Centre, Norwich and as a photographer. He is a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of 6. A spoken word version of his new collection Whistle (Arrowhead Press, 2010) is being toured by Apples and Snakes. He is Chair of the Café Writers Live Literature organisation in Norwich.

For a review of the whole collection please visit http://www.kathleenjonesdiary.blogspot.com

For  more stunning Tuesday Poems please visit the website at  http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Norman Nicholson

Well, the rabbit is out of the hat and in full view of the audience.  I’d been keeping quiet about the subject of the new biography until everything was signed and sealed, but Melvyn Bragg mentioned it in his BBC Radio 4 programme and newsletter - so now everyone knows that I’m writing about Norman Nicholson!


So, who was Norman Nicholson? An obscure northern poet, from the small town of Millom in Cumbria, born in 1914, a protegee of T.S. Eliot and the Lake District’s second most famous poet after Wordsworth.  'Poem' is NN’s working manifesto.

Poem

I would make a poem
Precise as a pair of scissors, keen,
Cold and asymmetrical, the blades
Meeting like steel lovers to define
The clean shape of the image.

I would make a poem
Organic as an orchid, red
Flowers condensed from dew, with every lobe
Fitted like a female to receive
The bee’s fathering head.

I would make a poem
Solid as a stone, a thing
You can take up, turn, examine and put down;
Bred of the accident of rain and river,
Yet in its build as certain as a circle,
An axiom of itself.


I was approached recently by the Trustees of the Nicholson Estate to write a Life and Work for the Norman Nicholson centenary in 2014. This isn’t a commercial project, more a labour of love - I’ve always loved NN’s poetry - he wrote about the landscape I grew up in - a working landscape, not the pretty picture postcard views sold to the tourists.  His best poems are probably Wall, Sea to the West and On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks, which is about the brutal de-industrialisation of the north of England in the second half of the twentieth century.  This is an extract:

            ‘They shovelled my childhood
On to a rubbish heap.   Here my father’s father,
Foreman of the back furnace, unsluiced the metal lava
To slop in fiery gutters across the foundry floor
And boil round the workmen’s boots; here five generations
Toasted the bread they earned at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit
And the town thrived on its iron diet.  On the same ground now
Split foundations moulder in the sea air; blizzards
Of slag-grey dust are blown through broken Main Gate uprights;
 Resevoir tanks gape dry beside cracked, empty pig-beds:
And one last core of clinker, like the stump of a dead volcano,
Juts up jagged and unblastable.....
                   
He lived all his life in the house he was born in - stubbornly defending his northernness - always a fierce enemy of Metrocentrism.  When anyone referred to him as a recluse he would say drily ‘They mean I haven’t been seen lately in London.’  People like Philip Larkin denigrated him as a 'Provincial'.  He was emphatic about the truth of Robert Frost’s statement ‘In order to be universal, you must first be provincial’.

I’ve only just embarked on the initial research and will keep you posted.  This will be the first time I’ve ever talked publicly about writing a biography, so it will be a new experience!




For more Poetry please check out the Tuesday Poets at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Kim Moore, The Drowned Fields

Although being without him now
would be like standing on one leg
still everything seems paper thin.

If my foot slips and breaks the surface,
I’ll fall to a land of drowned fields,
where the only language is the language

of the sky and the birds make endless
patterns in the air and the pools of water
are words the rain has left behind.

The birds are like shadows in the corner
of my eye, or silver, as if the sky
is throwing money to the ground.

Next to the path the grass moves beneath
my feet. Hummocks store black water
while his thoughts, impossible to ignore

push their way across the land like large
enthusiastic dogs. The lives I could
have led are silver threads across

the drowning land and birds come
together , then spread apart, as if the sky
opened its hand and let them loose.

Kim Moore


Kim Moore (who just happens to live in Cumbria) is a young British poet who is regarded as one of the bright stars of the future. Kim has won two of the UK’s most prestigious prizes for young poets - an Eric Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2011. She is 29 and works as a peripatetic music teacher, and is also in the final year of a part-time MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, The North, The Rialto and Ambit - all excellent places - and has read alongside Carol Ann Duffy at the Royal Exchange in Manchester.

The title ‘The Drowned Fields’ resonates with the weather up here in the northern hemisphere at the moment. I like the way the poem starts in mid-conversation, with images of a fragile relationship - the thin crust we all walk on with the ones we love before our lives become inextricably meshed together. The repetition of the words ‘drowned’, ‘drowning,’ emphasises the feeling of being overwhelmed and adds to the sense of danger - committing yourself to a relationship is one of the most risky things we do.

I particularly like this image:

‘ his thoughts, impossible to ignore
push their way across the land like large
enthusiastic dogs.'

And the way she describes the birds flocking and re-forming in the air,
‘.........as if the sky
opened its hand and let them loose.’

But somehow the birds, coming together and spreading apart, are another metaphor for the fragility of the relationship.
Kim Moore is one to watch.

For other Tuesday Poems please take a look at the Tuesday Poets' blog over at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com
There's some great stuff!

Tuesday Poem: The River of Stones

At the beginning of the week I joined 'A River of Stones', which is a project that lasts until the end of January, and is a way of using the Buddhist concept of 'Mindfulness' in our creative lives.  it was one of my students at Lancaster last year who introduced me to the idea of 'Mindfulness', which was the subject of her Ph.D.  She pointed out that our lives are too fast and heedless and there's not enough time to sit quietly and observe, or just simply 'be'.  Ted Hughes was a great advocate of sitting and looking too.  He would sometimes spend over an hour observing something with furious concentration, before writing about it.

I'm never going to become a Buddhist (or Ted Hughes!) and simply don't have the self-discipline to become a disciple of  mindfulness.  but 'A River of Stones' simply asks you to commit to spending a few minutes a day sitting (or standing) quietly, observing and thinking, to focus on one thing and then write about it in as few words as possible.  Then you can Tweet your 'small stone' if you're a Twitterer, or put it on your blog, or Facebook, or post it on the main River of Stones blog.

What you produce every day does vary in quality - sometimes you can't come up with anything - and it's difficult (impossible so far) to get beyond description in such a small space. Everything I write seems to have a romantic, rather sugary taint to it, which I'm trying to eradicate.  But in the middle of my stressful life, I'm finding the exercise very therapeutic.  Next week's aim is to try to get closer to the bare bones of things.

Here are this week's small stones.

1.  Cloud curved over the sea like a shell hinged at the horizon, where a golden pearl is radiating light.

2.  Deserted House:
Cracked walls and fallen tiles
the hanging gutters
but one mysterious light
behind blank shutters.

3.  The swaying blind cord ticks away the moments to the beat of the wind.

4.  A quiet room.  Only a thought disturbs.  A pulse of blood, a breath, the sunlight crawling across the wall.  The pen on the page.

5.  Haiku:
Olive leaves reflect
the sun like slim, silver fish
swimming in bright shoals.

6.  The bells, nodding from rival belfries across the piazza, do not agree with each other.  The clanging bronze vibrato tolls discord.

*The photograph is of a particularly beautiful, ancient wall on the road to Capezzano Monte where I live.

Tuesday Poem: A Sad State of Freedom, Nazim Hikmet

A Sad State of Freedom

You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you'll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others--
you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you're born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you're free
with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom--
you have the freedom to become an air-base.

You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being--
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.

There's neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life;
there's no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.

Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963)

Translated by Taner Baybars


For more poems by Nazim Hikmet got to http://www.poemhunter.com/nazim-hikmet/poems/

I thought that, with the elections in Egypt and the ongoing push for more democratic freedom in the Middle East, it might be good to feature work by a Middle Eastern poet for this week's Tuesday Poem.


Born in Turkey in 1902, Nazim Hikmet was politically active as a communist and spent many years in and out of prison for his beliefs, despite being a recipient of the International Peace Prize (alongside Picasso and Pablo Neruda). He is one of Turkey’s most important writers. Hikmet died in Russia in 1963 suffering a heart attack as he bent to pick up a newspaper from his doorstep. His poems have been put to music and sung by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen and The Byrds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A2z%C4%B1m_Hikmet

For more poetry by the Tuesday Poets please visit the Tuesday Poem website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Tim Jones

And Not to Yield

Leave home, and your ego
blooms as the square of distance. Return
is a necessary corrective,

a diminuendo of corridors,
anxious crowds, missed messages.
Fretting at the baggage claim:

did they even put your cases on the plane?
And the knowledge that, not far away,
an angry wife is pacing.

Pity Odysseus. Penelope
(the suitors done and dusted)
is on the surface calm

but furious beneath: all that crap
he put her through! She lets it out
in flechettes of resentment.

Odysseus learns to dodge or hide.
All he wants is a quiet life,
a place to write his memoirs,

but she keeps inventing tasks for him.
"I'm not bloody Hercules," he says, and,
"Didn't I tell you there could be delays?"

Tim Jones, from 'Men Briefly Explained'.



This newly released collection from Tim is excellent. There are some very impressive poems in it, but I also liked the way the collection framed them - the flow of the narrative through it. I was very happy to review the book and Tim quotes a paragraph on the back cover.

"Tim Jones writes about how it feels to be a man, of male relationships – father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband – exploring territory that men traditionally don’t talk about, saying what is often unsaid, confronting stereotypes, and genetic imperatives. He writes with a blend of economy, humour and compassion that is rare in poetry, often finding the unexpected phrase - ‘a diminuendo of corridors’ - or an unusual, but exact, image - ‘mountains piled like thunderheads’ - to surprise and illuminate. This poetry is how New Women want their New Men to be – strong, sensitive and empathetic."  Penelope would probably have preferred Odysseus to be like that too.  Living with (or more often without) a hero is hard work!   Odysseus also features in the Derek Walcott poem posted by Mary McCallum this week.

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Christina Rossetti

A Pause

They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
     And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay;
     While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
     Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
     My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:-
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair,
     Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
     Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
     Put on a glory, and my soul expand.

Christina Rossetti,  written circa 1853

Christina 1848 by her brother Dante Gabriel

 

Christina Rossetti's father was an Italian political refugee and poet.  Her mother was the daughter of another Italian writer, Gaetano Polidori.  Christina's uncle was John Polidori who accompanied Byron and Shelley to the continent and wrote The Vampyre.  Although she was born in London and spent most of her life there, Christina was very Italian in temperament - which didn't fit very well with English Victorian notions of womanhood.   She and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the 'two storms' but while he was allowed to go his own bohemian way, Christina had to conform and she found it difficult to subdue her rebellious disposition.   Much of Christina's poetry is about loss, loneliness and renunciation - themes that mirror her own life.  She broke off two engagements to men she loved  passionately because of religious differences (one was a Catholic, one an aetheist).   She seems to have regretted both decisions in later life.   Her mother was deeply, inflexibly, religious, an older sister became a protestant nun, and Christina's life under their influence was very restricted.  She was always very shy and spent most of her life at home, avoiding social contact,  writing poetry - some of which was erotic and passionate.  Her most famous poems are 'A Birthday',  'In the Bleak Midwinter', which was set to music by Holst, and 'Goblin Market' - one of the most erotic poems in the English language.   The poem above, A Pause, was written at a time when she had just broken off her engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson who had converted to Roman Catholicism.  

Christina Rossetti:   Learning not to be First, originally published by Oxford University Press,  is available as a Kindle book on Amazon for £2.86.

For more Tuesday Poems, please go to the hub on www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

For a review of  contemporary American poet Stanley Plumly's collection 'Now that my father lies down beside me' , go to my book review site .

Tuesday Poem - There's Nothing Like the Sun: Edward Thomas

There's Nothing Like the Sun

There's nothing like the sun as the year dies,
Kind as it can be, this world being made so,
To stones and men and beasts and birds and flies,
To all things that it touches except snow,
Whether on mountain side or street of town.
The south wall warms me: November has begun,
Yet never shone the sun as fair as now
While the sweet last-left damsons from the bough
With spangles of the morning's storm drop down
Because the starling shakes it, whistling what
Once swallows sang. But I have not forgot
That there is nothing, too, like March's sun,
Like April's, or July's, or June's, or May's,
Or January's, or February's, great days:
And August, September, October, and December
Have equal days, all different from November.
No day of any month but I have said -
Or, if I could live long enough, should say -
"There's nothing like the sun that shines today"
There's nothing like the sun till we are dead.


I've just been reading the new biography of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis, so I thought a less well-known poem by Thomas might be appropriate, particularly on a wild, wet autumnal day in England when the sun is in very short supply.  But my late, last damsons are still clinging to the branches of the tree.

Edward Thomas wrote this poem when he was in training to go to France, convinced that he would be killed there, but nevertheless, resolved to go.

I've reviewed the biography on my book blog - it comes well-recommended.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the Tuesday Poem hub and read the main poem and those of the other poets on the sidebar.

Tuesday Poem: Allen Ginsberg, Howl

I've just seen this film, which came out last year, and really enjoyed it. The script is taken from Ginsberg's collection 'Howl and Other Poems', from transcripts of interviews he gave, as well as the obscenity trial in New York, all linked together with some amazing passages of animation. It's a long time since I read Howl, and it made me want to pick it up all over again. It also seemed to fit with a book I've just been reading - Joyce Johnson's Beat Memoir 'Minor Characters'.

For more poetry please go to the Tuesday Poem hub, at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: What the River Told Me & This is What the Sky Says

What the river told me .....

Nothing escapes
the memory
of water.

This
is what you are made of.

This is what you are afraid of.

This is what the Sky says .....


Don’t wait up.

I have all the time in the universe.




I'm currently in transit between England and Italy.  These are two small fragments from the series I'm working on based on the Haida Gwaii Indian beliefs and poetry.   Their shamanic rituals were mostly in the form of poems and incantations and they all have wonderful titles which are irresistible as prompts for poems.   I'm having great fun exploring it all!

The photographs are from an autumnal, cloudy, but rather beautiful northern England.

For more Tuesday Poems, please visit the Tuesday Poets' Hub at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

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Tuesday Poem: Barbara Crooker, In the Late Summer Garden

In the Late Summer Garden


Green beans lose their adolescent slenderness,
broaden in plump pods.  One pumpkin swells,
fills a corner with its orange lamp.
At night skunks slink in to dig for grubs;
in the morning we see their small excavations.
My friend's cancer has grown, spread to her femur
and liver.  Everything that can be pruned has now been taken.
Tomatoes spark starry yellow blossoms, hope against hope.
Some will turn into hard green marbles, but the sun
has moved past equinox, days shorten and cool.
My son is learning his multiplication tables;
he flips flash cards at the maple table.
Numbers multiply like random cells.  I am learning
the simpler but harder facts of subtraction. .......

For the rest of the poem click on the link.


I'm travelling at the moment so have put this up in advance -  A wonderful poem by Barbara Crooker which appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review.  Just click the link.  It's rather sad in the beginning, but a great sense of seasonal rhythm and the natural cycle of life.   Feeling a bit autumnal myself - first of the autumn storms yesterday leaving us without internet for a while - and sad at leaving Italy which I'm growing to love more and more.

Tuesday Poem: Isobel Dixon - The Tempest Prognosticator

Moth Storm


The lamp stands on the stoep
so the moths crash the party,
fighting for the limelight,
their moment of brightness,
their fifteen minutes’ flame.

Tomorrow we’ll dust, and sweep
crisp wing-shreds up, wash
from the window panes the blight
of their massed batterings,
seeking the heart, the heat.

No: the house itself, with us,
has surged forth in the night,
a lit hulk lurching
to the clefted hill, urgently
in search of the ultimate

faraway blue, of the indigo wick,
blinding its placid glass
against this fitful blizzarding.

Isobel Dixon

Moth Storm comes from Isobel Dixon’s latest collection, just published by Salt. Salt is one of those amazing small presses (Two Ravens is another) that publish poetry and literary fiction of a very high quality. Like many of the best small publishers in Britain, its existence has been jeopardised by recent Arts Council cuts. One can only hope it manages to continue, as an antidote to the over-hyped commercial products that seem to be all that’s emerging from the big publishing houses these days.

‘The Tempest Prognosticator’ has to be one of the best titles of the year. The title poem refers to an ingenious appliance (illustrated above)  constructed in 1850 by a Dr George Merryweather - appropriately named because his prognosticator was invented to predict storms. It consisted of 12 glass bottles in a circle with a bell hung above them. In the neck of every bottle was a small piece of whalebone, connected to a hammer. Each bottle also contained a leech and when the air pressure dropped, signalling a storm, the leeches climbed up the glass, disturbing the whalebone and ringing the bell. A model of it is apparently in Whitby Museum in Yorkshire.


This is an intelligent, carefully crafted collection, with poems that may take several readings to give up their cargoes of thoughts and ideas, caught in cleverly structured nets of language. Reviewers like JM Coetzee have described it as ‘virtuoso’, and elsewhere the contents have been praised as ‘lusciously feral and finely crafted poems’ that are ‘a wake-up call to the imagination and the senses and suggest myriad possibilities of what a poem can do and be’. So, if you like poetry that makes you dig deep, you’ll like this.

Moth Storm is one of my favourites - I love the tautness of the language, the sub-text under each line, the wind that blows all the way from the southern hemisphere - all the way from Africa. I particularly like the image of the house ‘surging forth’ into the night, ‘a lit hulk lurching/to the clefted hills.’

Isobel Dixon comes from South Africa, where she has won several awards for poetry. She is currently living in the UK, where she is a literary agent. I’m privileged to have her as mine! If only all writers could have agents who are writers too.

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the Tuesday Poem website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem - Two New Zealand Authors

Author’s Bluff

It never stops in the famous story
does it, the wind, the wind?
            It is there
when the book is shut, pelting
the house walls, pushing the pines
the wrong way, making the girl’s
skirts flounce like the edges
of the streamed clouds, her heart
riding the wind.
        No wonder the sea
rings, throws salt at her lips,
the street tilts its deck
beneath the bright, flung stars.

Open the book, only that
will stop it.  Open the book
to let her through.

Copyright - Vincent O’Sullivan: Further Convictions Pending
Victoria University Press

It’s National Poetry Week in New Zealand, so I wanted to use work by an NZ poet, and this poem manages to cover two.  The first lines reference Katherine Mansfield’s famous Wellington story ‘The Wind!  The Wind!’

A big thanks to Vincent for giving me his collection when I was in NZ last year, and for giving me permission to post this on the Tuesday Poem site.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the web site www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com 

Tuesday Poem: The Double

Like but not like
through the eye of a lens
the distance of a gun sight
you can’t tell the difference.

There are two sets of clothes
two identical cars
the same hair-dresser.

But only one of them
must learn how to become
the other.

One goes to a restaurant
sleeps peacefully all night
with the window open.

The other lives behind
barbed wire, a coded door
uniformed guards.

One is the price
the Other has to pay.

© Kathleen Jones


This is another poem in draft - an idea I'm thinking about. Ever since I was an extra on a film set, I've been fascinated by the idea of having a double. All big film stars have them, on set as well as off, as well as pop divas such as Madonna. Apparently Kate Middleton also had a double when she was going to and fro to wedding rehearsals, traveling in identical vehicles to foil terrorists. Heads of state also have them. Who would care to be Obama's double? Does Gaddafi have one?

Apparently all writers are fascinated by doubles, the horror genre is full of Doppelgangers - and then there's Dostoevsky's novel 'The Double', and a film called 'Body Double' ...........

For more Tuesday Poems go to www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem - Ant Watching

Oh, who
can get into
the mind of ants?

Scribbling
their lines
skywards
up
my
wall.

Until
a perrssshhhhh
of aerosol
destroys them all.

Oh, who
wants to
think like a man?

© Kathleen Jones


After two weeks of traveling and struggling with non-existent internet, I've finally managed to arrive back in England and try to put together a Tuesday Poem.  This is just a scribble - watching ants climbing up the tower wall at Peralta!  They're so purposeful and dedicated, it seems a shame to get out the ant-killer.

Thinking tonight of everyone in Christchurch - have been exchanging texts with my daughter on the train on the way up from London.  She was at the doctors with the boys when the latest group of quakes struck and they all went under the desk.  She has recently moved out of Christchurch to Prebbleton which is not quite so shaky, but still comes into the city for shopping, schools etc.  It seems the ground isn't going to settle down quickly and my heart goes out to everyone over there who's having to endure months of fear and uncertainty.  Apparently more than 50,000 people have left the city already and I do wonder what is going to happen.  It is one of my favourite places.

The Tuesday Poem: No harm in hoping

I’m putting the Tuesday Poem up early because I’m going to be travelling for the next 24 hours. Neil has flown off to Singapore, (tempted to put a sad emoticon in here) en route for Cambodia and I’m heading south to Kaikoura on the ferry.

The poem I’ve chosen is by Vincent O’Sullivan, from his collection ‘Further Convictions Pending’ published in 2009.

No harm in hoping

At the end of the story I want you
to say, ‘I’ve forgotten the plot entirely.
It’s no use asking which character was which,
what name she used, what his job was.
Or where the bridge crossed the canal.’

At the end of the story I want you
to remember only the important things
that walk between the congregations of print
like a bride you’ve read of between the torches
of the story you thought you read.


I first met Vincent O’Sullivan when I began researching the Katherine Mansfield biography, because he’s one of the foremost Mansfield scholars and editor (with Margaret Scott) of all five volumes of Mansfield’s letters, author of many eminent academic papers, as well as the editor of numerous editions of New Zealand literature. It was only after that first meeting I realised that Vincent himself was a formidable poet and author of fiction. I began reading his work and it quickly became apparent that he was one of New Zealand’s most gifted authors. I felt quite embarrassed that I had regarded him initially as a scholar and not as a poet and author in his own right. This is one of the problems in New Zealand - authors here don’t always get the exposure they deserve on the other side of the world. Vincent’s work should be much, much better known.

I chose this poem because it seems to be about reading. To me it says ‘forget the detail, immerse yourself, live in it, to the point that it becomes your own story’. I’ve never agreed with the notion of ‘the death of the author’, but I believe absolutely that every reader reads a different version of a poem or story. The best stories for me are the ones where I go through a door into a virtual world that is utterly real until the last page.
I particularly love the image of ‘congregations of print’ and the reader walking like a bride down the torch-lit aisle between them.

For more Tuesday poems, click on the link.

Windy Wellington

So here I am in the windy city - there always seems to be a gale blowing when I’m in Wellington. But it’s a very friendly place, which makes up for the weather. Wellington has a very distinct identity. The houses, hotels and office blocks are crowded around a succession of bays, and climb precariously up the slopes of the surrounding hills. The views are spectacular. There are also lots of coffee shops, wine bars, tempting restaurants and little boutiques - you need to keep a grip on the wallet!

Thorndon, Wellington

Wellington was Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace, where she grew up and went to school. Her father was an entrepreneur, banker and leading figure in Wellington society - knighted for his services to New Zealand. Thorndon, the area where the family lived, is still surprisingly recognisable, with its brightly painted timbered houses and the botanical gardens they often visited. It’s possible to walk around and get a feel for Katherine’s childhood experiences. There are still gorse bushes blooming on what she called the ‘gorse-golden hills’ above the streets and you can run into the wind down to Lambton Quay where she bought the paper with her first published story in and read it propped against a lamp-post.
Last night there was an event hosted by the New Zealand Book Council - an informal discussion about Katherine Mansfield and the book. The interviewer was Elizabeth Alley, a very experienced broadcaster and chairperson, who steered me through the subject brilliantly. I get so nervous at these events I lose all sense of place and time. But the audience seemed to enjoy it and they bought quite a few books.

Kathleen pretending to be a Real Author

I also got the chance to meet New Zealand writer and blogger Tim Jones (Books in the Trees) and we went for a drink afterwards and had a very entertaining evening discussing the differences in the publishing scene here and in England.  Tim is one of the other writers who contributes to the Tuesday Poem blog here in New Zealand. 

The Tuesday Poem: Katherine Mansfield

Sleeping Together

Sleeping together... how tired you were...
How warm our room... how the firelight spread
On walls and ceiling and great white bed!
We spoke in whispers as children do,
And now it was I--and then it was you
Slept a moment, to wake--"My dear,
I'm not at all sleepy," one of us said....

Was it a thousand years ago?
I woke in your arms--you were sound asleep--
And heard the pattering sound of sheep.
Softly I slipped to the floor and crept
To the curtained window, then, while you slept,
I watched the sheep pass by in the snow.

O flock of thoughts with their shepherd Fear
Shivering, desolate, out in the cold,
That entered into my heart to fold!

A thousand years... was it yesterday
When we two children of far away,
Clinging close in the darkness, lay
Sleeping together?... How tired you were....


Katherine Mansfield isn't well known as a poet, but she wrote some good poems. So I thought it might be nice to put one of them up on the blog to celebrate National Poetry Day in New Zealand. This poem is about her disastrous teenage love affair with a young musician called Garnett Trowell who came - as she did - from Wellington. They were both living in London. Katherine became pregnant and the romance was broken up by Garnett's parents. The poem seems to refer to a visit she made to Glasgow where Garnett was playing with a touring opera company. She was hoping that their relationship could be mended, but she hadn't told him about the desperate, spur of the moment marriage she had made in order to provide a legal father for her child ....... The break with Garnett was permanent, but he kept her love letters until he died.

http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

The Tuesday Poem

ALONE AT NIGHT

Alone now in the old house
I lock doors, fasten windows
and close the curtains to keep out fear.

There is nothing outside but sheep
standing patiently in dark fields
keeping watch for winter foxes.

The trees toss restlessly in the garth
talking amongst themselves.
There is nothing outside but the dark.

Inside the fire burns optimistically;
it's flame a brand to thrust
in the eyes of ravening wolves.

I am not used to silence,
the quiet conversations of sheep
the breath of trees, fox cry.

Sometimes in the night
I wake and feel the silence and the dark
filling the sockets of my skull.


This poem was written quite a few years ago, after I returned to the north of England on my own to stay in the isolated farmhouse I had been brought up in. I realised during the night, that it was the first time I had been alone without either a partner or my children since I left home at the age of 18. I've always been afraid of the dark - a fear no rational debate can cure!!

* a garth is an old norse word - northern dialect for a belt of trees grown as a wind-break around houses.

http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/