Winged Ink

Tuesday poem: 'The Stations of the Bucket Man' by Keith Westwater

2012-01-16T21:26:00.006+13:00

The Stations of the Bucket Man

1

One Monday, Mr Jones walked out
of his Tinakori Hill campsite
with his birth certificate
bank statement and will
knelt in the gutter
at the intersection
of Grant and Park Streets
and died.

2

He was an urban Man Alone
before he went bush in the city.
His mother said his downfall
was his (bleeding) sensitivity.

3

The artist who painted him
with a halo and cross
was asking us to reflect
on what we would say
if we met on the street.

4

He stopped daily
at the Golden Arches
buying coffee and a bite to eat
in lieu of loaves and fishes.

5

The stockbroker’s assistant
nearly threw him out
of the counting-house
seeing he was not a Pharisee.

6

From his portrait
he looks over the shoulder
of the businessman
who wanted to buy his burial.
Who does he think he is?

7

One Christmas
there was room for him at the table
but he declined
stopping instead on the porch
to chat about the garden.

8

When he gave Wellington’s poor
money and clothes given him
they were, for a while
rich beyond relief.

9

In church he placed in the plate
twenty dollars just given him
then said to his benefactor
two would do.

10

One cold night
not long before he left us
he rested in a bus shelter
and told a passing Samaritan
he was alright
and thank you for asking.

11

At his funeral it was said
how useful a bucket was
living on the street –
for washing at the public fountain
for carrying things in
for using as a hat
when God wept on you.

12

Blessed are Wellington’s homeless
for they shall inherit the earth
on Tinakori Hill.

I love this poem. Every time I read it gives me shivers. I loved it from the first time I read it in JAAM 26 (or, actually, when I read it while typesetting JAAM 26). I most recently read it in Keith's debut poetry collection, Tongues of Ash. I thought of it again today, because Blanket Man (Ben Hana), a sort-of-but-not-really successor to the Bucket Man (Robert Jones), died yesterday. Both of these men chose, for various reasons, to become homeless. They both became Wellington personalities in a kind of uncomfortable way - for me at least. I couldn't help but feel uncomfortable around them - aware of my own privilege, my own mental health, a desire to help them along with a desire to stay the hell away from them. They had quite different energies - Robert Jones was more plodding and humble, I guess, while Ben Hana had more of a trickster energy, hanging out on busy intersections, worshipping the sun. Without meaning to mythologise either of them, they both made people think and feel, and they have been significant in the warp and weft of my city.

I'm not sure that, in my rant above, I really expressed what it is I think I'm trying to say. I think what I'm trying to say is that I'm sad. And that while they were homeless, they kind of belonged to us, to the city. That they matter. Or something like that.

Keith Westwater began writing poetry in 2003 while taking Dinah Hawken's Writing the Landscape course, and landscape and the natural world remain primary poetic interests of Keith's. Since then he has had work published in various literary journals and short-listed in competitions. His debut poetry collection, Tongues of Ash, was published last year by Interactive Press in Brisbane (for more information visit: http://www.ipoz.biz/Titles/TOA.htm). And Keith blogs here: http://www.keithwestwater.com/.

And then, if that's whet your appetite, check out the other Tuesday poems via http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

And happy new year! I hope it turns out fabulously for you, and for me too.

2011, year of not as much poetry as I had intended

2011-12-31T12:25:00.003+13:00

Sometimes I feel I'm in a time loop. Looking back at a post I wrote in Jan last year, I find I've articulated the very things I'm still feeling: that I keep pushing my own poetry to the bottom of the list. I decided that 2011 was going to be my Year of Poetry. I decided I was going to read a poetry book a week. I decided I was going to finish and polish the manuscript for my next book. I was going to focus more on my own poetry and less on publishing poetry.

So, this year, instead of publishing my average of one Seraph Press book, I published two. They are both wonderful, and I'm glad I published them. But after the middle of the year I did end up feeling that publishing (the two Seraph Press books, plus JAAM) was dominating my time entirely.

I haven't managed to read 52 poetry books this year. I stopped recording them back in May at 16/52. But I've also read these, in no particular order because I can't remember:

Cookhouse, by Paula Green (17/52)
Spark, by Emma Neale (18/52)
The City, by Jennifer Compton (19/52)
Thicket, by Anna Jackson (this is her new one, which sent me back to:) (20/52)
Catullus for Children, by Anna Jackson (and) (21/52)
The Long Road to Teatime, by Anna Jackson (22/52)
Hill of Wool, by Jenny Bornholdt (23/52)
The Moonmen, by Anna Livesey (24/52)
Western Line, by Airini Beautrais (25/52)
Men Briefly Explained, by Tim Jones (26/52)
Tongues of Ash, by Keith Westwater (27/52)
The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, by Kate Camp (28/52)
Poetry Reading at Kaka Point, by Peter Olds (29/52)
Pocket Edition, by Geoff Cochrane (30/52)
The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems, by Vivienne Plumb (Ok, so I did publish it, but I had to read it multiple times, so I'm going to count it) (31/52)
The Comforter, by Helen Lehndorf (ditto) (32/52)
Green Man Running, by Anna Jackson's honours class (I taught them how to hand-bind this little collection one Saturday afternoon) (33/52)
2011, by Anna Jackson (this is a little book of 11 poems Anna put together to commemorate the year) (34/52)
The Same as Yes, by Joan Fleming (a Christmas present) (35/52)
Nice Pretty Things and others, by Rachel Bush (also a Christmas present, and I haven't actually finished it yet, but I'll make sure I do today). (36/52)

So, 36. Not quite 52, but on the way.

I also haven't quite finished Cinema, the sadly neglected thing that it is, but I have gone so far as to sort it into an order, and hand it over to a trusted friend to read and give me feedback. (Pretty much the first thing she said is that she doesn't think the order is right!) Even though there are still some unfinished poems in there, it has helped make me feel like it isn't too far off being done.

Thinking back on the year, some other cool poetry things have happened. I've been part of Tuesday Poems for its second year (I don't always manage to post or be a good community member, but I try), and we Wellington members had two meet-ups - appropriately at the book-filled Library bar.

I did a couple of readings this year, both of which were really enjoyable - for me at least. In March I read at the Ballroom with Helen Heath and Helen Lehndorf as Helen Cubed. This was a wonderful experience, and one I hope we will reprise. At the end of the year, in early December, I read at Blondini's with Vana Manasiadis, Emma Barnes and Stefanie Lash. Much scarier than the readings was going out to Newlands College, doing talk to a hall-full (well, actually it was half-full) of students (which including reading a few poems, which I found much more comfortable than talking), running a writing workshop (which went really well, to my great relief) and presenting prizes to students who had placed in a poetry competition I had judged.

And I've had a few things published around the place. Most exciting for me was probably Sport publishing a poem sequence 'Nine Movies' (which is from Cinema) in it's entirely - all nine poems. Another big highlight is Paula Green selecting a couple of my poems for a new anthology of love poems that is being published in 2012. Sadly that had to be cut back to one when it got the publisher, who needed it to be a shorter book, but I'm still very excited. And it was also cool when my poem 'If this is the future...', which had been published in issue 2 of Eye to the Telescope, was the Thursday poem in the Dominion Post. (My in-laws still have the clipping stuck to their fridge.)

So, my year wasn't quite as poetry-filled as I hoped it would be, but it also wasn't quite such as failure as I thought it was before I started reflecting. And I'm going to try to make 2012 an even better year of poetry - one where I write more anyway.

(Very late) Tuesday and Christmas poem: 'Pōhutukawa' by Vivienne Plumb

2011-12-20T23:51:00.000+13:00

Vivienne Plumb has just been announced as one of the two Randell Cottage fellows for next year (she's the NZ one in the second half of the year, Florence Cadier is the French one in the first half of the year). She plans to use the time to research and write a novel with political themes set in Wellington. I'm very proud to have published her most recent book, The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems, from which 'Pōhutukawa' comes, in October.

I chose this because it's a very Christmas poem, a very New Zealand Christmas. Red pōhutukawa threads on the ground, hot asphalt, asparagus, fractures.

And look, I have 10 minutes left of Tuesday!

Check out other Tuesday (and some Christmassy) poems over at the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday Poet: An interview with Tim Jones about Men Briefly Explained

2011-12-12T20:38:00.007+13:00

In place of a Tuesday Poem this week, I have a Tuesday Poet. Below is a short interview with Tim Jones, about his new poetry book, Men Briefly Explained. It's part of a blog tour Tim's been doing around the interwebs (you'll find more of his visitations here: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/magical-mystery-tour-is-coming-to-take.html)

And once you've read this, you'll want to check out all the Tuesday Poems, here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

Did you set out to write a poetry book about men?

I was going to answer "no" to this question, but a dive into the dusty depths of my hard drive suggests that the answer should actually be "yes"!

Even before my previous poetry collection All Blacks Kitchen Gardens was published by HeadworX in 2007, I had noticed that I had written quite a few new poems about men, and I thought of putting them together in a chapbook which I was going to call "Guy Thing" - I even wrote a title poem. I had in mind the Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop Mini Series, which I really like.

The chapbook idea never turned into anything, but about three-quarters of the poems I had planned to include in it made their way into Men Briefly Explained. The rest of the MBE poems were mainly written in 2010, when I had scaled my ideas up from a chapbook to a new collection. By that stage, I was writing with the theme of the collection in mind. These newer poems are mainly in the second and third sections.

I still really like the idea of putting a chapbook together, though - I'd like to do that one day. Perhaps my poem about the final boss in the first Lara Croft game will finally see the light of day...

I'm a bit obsessed with poetry books as collections - as a complete whole, with a structure and shape. Did you put your collection in order, or did you publisher do it, or was it a combination of the two?

It was mainly me, with a few suggestions from Dr David Reiter of Interactive Press, the publisher, who is of course also a very widely published poet himself. The sections stayed pretty much as they were, but there was a little bit of re-ordering within them.

This is my second book published by Interactive Press. The first, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, which I co-edited with Mark Pirie, was a much trickier exercise to sequence - we shuffled the poems in that around quite a lot before arriving at the final order, and since the book won an award and has sold surprisingly well, it seems the effort was worthwhile.

If you were involved, how did you come to decide to arrange it in this way?

The poems in the prospective "Guy Thing" chapbook I mentioned earlier were mainly about me, and mainly about youth and young manhood, plus I had a number of poems looking at men, real or imagined, in the third person - and those men seemed, when I went back and thought about the poems, to be middle-aged.

A book about men that purported (at least in its title) to explain them, but stopped at the middle years of their lives - the stage I'd reached - didn't really seem adequate, so in 2010, I concentrated on writing poems for the third section of the book, where the protagonists of the poems range from middle-aged to posthumous. Deliberately setting out to write a group of poems on a pre-decided topic was quite a departure for me, but once I got into the swing of it, the remaining poems came quite quickly.

And did you also structure your previous poetry collections?

This is the first of my collection to have one overarching theme. In my previous collections, I've grouped the poems into sections that have had some kind of coherence - for instance, there is a section of my first collection, Boat People, that I think of as the "Russian section", poems either about Russia or strongly influenced by Russian poetry; and in both Boat People and All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens, the final section of the book consists of speculative poetry.

What's next for Tim Jones? Are you working on your next poetry collection?

After a long hiatus, I've again started writing the occasional poem from time to time, but my main focus at the moment is on writing short stories. Quite apart from the fact that that's what I want to be doing, I am obliged to do this, because when I was awarded the NZ Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010, it was on the basis of producing another collection of short stories, so I had better bestir myself!

With this collection, I again have a theme in mind from the start, rather than (as with my first two collections) coming up with the theme by finding a commonality within the stories I wanted to include. I have noticed that both publishers and reviewers of short story collections show a strong preference for linked or at least themed collections. Personally, I prefer variety, but since I've thought of this theme it has generated lots of story ideas. Whether I should write the stories based on these ideas, or whether I should simply provide readers with a title, an outline of the story idea, and a few blank pages for them to fill in themselves, is a decision yet to be taken.

How To Buy A Copy Of Men Briefly Explained

Men Briefly Explained is published by Interactive Press (IP) of Brisbane. You can find out more about Men Briefly Explained, and buy it direct from the publisher, on IP's mini-site for the book: http://www.ipoz.biz/Titles/MBE.htm

On Tim's Men Briefly Explained page, there are more options for buying the book in person and online, plus latest reader reactions and reviews: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/p/men-briefly-explained.html

Tuesday Poem: 'Wabi-sabi' by Helen Lehndorf

2011-12-05T21:50:00.006+13:00

Wabi-sabi

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.

Deep snow squeaks. We
stop on the Desert Road
because of the snow. You
throw snowballs at the
‘Warning: Army Training Area’ sign.
I take macro-photographs of
icicles on tussock.

When we drive up the Desert Road
we lose National Radio, we lose
cellphone reception, we lose
all hope. I was thirty-seven before
I considered not trying to always fix
things. I read an article in the New Yorker
about wabi-sabi – the beauty in the
broken and the worn. The integrity
of the much-used utilitarian object.

But then there was another article
about a woman flying to Mexico
to be put in a coma
so she can wake up mended. It is
like rebooting a computer, said the doctor.

Despite wabi-sabi, I want that.
To live in snow and not be thirsty.
I want good reception all the way
up the country. I want a shiny, clean
version of myself. Closedown,
hibernate, restart.

Helen Lehndorf is the author of the latest Seraph Press book, The Comforter, which I'm very proud to have published. We had two launches for it this weekend, one in Palmerston North (where Helen lives) and one one in Wellington. I've written briefly about them over on the Seraph Press site, but basically they were wonderful and magical launches. As part of her launch speech, she talked about how she had been writing this book for more than a decade - though the poems in it must have changed a lot, as many of them are about things that have happened within that decade. But basically, this has been a book that has been a long time coming for Helen, and one which is the realisation of a dream and the product of a lot of grit, hard work and determination.

Helen has also taught creative writing through Massey University, and so I'm sure she's helped other people along with their dreams.

'Wabi-sabi' is the opening poem in the book - partly because it's one of my favourites in the book (possibly my absolute favourite? But I have other favourites too), and also because it seemed to me to be an anchor of the collection. We begin here in the depths of winter, and we more towards warmer seasons, and back again.

This poem also, 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.

For more about The Comforter, visit: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/the-comforter.html

And to check out more Tuesday poems, visit the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

I'm doing a poetry reading

2011-11-30T22:41:00.002+13:00

My dear friend Vana is back in NZ for barely any time at all, and so we decided to hastily organise a poetry reading with our friends Emma Barnes and Stefanie Lash. Sorry for the short notice! The details are below, and if you're a Facebooker, the event is here: http://www.facebook.com/events/321034821241035/.

Hope you might be able to make it.

-----------------------------

December the 7th, 1911: King George and Queen Mary rode through Delhi amidst a military salute and the singing of the national anthem. The royal couple met with 150 rajahs, maharajahs and sultans. Elephants were banned from the parade for fear of them charging.

And, 100 years later: Vana Manasiadis, Helen Rickerby, Emma Barnes and Stefanie Lash read poems at 6 pm, at Blondini's (the cafe at The Embassy theatre), Kent Terrace, Wellington

Come one, come all. The cafe/bar will be open. The reading is free. Vana and Helen will have some books to for you to buy if you're interested. There will be no elephants.

Vana Manasiadis’s first poetry book was Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima. She grew up in Island Bay, and has lived in Athens, Paris and Bologna and is currently living in Crete.

Helen Rickerby is the author two collections of poetry, My Iron Spine and Abstract Internal Furniture, and one hand-bound chapbook, Heading North. She runs Seraph Press, a boutique poetry publisher, and is co-managing editor of JAAM magazine.

Emma Barnes has had poems selected for Best New Zealand Poems in 2010 and 2008. She was the editor of Enamel, a short-lived but much-loved literary journal.

Stefanie Lash completed a MA in creative writing in 2005. Her poetry has been widely published in journals.

Tuesday poem: 'Return to Nussbaum Riegel' by Tim Jones

2011-11-28T20:54:00.004+13:00

Return to Nussbaum Riegel

This is a tent.
This is another tent, next to the first tent.
This is a bag full of urine.
This is the vast inconceivable.

This is a rock.
This is another rock
These are the deposits of a long-vanished glacier.
The frigid wind, whistling over the frigid ice, passing over long
generations of mummified seals making their stealthy way from the sea,
has formed these rocks into the unearthly shapes we call "ventifacts",
photographs of which form the bulk of my presentation today.

This is me.
This is Guido.
This is Guido, Nails and Barry.
Guido, Nails and Barry
are men with whom I will always share a special
incommunicable
bond.

This is Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
He wrote his famous poem "Ulysses" while visiting Antarctica
on the first "Artists in Antarctica" programme
with Bill Manhire, Chris Orsman and Nigel Brown.
(This is Bill Manhire, Chris Orsman and Nigel Brown.)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson inscribed his famous poem "Ulysses" on a cross
placed on Observation Hill by the survivors of Scott's Polar Expedition of 1910-1912.
To read it, you need a magnifying glass
and an iron constitution.

This is the Polar Party.
These are the Polar Party's drinks and nibbles.
The Polar Party went on till 5 a.m.,
then made camp. Scott opened his diary,
wishing, not for the first time,
that he had brought a pen.

Note: Nussbaum Riegel is a rocky transverse ridge in the centre of the Taylor Valley, one of the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. The Dry Valleys have been among the main subjects of the New Zealand Antarctic research programme.

Tim Jones is the author of a whole bunch of books across a range of forms - poetry, short stories and a novel, embracing and combining both literary fiction and speculative fiction. He was awarded the NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010. He co-edited (with Mark Pirie) the anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Interactive Press, 2009), which won the Best Collected Work category in the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Awards.

'Return to Nussbaum Riegel' is from Tim's latest book, Men Briefly Explained, his third collection of poetry. It's published by Brisbane-based publisher IP Australia, and is available not only as a printed book, but in various electronic formats also. You'll find various ways to get your paws on a copy here: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/p/men-briefly-explained.html.

I wanted to share this poem in particular because I love the way it deftly glides between epic seriousness and humour. I'm particularly amused by Alfred Lord Tennyson in Antarctica as part of the Artists in Antarctica programme, and also by the 'polar party' ('These are the Polar Party's drinks and nibbles'). It becomes apparent part way through that this is the narration of a slide show or perhaps a Powerpoint presentation - can't you just imagine the presenter - standing there perhaps with his laser pointer. He'd be a gruff sort, I think. Ruddy faced.

I love the rhythm of the poem - each stanza beginning staccato, working its way up to a longer phrase - and then a joke. There are some gorgeous images in here too. How about: 'the frigid wind, whistling over the frigid ice, passing over long / generations of mummified seals making their stealthy way from the sea...' Lovely!

I'm going to be interviewing Tim on this blog soon, as part of a blog tour he's doing. And you can read lots more Tuesday Poems via the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

The Comforter by Helen Lehndorf

2011-11-27T15:14:00.002+13:00

I've been away (on a fantabulous road trip around the South Island), but before I went away I was very busy getting this gorgeous book ready for printing, and then when I came home, it was all printed. Hurrah! It's Helen Lehndorf's debut poetry collection, and it's fabulous.

We're launching it next Friday in Palmerston North and next Saturday in Wellington. If you'd like to come and I've been so remiss as not to send you an invitation, then email me (helen.rickerbyATparadise.net.nz) and I'll let you know the details.

More about the book here: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/the-comforter.html

Tuesday poem: 'bach cds' by Vivienne Plumb

2011-10-31T21:09:00.004+13:00

Vivienne Plumb: With a New Zealand mother and an Australian father, Vivienne Plumb has one foot on either side of the ditch. One of literature’s all-rounders, as well as six previous collections of poetry, she has written plays, short fiction and a novel. She has been the recipient of several awards, including the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship, the Hubert Church Prose Award, and the Bruce Mason Playwrighting Award.

This poem is from a book I've just published (!!!!) (as Seraph Press): The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems. This book grew out of a series of prose poems that Vivienne was writing, mainly about iconic New Zealand things. Some of these poems made their way to the middle section of Crumple, which I published last year, but I felt these New Zealand icon poems deserved a book of their own.

In these poems, which are often hilarious and frequently have a tug of fond nostalgia, I find a New Zealand I recognise. One filled with our national cuisine (represented by such things as whitebait, crockpots and muttonbird), with sheds, dogs, tramping, birds, sly-grogging, The Warehouse, inter-island ferries, inter-city buses, motels, gambling and bad weather.

Because summer is on the way (I even got sunburnt yesterday!), I chose this poem from the collection. When I first came across it, I thought it was Bach CDs (as in Johann Sebastian), but very quickly realised my mistake. We never had a family bach, but I've stayed in other peoples, and they are so often filled with the stuff you almost discard, but not quite.

There are a few more sample poems from the book that you can download on the Seraph Press site: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/cheese-and-onion.html.

And, for even more poetry, check out the other Tuesday Poems: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday poem: 'i carry your heart' by E E Cummings

2011-10-24T18:00:00.002+13:00

Sean is reading this poem at his sister's wedding. It looked on paper like a difficult or awkward poem to read, so I went hunting on the internet to see if there were recordings of it being read, and there are quite a lot. I'm guessing it's a wedding favourite.

The different versions include this extract read by read by Heath Ledger, which I like better than the the previous entire version. I think he makes it sounds more natural, and meaningful. And, quite frankly, less sucky.

I'm not sure I'd come this poem before, but I am familiar with e e's work, and had been a bit of a fan ever since I read some of his work in the first-year English poetry anthology. But this poem, I really just don't know how I feel about it. I'm wondering whether he might have taken a bunch of lines from valentine's cards and made a poem out of them, except that root of the root, sky of the sky stuff - that's not really greeting-card material. Not that I'm quite sure what it means... But yeah, do you think it's a genuine love poem, or is a parody of love poems?

Speaking of love poems, sadly, once the manuscript got to the publishers, Paula Green had to cut some poems out of her anthology of love poems. So only one of my two poems is going to make it to print. It's this one here, which I've been thinking of a bit this week, as Sean spent a bit of time in hospital. He's all good now though, but must take care and wear warm coats and so forth.

There's lots more poems for you to enjoy via the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesdsay poem: 'Finding Sepela: 22 February' by Tusiata Avia

2011-10-10T21:19:00.005+13:00

Finding Sepela: 22 February

I am driving through the river/ that is my road/ to find my daughter/ there are black sea creatures/ eating white hippos/ big as cars/I drive on the footpath/ the drowning of wildebeasts/ whole herds of them in Breezes Rd

I get to the Aranui traffic lights and put my hand to my chest/ I swear to her/ drive with my hand on my heart/ look into the dust cloud/ blacken my eyes

there are giant worms/ under the ground/ as big as Cairo/ they eat the fish and chip shop/ I promise her/ her little ears/ so far away/ her heart/ the sacred dome/ the creamy marble/ the white antelopes

five days go by/ and still I drive/ all on the roadside age/ a woman pushes a pram/ a cat peers out/ a rabbit/ a bird/ I pass them/ all women wear bare feet and walk/ rhino/ elephants/ trains of them lie/ in Phillipstown/ where they fall/ it is catholic/ this dream/ it is total

the house of saints is not brick and mortar/ but still it falls/ everyone is leaving for their home/ in the sky/ Japanese/Chinese/ Kiwis/ and everyone/ see them flying home/ bright babies/ through concrete steel and glass

I promise my daughter/ and run to Barbadoes/ the holy sisters are fallen/ look up through the broken window/ god the mother has turned her back away/ she looks down on us/ she sends us white and blue

My daughter is three/ she shelters under the battle club/ she’s hides inside the ground/ the enemies of god/ circle on the backs of buzzards/ they rain bricks on the bus depot/ the primary school/ the preschool

I snatch her up/ like a football/ I sprint the slowest steps/ it is underwater/ this dream/ it is eternal

Tusiata Avia is a poet, performer and children’s writer. Of Samoan-Palagi heritage, she lives in Christchurch. Her first collection of poetry, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt was published in 2004. Her solo show of the same name premiered in 2002 and has toured nationally and internationally. Her second book, Bloodclot, was published in 2009. She held the CNZ–Fulbright Pacific Writer in Residence, University of Hawaii, 2005. She was the 2010 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury.

'Finding Sepela: 22 February' is one of five poems by Tusiata in the latest issue of JAAM that all deal with different aspects of the Christchurch earthquakes. The others are great too, but this is the one that struck me the most. She makes the experience so immediate, but also so mythic. One of my favourite bits in the poem is: 'there are giant worms/ under the ground/ as big as Cairo/ they eat the fish and chip shop'. I can feel the unreality of the whole experience, and the desperate tug to get as fast as you can to the people you love. And then the relief, when she snatches up her daughter. It isn't all over, but that part of the quest is.

Along with Tusitala's poems, poems about the quake and its after effects by Fiona Farrell and Kerrin P. Sharpe open the issue. They are, as Anne says in the editorial, 'Christchurch writers who bear testament to the solidarity, bravery, and artistic spirit of the people of that city.' She also says: 'It is my hope that, once houses, streets and businesses have been re-established in Christchurch, there will be something - many things - to commemorate the collective grief and survival, such as the poetry wall the people of Sichuan province erected after their 2008 earthquake; and that forums such as JAAM will have been the places where writers first documented the earthquake, and that these documents will be some of their imaginative possessions.'

JAAM 29 has just been published and, with the help of other kind folks, I'm in the process of getting them to all the places they have to go. This issue was guest edited by Anne Kennedy, and you can read more about it here in this blog post I've just written: http://jaam.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/jaam-29-unleashed/.

And then you could pop over to the Tuesday Poem blog, and read some more Tuesday poems: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday poem: 'Lady Lazarus' by Sylvia Plath

2011-10-04T22:39:00.003+13:00

(If you can't see the video embedded above, you can find it here on YouTube: http://youtu.be/esBLxyTFDxE

I love hearing recordings of Sylvia Plath reading her work. She has such a rich voice, and she brings out the rhythms and rhymes in her poems. I think the quality I like the most about her voice is that there's some kind of ironic edge to it - a wryness? Maybe it isn't an edge - perhaps it's a bubble of a laugh, just held in.

Anyway, 'Lady Lazarus' is one of the poems of Plath's that I especially loved when I studied her. I should read some more of her work again - I think I'd find I now connected with poems that I couldn't understand then.

More Tuesday Poems via the hub blog! http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

(Late) Tuesday poem: 'The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' by me

2011-09-27T21:39:00.003+13:00

6 The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (from 'Nine Movies')

I’m pretty sure I know now
what love tastes like
and it takes something so
fantastical
to balance the sweet sharp salt
the corners of your tongue
to wash away the sticky syrup
that gets on my hands
and makes it hard to think

Running through the passages, tunnels of us
all made of books, stacked floor-
to-ceiling, and if they should topple
we’d be trapped beneath Brontës and Eliots
Dostoyevoskys, Tolstoys
Atwoods and Couplands and Greenes
Living in constant danger of being crushed
by the weight of Western literature
is just one of the risks we take

I know there are rooms inside of me
that you’ve never been to
You’ve whole basements
you’ve locked yourself out

The highlight of my week last week was finding out that a couple of my poems have been selected for a new anthology of love poetry, which is being compiled by Paula Green (a poet I very much admire). One of the two was this poem, which is part of a longer sequence called 'Nine Movies'. The whole thing is a love poem really, but not the soppy kind of love - at least I don't think so. I was aiming to capture the real kind of love, that might not start off all love-at-first-sightish, but grows, gets strong, faces difficulties, has a lot of fun, lives in the everyday. Love that isn't afraid of getting its hands dirty.

As you might suspect, each poem takes its name from the title of movie. This is probably favourite poem in the sequence. I think it's the last one I finished, and then I went back and added some of my favourite stuff and cut out some stuff that didn't seem quite necessary.

More Tuesday Poems via the Tuesday Poem blog – http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/ – which has just reached 100 followers. Cool!

New issue of JAAM almost out

2011-09-18T20:23:00.003+12:00

It's off to print this week, and we've got our CNZ grant to help pay for it all (yay!). Anne Kennedy, our guest editor, has done an amazing job and assembled such a fabulous bunch of writers that I must confess I was a bit intimidated. Anyway, I've posted a pic of the cover over on the JAAM site, go see: http://jaam.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/jaam-29-sneak-peek/

Tuesday Poem: The Cheese and Onion Sandwich, by Vivienne Plumb

2011-09-12T22:24:00.003+12:00

I've been working a lot in the last week or so on the next book I/Seraph Press am/is going to publish. It's by Vivienne Plumb, and now has a title The Cheese and Onion Sandwich and other New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems. As you might expect, it includes the above poem, but that version of it is actually from Crumple, where it is also included.

I'm really looking forward to getting The Cheese and Onion Sandwich out into the world, and hope to do it while the world cup is still on. There's a lot of representing ourselves to the world going on, and what I love about the prose poems Vivienne has written is that they represent New Zealand to me in a way I understand. As you might expect from her, if you know her work, they're pretty tongue in cheek, they gently and fondly skewer, and they're hilarious.

There's lots more Tuesday Poems via the Tuesday Poem blog. Go check them out!

In place of a Tuesday Poem

2011-08-30T22:28:00.003+12:00

I've just come back from a few wonderful days in Gisborne, where it was so hot and sunny. So I haven't sorted out a Tuesday poem again this week.

I'm delighted that my poem 'Enchantress of Numbers' is the Tuesday poem over on Helen Lowe's blog this week: http://helenlowe.info/blog/2011/08/30/tuesday-poem-enchantress-of-numbers-by-helen-rickerby. Helen is one of a peculiarly large number of NZ poet Helens (obviously it's a poetic name...), and she also writes novels and short stories.

There are lots more Tuesday poems for you to read via the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/. Also on the hub blog you'll find a poem by Peter Olds, whose latest book Coming Ashore was launched last week, the night after he recieved the Prime Minister's Award for poetry.

Tuesday Poem: 'Three Hummingbirds' by Janis Freegard

2011-08-15T21:58:00.003+12:00

Three Hummingbirds

I
My mind is full of aspidistras. I went to the house of
the glorious witch. We ate hummingbirds’ eggs and
small slices of persimmon glazed with honey. I wanted
her to teach me how to fly, but all I could say was
‘aspidistras’. In the courtyard, hummingbirds hummed –
a sad tale of missing eggs. I took the hand of the
glorious witch. We walked together among the
persimmon trees. ‘Teach me how to dream of
aspidistras,’ I begged her. She laughed her honey-
glazed laugh and then, and then, we were flying like
hummingbirds, high above the courtyard.

II
In the white stucco room with the man from Japan, we
listened to some wilder shade of green. I sensed the
presence of mules, underground. The man from Japan
performed magic tricks with a cigarette. There was a
cup on top of his wardrobe and I said: there’s a cup on
top of your wardrobe and he said: it’s got spaghetti in it.
I haven’t laughed so much since I learned to fly. The
underground mules toil subconsciously beneath the
motorway. I’m wondering how far until breakfast.

III
Two days ago I was floating beneath the surface
wondering whether to come up for air and today I’m all
hummingbirds. My garden is full of persimmons and
cups of spaghetti. I have flown with a witch until
breakfast. A man from Japan made a white stucco room
disappear which has got to be a good thing. I have
played with mules and danced through aspidistras. Our
minds, unfortunately, have minds of their own. Three
hummingbirds. All humming.

Janis Freegard

A few months ago I went to the launch of Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, Janis Freegard's debut collection of poetry (published by Auckland University Press). At it she was dressed up quite fantastically, including wearing a mask with a very long beak- you can see her wearing it in this video of her reading a 'The Icon Dies' on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfS_b52SBNE.

At the launch she also read the poem which I think is my favourite in the collection - 'Three Hummingbirds'. Thanks Janis for letting me share it. I enjoy it's energy, it's sort-of narrative thread, but most of all the surrealism. Though, there may be more realism to it than I suspected: Janis says 'the cup of spaghetti on top of the wardrobe and the magic trick with the cigarette come from a real life incident.'

Janis Freegard was born in South Shields, England, but has lived in New Zealand most of her life. She has a science degree from The University of Auckland, with Honours from Victoria University of Wellington. Her work was included in AUP New Poets 3 (2008) and, also a prose writer, she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield short story competition in 2001. Freegard lives in Wellington, New Zealand with an historian and a cat and blogs at http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com.

Check out the other Tuesday Poems, which are appearing already, via the Tuesday Poem blog.

Poetry stuff goin' on

2011-08-13T10:58:00.002+12:00

Monday 15 August: Joy Harjo

Born in Oklahoma, with a Muskogee Creek heritage, Joy Harjo is an internationally known poet; a performer, a writer (of plays among other things), and a saxophone player. She has received many awards for her poetry including the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her books include: ‘In Mad Love and War (1990); ‘She Had Some Horses’ (reprinted 2008); and most recently ‘How We Became Human: new and selected poems’ (W. W. Norton & Company 2002). She has released three award-winning CD’s of original music. Until recently, she taught at the University of New Mexico. She has spent many years in Hawai’i. Read more about her, listen to her poems at : www.joyharjo.com

Patricia Grace will chair this session.

Writers on Mondays is presented with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, and additional support from Circa Theatre and City Gallery Wellington. These sessions are open to the public and free of charge.

Date Monday 15 August

Time 12.15-1.15pm

Venue Te Papa Marae, 4th Floor, Te Papa 9 (note: no food may be taken into Te Papa Marae)

Monday 15 August: Kay McKenzie Cooke

The New Zealand Poetry Society is pleased to present Dunedin poet Kay McKenzie Cooke. Kay is a poet and short story writer with an extensive background in the early childhood sector. She won the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for her poetry collection, Feeding the Dogs, at the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. Her poetry has also appeared in a range of literary journals and magazines, as well as anthologies. Her second volume of poetry, Made for Weather, was published in 2007.

The evening starts with an open mic, and there is a small door charge of $5 ($3 for NZPS members).

7.30pm, The Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave St, Thorndon

Sunday 21 August: Alex Staines

Guest Poet: Alex Staines
Guest Musician: Steph Casey
Plus: Open mic (from 4pm)
Time: Sunday 21 August, 4 - 6pm
Place: The Ballroom Café, cnr Riddiford St & Adelaide Rd, Newtown

I was inspired by this

2011-08-11T21:17:00.002+12:00

From an article talking to the winners of this year's book awards. Kate Camp said:

Inspired a couple of years ago by a visiting Canadian poet with a big ego and boundless ambition, she decided to follow her instincts wherever they led her. The resulting collection is "not particularly user-friendly", she says, "even the title's a little bit difficult ... To think that you can be just going off in your own direction without much regard for whether anyone's going to be following you there, and then for it to get a really positive response is amazing."

Yay for going your own way!

Tuesday Poem: 'If this is the future...' and Eye to the Telescope

2011-08-08T20:18:00.004+12:00

I apologise for being such a slack blogger. I have once again not organised any of the many poems from other poets that I intend to ask permission to post.

Instead, my Tuesday poem is a poem by me, called 'If this is the future...', which you will find in the second issue of Eye to the Telescope, the Science Fiction Poetry Association's online journal of speculative poetry: http://eyetothetelescope.com/archives/002issue.html (my poem is the first one in the issue).

I wrote this poem last year, about the very peculiar way I was feeling before Sean had some surgery. (It turned out to be nothing like how I imagined - it was actually much less horrible than I expected.) After I wrote it, I thought, 'Hey, that's a science fiction poem!' and thought that if I'd written it earlier I could have submitted it to Voyagers. So when Tim Jones said he was editing the second issue of Eye of the Telescope, which was to have a focus on New Zealand and Australian poets, I immediately thought of this poem. You can read a media release about Eye of the Telescope issue 2 here: http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/eye-to-telescope-2-robots-time-machines.html

And you'll want to go an have a nose at the other Tuesday poems, which are already popping up, via the blog here: http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday poem: Untitled poem by me

2011-07-26T21:24:00.007+12:00

This Tuesday poem is rather late, but hey, it's still Tuesday.

I'm posting this one (which is from Abstract Internal Furniture) for two reasons. Firstly, because when I began my talk to the unsuspecting Newland's College junior students, I started with this poem, and they seemed to like it. I introduced it as a poem about a friend of mine who had a sucky boyfriend. My second reason for posting it is because that same friend, who now lives in the UK, came over for lunch on Sunday with her husband and kids. She now has a very nice husband, which is a vast improvement.

Check out all the other Tuesday poems here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

Poets on radio

2011-07-24T18:26:00.003+12:00

Two wonderful poets, Jennifer Compton and Anna Jackson, were on the radio this morning on the Arts on Sunday show, talking, presumably, about their new poetry books. You can listen to them here, just as I am about to: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/artsonsunday/20110724.

A poem of mine elsewhere

2011-07-23T10:24:00.002+12:00

I was really delighted that Janis Freegard published my poem 'Stranded in Paradise' from Heading North as her National Poetry Day Poem yesterday. You can read it here: http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com/2011/07/22/national-poetry-day-poem-stranded-in-paradise-by-helen-rickerby/

Poetry Day Poem: 'Poem without the L word' by Helen Lehndorf

2011-07-22T00:01:00.001+12:00

Poem without the L word

My little black cheese.
My heart-shaped river stone.
My enamel bento box.

My odd sock.
My yard bird.
My dearest speck.

Oh curly one.
Oh restless leg.
Oh sweet and sour.
Oh sifted flour.

My warm brown egg.
My coffee pot.
My mulch, my humus,
my thick layer of good rot.

You lush and lilting.
You wreckless eric.
You converse classic.

You.
Every hour, on the hour
on 45, 33
and on imported, limited-release EP.

Happy National Poetry Day!

Last week, on Friday, I did one of the most terrifying things of my life. At least, it would have been terrifying if I had really allowed myself to think about it - but I feared the terror would be disabling, so I mostly didn't think about it. I went back to high school.

Harvey Molloy had asked me to judge the poetry competition he runs at his school, and then asked if I'd be willing to talk to the junior students about being a poet and publisher, and then run a writing workshop - both things I'd never done before. I think it all went well - the children didn't riot in the hall, and the kids in the workshop were great and seemed really engaged. As part of the workshop we looked at list poems, and I got them to come up with different ideas for list poems (they had some really good ones! I wrote them down so I could steal them), and then start writing them (though we ran out of time).

I took along some examples of list poems, and one of them was 'Poem without the L word'. They liked it, but at the end a few of them chimed that they didn't understand the last bit - they didn't know what an EP was! 'Ah! You won't even know what a record is, will you?' These kids probably don't even own CDs!

They got the point though - the way of saying something without saying it, which is kind of what I think poetry is - or perhaps saying something, while also saying something else.

I love that the things Helen lists, things she loves - or rather, things the narrator of the poem loves (let's not confuse these two things) - are so particular - and some of them are kind of odd. No one else's list would be quite like this. I also really love the rhythm and rhyme she sets up in this poem - it's playful, and not overdone.

Helen Lehndorf is a poet and writing teacher from Palmerston North, and is someone to watch. I would say that of course, as later this year I'm (as Seraph Press) going to publish her debut poetry collection, The Comforter. But then, I wouldn't be publishing it if I didn't think that. You can find out more about her here on her official Helen Lehndorf, Writer page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Helen-Lehndorf/220615784632554.

My poem elsewhere

2011-07-13T10:43:00.002+12:00

I'm delighted that Tim Jones has published by poem 'This is the way the world ends' as his Tuesday poem this week: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2011/07/tuesday-poem-this-is-way-world-ends-by.html.

The poem was inspired by the film Southland Tales, which I love and pretty much everyone else in the world hated. Except the audience I saw it with at the film festival, who erupted into spontaneous applause at the end. It's a kind crazy movie. Tim describes it as if Tarkovsky was combined with Michael Bay and given millions of dollars to make a movie. That's pretty accurate.

Launch of Anna Jackson's new collection Thicket

2011-07-11T19:27:00.003+12:00

Instead of a Tuesday poem this week, here is an invitation to the launch of Anna Jackson's new poetry collection, Thicket. There's more about the book on the AUP website, and here's the poem I posted on the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/2011/06/margo-or-margaux-by-anna-jackson.html.

The invite:

You are invited to come and help me launch Thicket by drinking wine, eating olives and listening to a few poems
at the Stout Research Centre
12 Waiteata Rd
5 – 6.30ish, Friday, 15 July

Vana Manasiadis talks to Kim Hill about what's going on in Greece

2011-07-10T17:35:00.002+12:00

My dear friend Vana, whose book Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythisitorima I/Seraph Press published in 2009, was on the radio yesterday morning talking to Kim Hill about the situation in Greece at the moment. Vana has lived in Crete for the last few years, but is currently spending time in Athens. She talked about what it's like in Athens at the moment and gave a background to Greece's economic troubles. Most interestingly, to me anyway, she talked about the grassroots movement, the 'Aganachtismeni', which has been holding general assemblies around the country, and particularly in Athens. You can listen to the interview on the Radio New Zealand website: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/20110709.

Tuesday poem: 'Second Person to Drown' by Emily White

2011-07-04T20:29:00.004+12:00

Second Person to Drown

There is only one
Poem of the Sea about you.
It’s not exactly a Poem of the Sea
so much as it is a Poem in the Sea but
it’s still about you and anyway it goes like this:

You can’t feel its pull but you know that the
tide is taking you somewhere, and it doesn’t
matter. You are plankton. You are scattered
around in little pieces. You can breathe just fine
but all around you is the sound of drowning.

Little fishes tickle your face. It seems like
they are everywhere, and they mesh around your
body like a net. You curl into a crescent. You
feel the watery salt arms of the ocean encase you,
you touch your hair and it’s seaweed now; a
kelpy squelch against your wrinkled palm.

You think you know that you are not plankton,
but since you aren’t near the shore anymore,
you might yet be plankton, in little pieces,
rolling through water on your tummy,
your microscopic tummy –

riding an invisible tide, and
a wet claw that drags you
to the sea floor.

Emily White

This is one of the poems in the chapbook I helped make the weekend before last. There were lots of lovely poems, but this is one of the ones that struck me the most. I love how it starts - with a sort of prologue, with a bit of shuffling almost - a little bit of wry humour. I wonder who it is addressed to. And then begins the poem within the poem. It's beautiful and creepy and, I think, a very light sea-green. I particularly love 'You are plankton. You are scattered/around in little pieces.' The poem floats around, like the subject of the poem. The drowning person becomes part of the sea, remembers they don't belong in the sea, grow again into a sea creature. And then the poem ends with that 'wet claw', which I imagine to be enormous and black against the pale sea green.

Emily White is an honours student in English literature at Victoria University. I expect we'll see more of her poetry in the future.

And for more Tuesday poems, visit the Tuesday Poem hub: http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

What I did last Saturday

2011-07-02T19:33:00.009+12:00

I made a book! Actually, I made a couple of books, and several other people made more books as I taught them how.

The book was a little chapbook called Green Man Running, and the other people were my friend Anna and some of her students. Anna's been running an honours course in poetry and poetics this year, which sounds awesome enough by itself, but the students have been also writing their own poetry. Some of them had previously written poetry, but for some of them it was their first go.

Green Man Running has two poems from each of them. It was the fastest publishing process ever - Anna sent me the poems on Friday afternoon, I typeset them quite late on Friday night after mooching around on the couch watching some kind of rubbish television with Sean for most of the evening, sourced the paper on Saturday morning, printed them early on Saturday afternoon, and we folded and sewed them into books later in the afternoon, and were all done by afternoon tea time. This is result:

They were very excited to be in their first book, and a gorgeous book it is too, if I do say so myself. It was fun to make it, and I so much enjoyed hanging out with them and reminiscing about honours - it was my favourite academic year, even though it seriously fried my brain (though that was more at the end when I had to do five exams in less than two weeks).

There were two cover choices - cream paper or white, and they were all bound with a green hemp thread.

The thread colour doesn't come out so well in that photo.

Here's the tour of the book, from the beginning, middle to the end:

Inside cover, showing off the green cover card.

The contents page. Just like a real one.

It's still not that easy to tell that's green thread, is it? Or maybe it's just that my monitor is so crap. Anyway, it's a sort of forest-green colour.

It even had a contributor-notes section, which was particularly cool because they were written by other students, and tended to have a rather surreal tone.

There were some really great poems in there, and I hope to be able to share one or two as a future Tuesday poem. And I expect to see some of their names around in the future.

The easiness of making these books led me to make another wee book for a couple of work colleagues who left last week. In fact, I might make all of Seraph Press's books like this from now on - all I need is a good photocopier! Actually, from my previous experience, it can take a lot of time to make handmade books, but, then again, many hands makes light work and it's a fun thing to chat around a busy book-binding table.

Tuesday Poem: 'Memories of the civil war'

2011-06-27T21:56:00.003+12:00

Memories of the civil war

When the Springboks came
we were six or seven or eight.
I didn’t know much
about that
but I knew all about
the Royal Wedding.

Karen says
that she was probably
making veils for her
friend’s Barbie. They’d play weddings
‘But don’t worry,
we’d always drown her afterwards’.

I was in Standard One
and my friend Catherine
was English and had the
same haircut as Lady Di. In class we
wrote stories about royal visits
but not about riots in
the streets of Wellington.

Brian was fifteen
and lived in the Waikato.
‘We were very pro-tour and pro-rugby’.
He begins to explain how
it was the last straw
for the Kiwi blokes
who’d recently been
told they were racist and
sexist and now
they couldn’t even watch the footy.

I think we must have watched
one game on television, because
I remember my South African mother
saying she wanted the Springboks to win.
I remember some other kid
telling me that his mum said
South Africans were bad. Most kids
just said ‘Your mum can’t be South African –
she’s not black!’

Joeli says she remembers being
scared, but she hadn’t been
back long from Iran, escaping
during the revolution. Loud noises
still terrified her.

We’re watching footage on the television
twenty years later. There’s a riot and
I can see the building
where I work.
I had no idea
what was going on
outside my window.

I wrote this about 10 years ago, after watching an documentary about the 1981 Springbok tour. (It was published in Abstract Internal Furniture.) At the time I worked at the National Library, and it was chilling seeing footage of The Battle of Molesworth Street.

Next month it will be 30 years since the tour. Because, as the poem suggests, I don't really remember it, I'm fascinated at how it really tore the country apart. I had an interesting talk with some of my colleagues this afternoon about it - some of them were involved in protests, some of them were arrested. They all had interesting stories and also ideas about what happened and how it hooked into the psyche of our country. I'm looking forward to hearing more stories - I feel like people haven't really talked about it enough. I think there's still some healing and understanding yet to happen.

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the hub blog: http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Submit to Pasture

2011-06-27T18:05:00.005+12:00

I haven't even had time to write about the gorgeous new literary magazine Starch, which arrived in my post box last week (though I will), and already it has a sibling publication: Pasture. Both of these, published by the talented Kilmog Press, are hardback and hand-bound and gorgeous.

Pasture is calling for submissions, but you have to be quick! Submissions close on 1 July 2011. That's Friday! Details in pic below (you'll need to click it to make it bigger to read it properly):

In case, despite clicking the pic, you still can't read it, it basically says that you can submit poetry, short fiction, reviews or essays to starcheditors@gmail.com. Put Pasture in the subject line. All submissions in one word doc. Include bio and postal address. Submissions close 1 July.

Hansel in the house, by Anna Jackson

2011-06-20T21:59:00.004+12:00

Hansel in the house

When you lie in your bed at night
hearing your parents talking?

That’s the sound of your coffin
being assembled for you to climb in.

That’s when you have to get out
of the house, of their life.

And all you want from them
is to leave the door open.

All you want . . .

All you want is for them
never to wish you were gone.

I'm the editor of the Tuesday Poem hub blog this week, and I asked Anna Jackson if I could publish a poem from her upcoming collection, Thicket, which is coming out in July. (I'm very much looking forward to it.) And then I thought, ooh, I could publish another poem from her collection over here, to give you all a double taste of the book. I chose this poem because it really struck me. I'm a big fan of fairy tales - or maybe fan is the wrong word: I'm interested in them, but find them often disquieting and disturbing. And this poem is certain disturbing - especially the image of your parents talking being the sound of them assembling your coffin. *Shiver*.

The poem I chose for the Tuesday Poem blog isn't as dark - or rather it has a different kind of darkness - a much more pleasant kind. Go check it out here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/2011/06/margo-or-margaux-by-anna-jackson.html and then take a look at the other Tuesday Poems (in the right-hand side bar)

Forthcoming Seraph Press books: New Zealand Icons by Vivienne Plumb, and The Comforter by Helen Lehndorf

2011-06-12T10:50:00.003+12:00

Seraph Press is basically just me, and over on the Seraph Press site I've just announced the two books it/I is/am going to publish in 2011: New Zealand Icons: Prose Poems by Vivienne Plumb, and The Comforter by Helen Lehndorf. You can read more about them over there: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/1/post/2011/06/forthcoming-books-in-2011-poetry-by-vivienne-plumb-and-helen-lehndorf.html.

Tuesday Poem: 'The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind' from Nine Movies

2011-05-30T22:34:00.002+12:00

6 The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

I’m pretty sure I know now
what love tastes like
and it takes something so
fantastical
to balance the sweet sharp salt
the corners of your tongue
to wash away the sticky syrup
that gets on my hands
and makes it hard to think

Running through the passages, tunnels of us
all made of books, stacked floor-
to-ceiling, and if they should topple
we’d be trapped beneath Brontës and Eliots
Dostoyevoskys, Tolstoys
Atwoods and Couplands and Greenes
Living in constant danger of being crushed
by the weight of Western literature
is just one of the risks we take

I know there are rooms inside of me
that you’ve never been to
You’ve whole basements
you’ve locked yourself out

This is another poem from my 'Nine Movies' sequence - I posted part 1 'The Opposite of Sex' a couple of weeks ago. I generally find love stories in movies pretty dumb and unbelievable, but I'm still a sucker for a love story that seems authentic, rather than schmaltzy.

Check out the other Tuesday Poems, which you'll find over on the hub blog: http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/. The official Tuesday Poem is already up - it's 'Travelling at Night' by US poet and film maker Kathryn Hunt, and includes a video of the poet reading her poem.

Poetry reading: The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver (12/52)

2011-05-21T22:16:00.002+12:00

I first came across a poem by Vicki Feaver several years ago when I was nosing through some poetry anthology that a friend had for her poetry course at university. I was really struck by her poem - it was about Judith, whose story is told in the Apocrypha. I'd written a bit about Judith too in my poem about Artemisia Gentileschi and her paintings: 'Artemisia Gentileschi, 1593–circa 1642' - Gentileschi painted several pictures of Judith, including two of her beheading Holofernes (which is what she was famous and celebrated for).

You can read Vicki Feaver's poem 'Judith' on the English Poetry Archive site. It's a poem written in the voice of her protagonist - something that I've enjoyed doing to. It was a poem that made me want to read more of Feaver's work, and I've looked out for books by her around the place - in bookshops and libraries - but never saw any. So, now with the wonders of the internet, I decided to order a book. The book that Judith is from, The Handless Maiden, is out of print, so I bought the more recent The Book of Blood. It arrived surprisingly quickly.

I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed with this book. I wanted there to be more in there that I loved, but a lot of the poems just left me kinda cold. They didn't feel rich, they didn't feel necessary. But, looking back on it, I have fond feelings about the book, remembering how it very quietly seemed to tell a cumulative story of a life. Of sadness, of being left, and then finding love again, but that not solving everything.

In any case, there was one poem I really love, which makes the whole collection worthwhile: 'Hemmingway's hat'. It's a sort of genderbending poem about new love. No, it's more than that - it's about how we are the sum of various parts, of our histories. It ends with joy.

Poetry reading: Lost Relatives by Siobhan Harvey (11/52)

2011-05-21T22:00:00.003+12:00

I haven't been keeping up with recording the poetry books that I've been reading, but I have been reading. I'm in danger of losing track, so it's probably time to start recording them again.

First up is Lost Relatives by Siobhan Harvey, which I've mentioned previously when I included a poem from it, 'Tooth', as my Tuesday poem. I said then that it was lovely meeting old friends in here - poems I'd come across in other places, including some I'd published in JAAM many years ago. The book tells a story of loss, and of gain. Of leaving an old home and family and country behind, and coming to a new country, building a new life, with a new family, and new connections.

Tuesday poem: 'The Opposite of Sex' from Nine Movies

2011-05-16T22:30:00.002+12:00

1 The Opposite of Sex

The first time is always awkward

You held the Jaffas where I could reach
your hand too close
to my leg

Apparently Lisa Kudrow has a degree
in something
We’re always so surprised
when actors aren’t stupid

Later that night
I jumped into a taxi
and the driver looked at you
through his rear-vision mirror
and asked
‘Are you breaking that poor guy’s heart?’

This poem is the first section of a sequence called 'Nine Movies', which has just been published in Sport 39 - all six pages of it! So I'm publishing it here as a kind of celebration. You can read the rest of the sequence in the latest Sport. It's kind of a love story. Well, actually, it is a love story. *Spoiler* It ends happily - at least the poem sequence ends happily. The story hasn't ended, but it continues very happily. It may be based on a true story.

There are lots of other great things in the lastest issue of Sport too, including poems by the other members of Helen Cubed (Helen Heath and Helen Lehndorf), so Sport is now with 66% more Helen. They've also just got a new website: http://www.sportmagazine.co.nz/

Another thing I'm celebrating is that I got a new, whizzy and very cute computer/laptop/netbookish thing. It has things like a web cam, so I have finally entered the 21st century. So, I decided I would record myself reading this poem. I did, and the not-especially-high-quality results are below.

If you are having trouble viewing it here, you can watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud_1i1zckig

And go and check out the Tuesday Poem hub blog, with the featured poem, and all the other Tuesday Poem blogs: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday poem: 'Conversation Overheard on the Road to Salem' by Laura Solomon

2011-05-10T12:49:00.004+12:00

Conversation Overheard on the Road to Salem

Think you're so fancy in that pointy hat,
with the audacity to just assume your black floating cape is the best.
Those warts are only stick-on, m'dear.
I can see right through you.

Those newts you keep in jars, gloating of their powers,
are just as plastic as dolls.
Pathologically competitive, that's your problem –
if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times.
Pretending you know how to walk the line,
you're barely balancing as we ease on down this road.

Still, for all my bitching, we're on the same side,
we'll hold onto each other when the deal goes down –
you pretend to float and I'll pretend to drown.

Laura Solomon came to prominence back in the 1990s when she had two novels published by Tandem Press (Black Light and Nothing Lasting) - which I remember as really exciting, because she was so young. Since then she's been mostly overseas, in the UK, but has continued writing novels. In Vitro, from which this poem comes, is her debut poetry collection, which has recently been published by HeadworX.

The poems in In Vitro are mostly told in the first person by a wide variety of narrators, from a fertility scientist of dubious sanity, to the ghost of a man who was hit seven times by lightning, to Guy Fawkes, to crows and bats.

I chose this poem, again with a first-person narrator, because I was haunted by that last line 'you pretend to float and I'll pretend to drown'. Drowning witches was one way to test if they were in fact witches - the idea being that if they floated then they were a witch, but if they drowned then they were innocent, and dead.

There are many other Tuesday poems for your enjoyment. You'll find them here: http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday poem: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by T. S. Eliot

2011-04-25T19:45:00.002+12:00

I was a bit unsure about sharing this audio of T. S. Eliot reading 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', because I love this poem, but I wasn't sure what I thought about his own reading of it. But actually, it's growing on me.

Tuesday Poem: 'Milk for Money' by Emma Barnes, and all the other Best NZ Poems 2010

2011-04-11T22:43:00.004+12:00

I'm not going to actually repost this poem, which was included in Best New Zealand Poems 2010, as selected by Chris Price, rather I simply direct you it there: http://www.nzetc.org/iiml/bestnzpoems/BNZP10/t1-g1-t3-body-d1.html.

'Milk for Money' is one of the longer poems I've ever seen of Emma's, and it uses the length to tell a lifetime, or rather several lifetimes. I love its shifty, mythic use of time. As well as time, it bends gender, it bends language. It's full of love, it's full of loss, it's full of colour.

I was delighted to see that so many of my friends and acquaintances have poems in this latest selection of Best New Zealand Poems (and there are others I'd definitely have included, if it were my selection, which it obviously wasn't). Congratulations to you all! Check them out: http://www.nzetc.org/iiml/bestnzpoems/BNZP10/contents.html.

Also, it was the Tuesday Poem's first birthday last week, and to celebrate we collectively wrote a poem, exquisite-corpse style. And now it's done, and you can check it out on the blog: http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/. I wrote my bit on Friday afternoon, and found I was really nervous about it beforehand - I'm not much of a collaborative writer, and I tend to keep my work away from prying eyes until I'm sure I'm ready to release it into the world. But actually, it was really fun.

As always, for more Tuesday Poems, check out the sidebar on the blog.

Tuesday Poem: 'You have to walk before you can fly'

2011-04-04T22:21:00.001+12:00

You have to walk before you can fly

It’s Chantelle’s first birthday
and I’m watching her learn.

She hands me each piece
of crumpled plastic.
A gift? Or an order?
She hides a torn corner of cardboard
inside her new book.
When she opens the pages
she finds it again. It’s as simple
and as wonderful
as that.

We think she is a lot
like the cat.
They have similar habits, they
think they are Queen and
you have to keep an eye on them both.
But cat is content
with her life, while Chantelle
can already say
Mama, Dada and fish.

Chantelle and I
are an orchestra. She shakes
her rattle and I
shake mine. I am aware
I am trying to amuse her
because I want her to like me. Fortunately
it’s still easy to find her favour.

‘In twenty years’
says Sean
‘We’ll be getting ready
for her twenty first’.

I doubt it will be that easy then.

We gave Chantelle fairy wings
for her first birthday. They are
green and patterned with glitter. She
doesn’t understand them yet – she hasn’t
worn them. She doesn’t yet
care about trying to look pretty.

She slithers over to
scavenge a bite of
our apples. She is learning
to walk without support.

It's the Tuesday Poem's first birthday this week, so it seemed appropriate to post this poem about my niece's first birthday. I read this poem at the launch of Abstract Internal Furniture, by then she was almost two, and had gotten the hang of the wings. She wore them to the launch, and tottered across the empty space in front of me as I read the poem - knowing it was about her. It freaks me out that we were recently celebrating her 11th birthday, but time will march on. She still has the wings apparently.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Tuesday Poem blog we're going to be writing an exquisite-corpse-type collaborative poem over the next wee while. Will be interesting to see what we come up with! Also, check out the other Tuesday Poems via the blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday Poem: 'The Truth the Dead Know', by Anne Sexton

2011-03-21T22:46:00.006+13:00

If you can't view the YouTube clip above, then click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkCHYVgXHiQ

Reading Siobhan Harvey's Lost Relatives recently sent me back to Anne Sexton, as Siobhan has a couple of Anne-Sexton related poems at the end of the collection. So today, an audio poem of Sexton reading her own poem. Also, because there's been so much death around lately - both big disasters, and little disasters, which are no less big for the people who have lost someone they love.

Check out the other Tuesday poems on the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Robert Sullivan and Poetry Society (and Helen Cubed at the Ballroom)

2011-03-19T18:07:00.003+13:00

I mentioned earlier that Robert Sullivan was reading at the Poetry Society in March, but it was in the middle of a long ranty post, so it's worth reiterating.

He's reading on Monday at 7 pm (which is earlier than usual), at the Thistle Inn, Mulgrave Street, Thorndon. There will be an open mic, and there is a $5 entry fee ($3 for members).

Also, Helen, Helen and I have been making preparations for our reading tomorrow at the Ballroom: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2011/03/helen-cubed-come-see-us-read-poetry.html. I am still having serious debates with myself over what poems to read, but will try to read a mixture of older and newer stuff. See you there?

Tuesday poem: 'Tooth' by Siobhan Harvey

2011-03-14T22:28:00.004+13:00

Tooth

Today, you’re twelve teeth old,
and we fossick for shells,
star-fish, pipi and paua

until the tide goes out
when we wave goodbye
to yachts moored in the marina.

At home, you float
across polished floors
until you keel over.

Your jaw leaves an alveolus
in the matai deep enough
for a tear-drop’s caress.

As I stroke you,
your eyes collect water;
your gums are an ocean of blood.

But only when you’re sleeping,
do I discover a tooth
anchored to blue woollen blanket.

Suddenly, you’re eleven teeth old
and have grown, like Lazarus,
younger beneath moonlight.

White and hull-shaped,
tooth’s a boat,
isolated by low tide.

In the morning,
I’ll show you how it can rest
safely upon its starboard.

Siobhan Harvey has just launched her first New Zealand collection of poetry, Lost Relatives, from which 'Tooth' comes. She's lived in New Zealand for a decade, but grew up in UK. She's the poetry editor for Takahe, and is a consulting editor of International Literary Quarterly. She was the editor of Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion and Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals. I got to know Siobhan after accepting three of her poems for JAAM 22, and met her for the first time when she came down to Wellington as part of the Winter Readings. Since then, I've met up with her each time I go to Auckland, and it has been lovely getting to know her.

Lost Relatives is, in great part, about Siobhan's experience of moving to New Zealand - leaving behind and, in a sense, losing her home and her family. And then building a new life here, with her new family, her partner, her son, and her 'found' family. Sometimes reading Lost Relatives was like finding old friends - there were many poems I'd read before, including those three poems I'd published in JAAM 22 all those years ago.

Last Thursday I went along to the offices of Steele Roberts for the Wellington launch of Lost Relatives. (She also launched it in Auckland, where she lives.) I wasn't surprised to find a bunch of other writers there, because Siobhan has a knack of making connections with people - not in a 'networking' sort of way, but in a genuine connection sort of way - and has made friends (found family) all over the country. Roger Steele began, Harry Ricketts launched the book, and then Siobhan spoke and did an excellent reading of some of the poems in the book.

I've chosen 'Tooth' as my Tuesday poem because it was one of the poems she read, and I was particularly struck by it - by its simplicity - a story of her son falling and losing a tooth - which belies its intricateness. I love especially the marine metaphors - 'keel over', 'your gums are an ocean of blood', discovering the tooth 'anchored' to the blanket, the tooth 'isolated by low tide'. I also really liked the idea of her son being 'twelve teeth old', and then going back in time to being only eleven teeth old. He was at the launch, and is now six (I think), so many more than eleven teeth old - but still has the gap where the tooth once was.

As always, check out the other Tuesday poems via the Tuesday Poems blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

Helen Cubed – come and see (and hear) us read poetry

2011-03-12T21:27:00.004+13:00

On a lighter note (not that we will necessarily be reading light poetry), I will be reading at the Ballroom Cafe next Sunday with Helen Heath and Helen Lehndorf. Together, we are Helen Cubed.

It'll all start with an open reading, followed by live music by Blue Vein (Dan Bar-Even, Liz & Kate Kennedy), followed by Helen Cubed. It will be awesome, because what could possibly be better than three Helens? (Four Helens I guess...)

Look, there's even a Facebook event, you don't even need to remember when it is, because it Facebook will remind you: http://www.facebook.com/?sk=events#!/event.php?eid=154114791313415

What is with you, 2011?!

2011-03-12T21:15:00.003+13:00

2011 is supposed to be the year of poetry, for me at least. And has been. But it was not supposed to be the year of a whole bunch of horrible stuff. I'm grateful that it hasn't been for me personally, but I'm really feeling for everyone for whom this is year has been crap, what with earthquakes and tsunamis and floods, and, for other people, smaller but personally huge tragedies. I'm trying not to feel helpless in the face of it all. And, meanwhile, I'm appreciating my life and the people in it.

Tuesday(ish) poem: 'Poetry with Beatrice and Laura'

2011-03-09T21:45:00.003+13:00

Poetry with Beatrice and Laura

Could Beatrice have written like Dante
Or Laura glorified love’s pain?
I set the style for women’s speech
God help me shut them up again.
― Anna Akhmatova

First we discuss Beatrice’s poem
It’s about her stalker
how he hides
around corners, appears
everywhere
she goes, pretends
to be walking the other
way, pretends
he doesn’t see her
‘I don’t think he’s dangerous’
she says, ‘but he really gives me the willies’

We praise
her sharp images
the melody of rhythm, conciseness of form
her humour

I suggest she might want to change
the names

‘He just needs a proper girlfriend,’ says Laura
and she knows
what she’s talking about
she too
has a bad case of the secret admirer

‘It’s just been embarrassing,’ she says
‘I have to publish
under a pseudonym
“Oh, you’re that Laura,” they used to say
“Laura ‘whose beauty was the envy of the sun’”?
No editor would take me seriously anymore’

Her poem, a perfect sonnet
is about love and pain
and how they are not
the same thing
‘Something my grandson
should have learnt,’ she giggles
It is a departure for her
She usually writes political satire

As the theme
has turned around to love
poetry I confess that since
I have been in love
love poems have been
scarce
I suggest that there is something
about the distance, the artifice
of infatuation
that lends itself
to voluminous words
Beatrice and Laura groan

Beatrice says, ‘My husband read
what he wrote about me: “Turn, Beatrice
o turn your holy eyes upon your faithful one,”
and he said “Dante should come and live with you
for a few days, then he’ll know
how human you are,” but then
he kissed me and said
“and that’s why I love you”

Same time next
week we’ll meet again
at Beatrice’s house
and over tea and cake
bring our latest clutch of poems out
into the light

OK, so not actually Tuesday anymore, but I've missed posting a Tuesday poem for several weeks now, for various reasons, and thought it was time I got back into the swing of it.

I mentioned this poem in my last post, and talked about how I was inspired to write it after getting annoyed by that quote by Anna Akhmatova. It was going to be one of the poems in the last section of My Iron Spine, where I hang out with women from history, but I took it out because I wasn't entirely sure about it. I'm kinda fond of it though.

Beatrice Portinari (1266–1290) was a Florentine lady, best known as the woman loved from a distance by Italian poet Dante Alighieri. She is worshipped in many of his poems and appears in The Divine Comedy as a guide to paradise. It is likely that Dante only actually met Beatrice twice in his life. Laura de Noves (1310–1348) was a lady of Avignon, believed to be the woman loved from afar by the poet Petrarch and the subject of many of his sonnets. She was probably an ancestor of Marquis de Sade.

You will find many other Tuesday poems via the Tuesday Poem blog.

February poetry reading (6-10)

2011-03-02T22:13:00.000+13:00

My reading has been rather haphazard, but I seem to have managed to read some poetry books. I got a whole bunch out of the library, and now they are all overdue, sigh, and I'd better take them back. This is why I'm generally not a library user - due dates mean nothing to me, and then it ends up being cheaper buying books...

Vita Nova by Louise Glück (6/52)

I have conflicted feelings about this book. Louise Glück is a celebrated contemporary US poet, she's won lots of prizes, including for this book, but most of it didn't seem very good to me. That isn't to say that it isn't good, but more that it sent me in a bit of a spin because I couldn't see why it was good. Is it a problem with me? I guess this happens a lot - people raving about something that doesn't speak to me at all, which seems clumsy or lacking a point - and I guess we all just have different taste. But still...

There was some lovely stuff in Vita Nova though, even for me. The collection is telling a subtle story of the narrator's rebirth into life after something happened. There are snatches of a failed love affair and it's all mixed in with mythology. Should have been right up my alley. And some of it was. Here's my favourite quote:

I lived in a tree. The dream specified
pine, as though it thought I needed
prompting to keep mourning. I hate
when your own dreams treat you as stupid.
(Condo)

Vita Nova is, apparently 'written in the elected shadow of Dante', and so I thought now might be a good time to pick up that copy of Vita Nova/The New Life by Dante, which has been sitting on my shelf for some time. I'm still clawing my way through it, and perhaps it is just the translation, but it reads to me like the stalky obsessions of a very socially maladjusted young man, who could do with a bit of a slapping (except of course I abhor violence). It tells the story of how he saw Beatrice, fell in love with her, and then obsessed over her for years and years. He writes some poems. In between the poems he tells us what the poems mean and how they work (and how clever he is), and how he pretended he loved someone else, for some reason, and how he got so thin because of his love, and goodness me you really should have found some medieval Florentine psychotherapist, Dante, then perhaps you could have just asked her out and got it all over and done with.

I probably didn't come into it with the most receptive attitude - when working on My Iron Spine I wrote a poem called 'Poetry with Beatrice and Laura', where I have a poetry-writing group with Beatrice and Laura (the beloved of Petrarch). I wrote it after I was really annoyed by this epigram by Anna Akhmatova:

Could Beatrice have written like Dante
Or Laura glorified love’s pain?
I set the style for women’s speech
God help me shut them up again!

I normally like Anna Akhmatova's poetry, but this infuriated me, and I wanted to give some kind of voice to those women, who haven't gotten to have one in history.

Anyway...

Music Therapy by Peter Olds (7/52)

In contrast, I really enjoyed this book. It's quite simple, accessible and balanced. I reminded me of nothing as much as James K Baxter's Jerusalem poems, and I imagine it may be written in that tradition - Olds spent some time at Jerusalem in the 1970s. Similarly, many of these poems are about a time spent living differently, in solitude. In the 1980s Olds lived for a while in a hut at Seacliff, near the old psychiatric hospital. Like Baxter's poems, he will often describe things he sees around him, which will very subtly be metaphorical of what's going on for him. The rest of the book focuses on Dunedin in the 1990s, after a breakdown. I would include a quote, but that book has gone back to the library, to avoid further fines.

Soft Sift, by Mark Ford (8/52)

I picked this one up from the library cos it's published by Faber and sounded interesting. I'd never heard of Mark Ford before this, but then I have an appalling lack of knowledge of contemporary poets who don't live in NZ, which is what I'm trying to rectify this year.

I started reading this one afternoon, while I was in a grumpy-pants mood, and had wandered down to sit in the park in the sun to have some alone time. When I read some more, I was sitting on a concrete thing at Oriental Bay, with my feet being lapped by occasional waves - until I retreated because the tide was coming in and a particularly huge wave soaked my skirt, my bag, and dampened the book (don't tell the library). I finished it off sitting at my dining room table. This is basically irrelevant, except that now it's intimately connected with those locations in my head.

I found the poetry itself really dense. I described it to friends as kind of like eating dessert while drinking something also very sweet. I can totally enjoy dense, rich, even sticky poetry, and I did enjoy quite a bit of this, but I found I had to keep rereading lines - there seemed to be a lot of words without a clear meaning - not in a metaphorical sense so much, but as in a sense sense (if that makes any sense). For example, the first two lines of 'Penumbra': Beneath an angular web of scratchings-out/Vagrant motives glow like phosphorus: low, creeping' (though actually, that seems to make more sense now than it did before...).

I confess, I read a lot of the poems without really getting them - and now have forgotten them entirely. But one that has really stuck with me is 'The Long Man', about the Long Man of Wilmington, well, at least partly - you know poems, tricksy things – they're generally about stuff other than what they're about. Anyway, it begins 'The Long Man/of Wilmington winces with the dawn; he has just/endured yet another mythical, pointless, starry/vigil'. A favourite bit: 'I had/ the 'look', as some called it, meaning I floated/in an envelope of air that ducked and sheered/between invisible obstacles.' And the end:

... I kept picturing someone tracing
a figure on the turf, and wearing this outline
into a path by walking and walking around
the hollow head, immobile limbs, and cavernous torso.

Piki Ake! and Voice Carried My Family by Robert Sullivan (9–10/52)

I read these in preparation for Robert Sullivan's reading at the Poetry Society in March. Piki Ake!, his second collection, is from 1993, while Voice Carried My Family is from 2005. There's a bit of a gap in between (though, there are other books in this gap), and there does seem to me to be a development of style, as well as some similarities and similar interests and concerns. Both draw on Maori culture, stories and heritage, and both show the influence of waiata. Pike Ake! seemed more ... informal - I'm not even sure that's the right word. Perhaps looser is more what I mean. It has quite a few personal stories, including several poems telling the story of a family reunion up in Northland. There's still personal stories in Voice Carried My Family, though they seem tighter, perhaps more sophisticated.

He tells others' stories too - such as the stories of Te Weherua and Koa, young Maori boys who hopped on board the Resolution in 1777. Sullivan also knows that telling others' stories is problematic: 'But I can't. I just can't take the middle of your throat./Who would I pay for the privilege?' ('3 Mai') I felt a similar issue when working on the 'biographical' poems in My Iron Spine - I wanted these women to be remembered and celebrated, I wanted to give them voice, but I knew that it was my voice I was giving them, not their own. I couldn't really know what their voices would say. It is a slightly uncomfortable appropriation.

I think my favourite poem from either collection is the mysterious and haunting '13 ways of looking at a blackbirder'. I can't possibly tell you exactly what it's about, but I kind of feel it. You know, like a David Lynch movie.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing/hearing Sullivan read - I've never heard him before, and hearing how a poet read, their rhythms, can give you a whole new way of understanding their poetry.

The earthquake

2011-02-26T12:26:00.004+13:00

It's unbelievable, and all the words I string together about it are kind of feeble in the shadow of it. It was a week spent flicking between things on the internet (I learned early on that I couldn't bear to watch television coverage), and then trying to not keep reading things on the internet, because it wasn't really helping anyone. Twitter really came into its own though - I got better information from there most of the time than from the media sites, and it helped people get in touch with each other and help each other.

Fortunately, all the people I have direct contact with in Christchurch have come through ok. Unfortunately this isn't true for everyone - when I heard on Wednesday that a colleague's father-in-law had died, it really brought it home. What can we say to people who have lost people, or their houses, or their jobs and livelihoods, except we're so, so sorry.

Actually, I've noticed a lot of people have been doing more than that. Straight away people were finding ways to raise money to help. On Thursday I gave some money to a girl on Cuba Mall, who was singing and collecting money, because she just wanted to do something. Some creative people have gotten really creative about this: some local writers are going to publish a fiction anthology, Tales for Canterbury and gamers have put together a bundle of RPGs, both with profits going to help in Christchurch. I think it shows how much most people, despite our own petty selfishnesses, do really care about each other. And, in relation to other events this week, I don't think we actually want New Zealand to be as unequal as it has become.

JAAM calls for submissions for issue 29

2011-02-09T21:08:00.003+13:00

Finally! Woo! It's later than usual, because I've been busy sorting out things, but these things seem to work out the way they're supposed to...

I'm really delighted that Anne Kennedy is going to be our guest editor. For more info, check out the call for submissions: http://jaam.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/call-for-submissions-for-jaam-29/.

Tuesday Poem: 'severe weather warning' by Vivienne Plumb (and interview)

2011-02-07T22:25:00.002+13:00

Vivienne Plumb was interviewed on the Radio New Zealand National Arts on Sunday show, by Lynn Freeman. It begins with Vivienne reading 'severe weather warnings', from Crumple, so that's my Tuesday Poem today. You can listen to it here: http://podcast.radionz.co.nz/art/art-20110206-1448-Vivienne_Plumb-048.mp3.

Vivienne Plumb, with a New Zealand mother and Australian father, has spent much of her life crossing the Tasman. She is one of literature’s all-rounders; as well as six previous collections of poetry, she has written and published plays, short fiction and a novel.

Vivienne has held many awards and residencies, including the Hubert Church Award for a first book of fiction, which she won for her collection The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in Her Sleep (1993), the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and the University of Iowa International Writing Programme.

Not one to sit still, she is currently dividing her time between Auckland and Sydney, where she is completing a doctorate in creative arts.

Vivienne Plumb interviewed on Radio New Zealand

2011-02-05T00:10:00.002+13:00

As I've just blogged over on my shiny new Seraph Press site (which suddenly seems to have grown 'like' and 'tweet' buttons that I'm not entirely certain I like) Vivienne Plumb is going to be interviewed by Lynn Freeman on the Arts on Sunday show this Sunday (at 2.30 pm). More details on the Seraph Press site: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/1/post/2011/02/vivienne-plumb-talks-about-crumple-on-national-radio.html (go on, humour me and have a look - I've just managed to get Google Analytics to work on the site, finally, so every visit will make me happy.)

I'm really excited about this interview, and the fact that I have been involved in organising three upcoming Seraph Press-related readings - I'm feeling like maybe I'm not such a totally useless publicist after all.

More details about the readings will follow, but the first one up, which is the most finalised, is Helen Cubed (me, Helen Heath and Helen Lehndorf) at the March Ballroom Poetry Cafe in Wellington.

Tuesday Poem: from The Time of Giants, by Anne Kennedy

2011-01-31T22:58:00.003+13:00

from Cinema, the sad ending 'o'

3.

Have you seen Psycho? No. Vertigo? No.
Rear Window?
No.Rope? Nope. They don't
make them like that any more. No.
In that case have you read
The Inferno? No.
In that case did you see
The Towering Inferno? No.
Have you seen you know? No.
Have you? No.
Okay have you read Plato? No.
Bassho? No.
Sappho? No.
Purgatorio? No.
Paradiso? No.
Umberto Eco? No.
Daniel Defoe? No.
Othello? No.
Orlando? No.
Waiting for Godot? No.
Living in the Maniototo? No.
Crow? No.
Wodwo? No
Alice Munro? No.
Gregory Corso? No.
Edgar Allan Poe? No.
Allen Curnow? No. Wystan Curnow? No. Any Curnow? No.
Black Rainbow? No.
The Rainbow? No.
Whanau? Nau.
The Pisan Canto? No.
Rimbaud? Naud.
Don DeLillo? No.
Alan Sillitoe? Noe.
Joy Harjo? No.
Leslie Marmon Silko? No.
Steven Winduo? No.
Timothy Mo? No.
Henry D. Thoreau? Neau. Paul Theroux? Noux. Any Th...? No.
Robinson Crusoe? Noe.
Ivanhoe? Noe.
Te Kaihau? Nau.
The Kumu Lipo. No.
Under the Volcano? No.
The Aloe? Noe.
The Loss of Eldorado? No.
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow? No.
Barbara Trapido? No.
Henry and Cato? No.
The Wide Window? No.
The Grim Grotto? No.
Oh, the Places You'll Go!? No.
Kate DiCamillo? No.
Go Dog Go? No.
Do you remember Yoko Ono? No.
Juno
and the Paycock? No.
Anthony and Cleo-
patra? No.
The Canto
General? No.
Beo-
wulf? No.
O-
vid? No.
O-
sip Mandelstam? No.
Flann O'
Brien? No. Greg O'Brien? No. Any O'B…? No.
Baby No
Eyes? No.
The Go-
Between? No.
The po-
em with the women coming and go-
ing? No.
You do know
the coming and go-
ing one? No.
Oh
so
no coming and going then? No.
War And Peace?
Yes.
Really?
No.

I mentioned the other day that I'd recently reread The Time of the Giants by Anne Kennedy. The context of this poem is that Moss, the protagonist, is out on her first date with Paul, her new boyfriend. She is taking pains (literally) to avoid him from finding out that she is a giant. They are about to go into the movie (Shakespeare in Love). From their discussion, you might guess that they are rather different sorts of people. Moss is rather more cultured.

What I love particularly about this poem, or rather section of a poem, is its playfulness, its rhythm and rhyme and cleverness, and all the different ways of saying no. I haven't tried reading it out loud - I'm sure it would be awesome - but it's the kind of poem that reads itself out loud in your head.

Anne Kennedy is a novelist, award-winning poet and short-story writer, editor, literary critic and scriptwriter. She's recently returned to Auckland from Hawai'i, where she was teaching creative writing.

Head on over to the Tuesday Poem blog for more Tuesday Poems: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

January poetry reading (2–5)

2011-01-30T11:37:00.005+13:00

The Time of Giants by Anne Kennedy (2/52)

I was fortunate enough to meet Anne Kennedy at the launch for Crumple in Auckland in November. We've been corresponding and she very kindly sent me a copy of The Time of Giants. This is a re-read for me. I read and enjoyed it back in 2005 when it came out. I've enjoyed it even more this time through though - as I often do when I reread things I liked the first time. You often get more of the nuance and layers and so forth.

One thing I hadn't picked up on the first time, possibly because I hadn't read it yet, was its parallels with Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson. Both are collections of linked narrative poems, aka verse novels, which modernise a character from myth. In Carson's case, a monster from Greek myth, and in Kennedy's case, a giant from Irish myth (though Moss, the protagonist, is not herself from a myth, she is a descendant of Irish giants, such as Finn MaCoul, whose story is told in the second section).

Moss and her brother Forest are giants, though their parents are normal height. This is really the story of Moss and her efforts to keep her normal-sized boyfriend Paul from realising she is so tall. I took this also as metaphorical for that feeling that I'm sure most people have - that they are some kind of freak, and are going to be found out at some point.

It's a really playful collection, with a playful story and playful and surprising use of language. I'm going to publish a piece as my Tuesday Poem soon, so you can see what I mean, if you haven't already read it.

Friend's poetry manuscript 3/52

I won't say much about this, with it being unpublished and all and still in progress (though basically ready to be unleashed on the world in my opinion). But I will say that it's great, and I'm excited about it. I'm going to be giving feedback and praise, so will read it a few more times, but I won't cheat by recording each read-through though.

100 Traditional Smiles, by Anne Kennedy 4/52

Because I'd just read The Time of Giants, and because I had recently acquired this book as part of a big bag of poetry books that a friend donated to me, I thought it was a good time to read it.

I'm not sure I should be counting this one, as it claims to be a novella, and is clearly written in prose, but it's very poetic prose, with only the loosest narrative (much looser than The Time of Giants), so I am claiming it as prose-poetry verse novel(la).

Like The Time of Giants, it's wonderfully inventive and surprising. In the more than 100 sections (I would count them, but I put the book down somewhere and now can't find it) of varying lengths, from short to really short, it jumps between a series of characters, including 'the woman' (actually I think several of them are referred to as 'the woman' and I wasn't always sure which one was meant, which I'm sure was deliberate), the Italian couple, Eileen, Irene, Leslie, the Hoboken couple (former New Zealanders living in New Jersey), the graphic designer and even, in a few places, an 'I'. They are in various parts of the world - New Jersey, as I mentioned, Auckland, Gore, New York, Nottingham. Some know each other, some don't, but there are threads, or rather wools, connecting many of them.

Northland, by Michele Leggott (5/52)

Northland is a gorgeous hand-made book from Pania Press (Jack Ross and Bronwyn Lloyd). I was keen to get my paws on a copy because it's about, or perhaps rather set in, the same areas as my book Heading North. Northland is a gorgeously produced book, and it was lovely revisiting some of these places in poetry. I think my favourite of the poems was 'listening', with the repeated line at the end of the three stanzas 'unwinding the bird in my throat'.

New lit magazine from Kilmog

2011-01-29T20:58:00.004+13:00

In other exciting news today, Kilmog Press, a Dunedin publishing company known for it's gorgeous hand-made books (including my own Heading North) is going to publish a literary journal, called Starch. AND, it's going to be hardback. It's open for submissions. It will be very cool. More info here: http://kilmogpress.blogspot.com/2011/01/open-for-submissions-starch-new-zealand.html

Seraph Press gets new website

2011-01-29T17:21:00.004+13:00

Woo! Seraph Press (which is basically me) has finally grown up and got it's own URL: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz. And I've finally built it a new site, which is currently not entirely dis-similar to the old one. I will be able to add news more easily, as it has a built-in blog, and I'm sure there are many other fabulous things I could do.

The old one (which I'll start redirecting from or something) was built on a Paradise homepage, with an old version of Dreamweaver that I got from my old work. And, because I don't know CSS, it was built in a series of tables and really was a bit of a pain (though it loaded super-fast).

This one is built on Weebly. Is anyone else using that? How are you finding it? It looked quite flexible and is, you know, free, unless you get pro, which I might perhaps, though mainly so I can add my favicon back (and add video).

For my first proper post on seraphpress.co.nz I've linked to Helen Heath's interview with Helen Heath. I published Helen Heath's debut chapbook Watching for Smoke, in 2009 (goodness, was it so long ago!). As part of her continuing series of interviews, she's put herself in the interviewee's chair. Check it out on her blog: http://www.helenheath.com/2-jan-2011/quick-ten-helen-heath.

Tuesday Poem: 'Daddy' by Sylvia Plath (as read by Sylvia Plath)

2011-01-24T21:38:00.003+13:00

If you can't view this embedded video, you can watch it on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM

A quick Tuesday Poem today. I stumbled across this yesterday, and goodness me it's so exciting to hear Plath read her own poem - to hear what her voice sounded like for one (I have listening to recordings of her a long time ago, but I don't remember her voice being so deep), and also to hear how she reads this - where she puts stresses, the rhythm she uses, where she pauses.

When I came across this, I also came across the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice, and I know there will be so many other wonderful treasures of poets reading their work and writers voices, but I'm afraid to get started looking for them, because where will it end!?

Well, you can go and have a look for poetry on Youtube, but you can also go look for more Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Nox, by Anne Carson (no. 1)

2011-01-23T22:27:00.003+13:00

To be honest, I'm not even sure if this book really qualifies as poetry. It isn't immediately recognisable as a poetry book - it's much thicker for a start, is in a box, and is concertina folded. And when you look at the pages, you don't find what you'd immediately recognise as poetry. There are fragments, photos, scribbles, things that appear to pieces of peeled paint, and lots and lots of definitions of Latin words.

But, when you read them, they feel like poetry, and it's by a poet, so I'm counting it.

I'm a big fan of Anne Carson. She's a Canadian poet and the author of what, if asked, I say is my favourite poem: 'The Glass Essay' (I've written about it a couple of times on this blog). She's better known, I think, as the author of Autobiography of Red - a kind of verse-novel retelling/revisioning of a Greek myth about the monster Geryon and his relationship with Herakles - which I also love, but not as much.

I asked for Nox for Christmas, and it duly arrived via the internet - I haven't seen it in Unity Welly, though I did paw it in Unity Auckland but didn't have enough room in my bag to bring it home. As I said, it's a big book. As a physical object, it's gorgeous. (Oh hey, here's a video showing it on Youtube.) It's a facsimile of a scrapbook Carson made as an epitaph for her brother after he died. It tells his story, sort of, in little fragments, snatches, glimpses, riddles almost. She only had little snatches of him, really, because he 'ran away' at some unspecified age (sometime in early adulthood) to avoid prison - I don't think we are told what for, but intimations are drug dealing or possibly something to do with the death of a girl he loved - though that might have been later. And after he skipped the country the only direct contact Carson had with him was about five phonecalls over twenty-two years. So, anyway, these story snippets are mostly on the right-hand pages.

The book begins with a reproduction of a typed, slightly water damaged, poem in Latin.

On many of the left-hand pages are definitions of Latin words, much as one might find in a Latin-to-English dictionary. The definitions (it took me a little bit to realise, I'm afraid, but I was a bit ill at the time, so forgive my slowness) are of the words in the poem, defining each word's various meanings, subtleties, layers, and gives the word in the context of a few phrases. While these definitions are not always easy to read, they are each like little poems. For example, the definition for aequora begins:

a smooth or level surface, expanse, surface; a level stretch of ground, plain; inmensumne noctis aequor confecimus? have we made it across the vast plain of the night?

Later, she tells us about the poem that begins the collection. It is by Catullus (poem 101), and he wrote it as an elegy for his brother, who had recently died. Carson, who teaches Classics at university, says how it had moved her, and how she tried several times to translate it, but:

Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101.

She does, further in to the book, include an English translation of the poem, but the real translation of the poem is the accumulation of these definitions, which show the weight and power that sits behind each word.

As well as highlighting one of the difficulties of translation, it also for me emphasised the power of poetry - in a good poem, each word has all those layers of meaning sitting behind it. It may mean one thing on the surface, but another thing below that, text and subtext, punning and play.

It's getting late, and I'm ranting a little now, but this is a rich book - not easy, perhaps, but rich in language and rich in ideas and meaning - and a book I suspect I will return to over and over.

2011, Year of Poetry*

2011-01-22T18:23:00.006+13:00

*I should note first off that 2011 is not the year of poetry in any kind of official sense, and is in fact, according to Wikipedia, the International Year of Forestry, International Year of Chemistry, International Year for People of African Descent, and World Veterinary Year.

There's nothing like being on holiday to make me stop and think.

As soon as I did, I realised something was wrong.

I realised that poetry, something I consider one of the most important things in my life, has been consistently pushed (by me, I confess) to the bottom of my priority list. I have been neglecting it. The writing and revising of my own poetry, and the reading of other people's poetry, and generally being a poet (so, sitting around, especially in cafes, looking kinda melancholy and deep, thinking profound thoughts) doesn't have strict deadlines, and so is generally trumped by things that do.

Some of the things that get prioritised above my own poetry are also poetry-related - publishing other people's poetry through Seraph Press and JAAM - but I realised that while those things are very important to me, for my self personally my own poetry is more important, and I should stop putting it at the bottom of my list.

OK, so easier said than done.

I'm not planning to give up Seraph Press or JAAM, I have a full-time day job, I have a partner I quite like to hang out with often, and friends I like to see from time to time. I also really like sleeping. So how am I going to make this the year of poetry?

Well, I do have some ideas. One is to spend less time on the net, especially Twitter and Facebook, not so much because of the time, but more because I find it makes me attention-deficient - anxiously checking and clicking, finding that I'm looking for some kind of 'hit'. It puts me in a space that is kind of opposite to the space I need to be in to write poetry.

Something that puts me in a good head space to write poetry is reading poetry. Usually I find it very mind calming; slowing, but often sparking - a word, phrase or image often sends me off in a parallel or perpendicular direction. Also, you know, I like poetry, and I think it's important to have an idea of what the local and international poetry community is up to.

So, I have arbitrarily decided I'll try to read at least one poetry book a week. And while I'm unlikely to write detailed reviews and analyses of them, I do want to record them in some way - so expect blog posts.

I'm also looking for recommendations, so let me know collections or poets you think I'll like, or think I should read. I'm particularly interested in broadening my familiarity with contemporary overseas poets - though they are sometimes hard to get hold of around here.

Another thing I'm going to do is make sure I spend a lot of time hanging around in cafes - I tend to write better there, where - despite the busyness - there are fewer distractions that at home.

That said, my major poetry plan for the year is to finish 'Cinema' - what I hope will be my next book. I've been working on the poems for it for a while, and think I have most of what I need for the book - though I still have a few in mind. After Christmas I spent a few hours going through what I had and pulling out all the poems I didn't like so much, or which I don't think fit. Now I want to work on the structure/order/flow/narrative of the collection as a whole, and polishing the individual poems. Probably then I'll find spaces where new poems should be, which will want to be written too.

Secondary to that, is my next epic poetry project, which I started on in the middle of last year, and which I expect to take a while.

It's going to be a busy year.

Late Tuesday Poem: 'Partying with Katherine Mansfield'

2011-01-18T19:29:00.003+13:00

Partying with Katherine Mansfield

‘Don’t be a bore,’ says Katie
as she pulls me up by my arm
to the dance floor

She was proud to be the first woman
in the whole of London to wear purple stockings
She shows them off as she shimmies
her skirt above her knees

I teach her the twist and she spirals off
towards D H who has found
an ironing board from somewhere and
they take turns at sliding down, shrieking with laughter

She’s smiling and kissing
everyone in the room, sipping punch
now joining me at the open window
breathing in the cool night air

‘Today is a new day, a new year, a new age
It’s a new world,’ she says
‘We mustn’t live as if it isn’t’

Better late than never, I guess. My first Tuesday Poem of the year is the last poem in My Iron Spine, but one I mean to have lashings of hopefulness and forward-lookingness. Katherine was indeed said to have been the first woman in London to wear purple stockings. When I read her stories at high school (and liked them) the impression we got of her - or I did at least - was of some sweet kind of tragic creature. But actually she was much more exciting than that, and much more full of life.

Many Tuesday poets are getting back into it today. You can find them via the Tuesday Poem blog.

Submit to Enamel

2011-01-15T12:02:00.003+13:00

Submissions for the third issue of Enamel magazine close today. Have you submitted? I haven't. But we still have time! We have around 12 hours! I'm not sure I will manage it, but you can. You can! More details here: http://enamelmag.blogspot.com/2010/09/enamel-3-submissions-opening-november.html

Farewell Harvey McQueen

2011-01-09T19:23:00.001+13:00

I was so sad to hear that poet and anthologist Harvey McQueen died on Christmas morning.

There are lots of other and better farewells for him on the net, including this one by his wife Anne Else on Harvey's own blog: http://stoatspring.blogspot.com/2011/01/last-post.html, but I just wanted to say a short quiet farewell too. I didn't know Harvey very well, but met him at various literary things, and more recently I've known him through his blog. He wrote a lovely review of my first poetry collection, which I always appreciated. The thing I remember him most and often for is a kowhai seedling I got at the launch for his book This Piece of Earth - if you bought the book you got a seedling. The seedling is now a smallish tree and, while I'm no longer in the habit of naming all my plants, I've always thought of that tree as 'Harvey'.

Here's a few of the other tributes:

Tuesday Poem, Secret Santa edition: 'Christmastide' by Helen Lowe

2010-12-21T00:01:00.000+13:00

Christmastide

Christmas—and we
like so many others
are washed north
on a tide of summer,
our route signposted
by pohutukawa,
all flowering late
against a mirage
of cabbage trees,
dusty in the heat
that shimmers
above melting tar—
the whole country baking
as the nation makes
its annual pilgrimage
of Christmas and New Year:
Good to see ya, we say,
or simply mate, pouring out
a cool one before we sit
down together, buoyant
with the sunshine
and the colour,
the high tide of summer.

by Helen Lowe

Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet and broadcaster. She won a Robbie Burns Poetry Prize (NZ) in 2003 and the A2O Prize (Australia) in 2007 and has been published and anthologised in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. Her first novel, Thornspell (Knopf, 2008), won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel: Young Adult in 2009 and her second, The Heir of Night (Eos, USA; Orbit, UK) has just been published. Helen hosts a monthly poetry programme on Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM.

This week, because it's almost Christmas, we Tuesday Poets have paired up and are posting each other's poems on our blogs. I was very happy to be paired with Helen Lowe (I am developing a belief that there are a disproportionate number of poets called Helen), who I have come to know through her work in JAAM (I've just published a couple of her poems in JAAM 28), through her blog (http://helenlowe.info/blog/) and who I have even met in real life, at a Poetry Society anthology launch.

We decided on a summer/Christmas theme, and sent each other a few poems to chose from. I decided on this one, because it seems to glow with yellow sun and blue water. Can't you just feel the heat and smell the barbeque? We New Zealanders seem to hold two images of Christmas in our heads - the one with snow and robins, and our actual summer Christmas; and I love that this poem celebrates the summer Christmas.

So, over on Helen Lowe's blog you'll find my summer poem: 'Burning with Joan of Arc' (it may not sound like a summer poem, but just trust me).

And over on the Tuesday Poem blog you'll find other secret Santa poems. And have a good Christmas!

Tuesday poem: 'Going Back' by Tim Jones

2010-12-14T00:12:00.000+13:00

Going Back

My mother is the gap in the windbreak
the fallen macrocarpa
the flooded river and the flooded plain.

The radio, not tuned to any station
the rails removed from a siding
the gash in the mountain's side.

My mother is the doorway
and the grip of my father's hand
and the stubble of his cheek on mine.

The missing face in the kitchen
the absent chair at the table
the silence under all we say.

Remembering, unforgetting,
on the edge of sleep in the darkness
my mother is each toss and turn.

The need to leave in the morning
the long goodbye to my father
the driveway and the car I drive.

My mother is the corner
the anxious overtaking
the yellow lines that double in my eyes.

The last lap of the journey
the final tick of the engine
my mother is the road I travel home.

by Tim Jones

I chose this poem because I love it. Every time I read it I get shivery. I feel that to analyse it too much would be to flatten it, and what I love about it is its subtlety - the subtle way it deals with grief.

'Going Back' was in Tim's second poetry book, All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens (HeadworX, 2007).

As well as being a poet, Tim Jones writes short stories and novels, both 'literary' and 'speculative', manages a day job, and is a husband and father. He blogs here: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/.

Check out other Tuesday poems via the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Me on JAAM 28

2010-12-13T13:22:00.002+13:00

Helen Lowe was kind enough to ask me to write a guest post on her blog about JAAM 28. In it I write about the genesis of this issue and how it all came together. I also include a poem from the issue: 'Siegfried' by Hera Bird. You'll find it here: http://helenlowe.info/blog/2010/12/13/guest-post-helen-rickerby-jaam-28-dance-dance-dance/

Tuesday poem: 'Forty-League Boots', by Vivienne Plumb

2010-12-06T21:27:00.003+13:00

Forty-League Boots

Everything about the day feels massive –
at the beginning I am careful to make sure
I am wearing my forty-league boots.

At Bidwell Street the plaster Madonna
stands on the mantelpiece and rattles
whenever a visitor shuts the bedroom door.
She lies at rest in her wooden casket.

Such a strange late afternoon light
during our pre-funeral picnic.
We drink with parched gusto
and laugh so hard that
the winking knives and forks laugh with us.

My dusty boots are leaden feet
on the plaid picnic blanket.
Above the city in shivering paspalum
and talking trees
the invisible ones are with us,
kissing our foreheads.
The vaporous fog draws in closer
off the tongue-shaped hills.
The words are pearls in our hands,
running, running away through our fingers.

Best not to endure life
in the shallows, better to dive deep –
a pure white sheet, a kiss between
the thighs, and cachinnations not sighs.

By Vivienne Plumb

I'm afraid there's been a bit of a dearth of Tuesday poems from me lately, though today there is not just this one, but I'm also the editor of the Tuesday Poem hub blog today, and you'll find another poem selected by me over there - that one is 'Hunt the slipper: a romantic divertissement' by Jo Thorpe, which is from the recently published JAAM 28.

Here, I've chosen 'Forty-League Boots' this week to celebrate all the busyness that has been keeping me from such things as Tuesday poeming (and almost, I sometimes feel, from breathing): publishing stuff - both JAAM and Crumple recently.

I'm still buzzing from the two launches we had for Crumple: one in Wellington - my home turf, and Vivienne's home for years and years; and in Auckland, which is where Vivienne is living now. The Wellington launch was in my neighbourhood - at the Aro Valley Community Centre hall, just down the hill from where I live (possibly I can see it from my lounge window, but its too dark to check), and only about 25 steps from where Vivienne lived for a couple of years. It was a perfect venue: cosy and welcoming - there were even couches - with large windows and doors and a playground next door for the many younger launch attendees. It was great having our friends and family around. It was a great pity that Kate Camp couldn't make it at the last minute, but I read her launch speech in her stead.

Because Vivienne is living in Auckland now, and has so many important people there, we decided to have a second launch. This one was at The Women's Bookshop, which was so appropriate as they are really supportive of independent publishers, they're Viv's new local bookshop, and she and Carole, the manager of the shop, go a long way back to when they were both acting in Wellington. Crumple was launched with aplomb by Janet Charman. I was blown away by the support everyone gave Vivienne and the book, and how many poets turned up. I had such a wonderful time meeting people I'd communicated with in various ways over the years, meeting other people I knew only by reputation, and getting to see some of the friends I have in Auckland. It was also a good opportunity to introduce myself and Seraph Press. I realised that I have always had really great experiences at poetry events in Auckland – though admittedly not have that many, but three out of three isn't bad.

Back to 'Forty-League Boots' though, it's my favourite poem in a book full of favourite poems. It's the final poem in the collection, and seems to me to be really key. It's also a poem that never fails to make me emotional. There is a lot of travelling around and rootlessness in Crumple - a lot of homelessness. In 'Forty-League Boots' home is in people, both here and gone. But the bit of the poem I love the most, which always gets me, is the final stanza - it's a call to life and really living. When I first read this poem, I typed up the final stanza and sent it to several of my friends (also with the explanation that cacachinnations means laughter, more or less) because it touched me so deeply.

After you've checked out my other Tuesday poem selection over at the Tuesday Poem blog, you can have a look at the many other Tuesday poems in the sidebar on the left.

JAAM 28 dances out into the world

2010-11-18T11:06:00.003+13:00

Yay! And you can read the media release we wrote about it over here: http://jaam.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/jaam-28-dances-out-into-the-world/

Poetry events in the next crazy week

2010-11-13T21:28:00.005+13:00

It's going to be a pretty crazy week for me, but I hope to get to at least one of these events, maybe more!

On Monday: Diana Bridge at the Poetry Society

The New Zealand Poetry Society presents Karori poet, Diana Bridge. Diana has been published widely since her first collection appeared in 1996. Her writing reflects a rich and varied life lived as partner to a New Zealand diplomat posted around the world.

The event is open to the public, and starts at 7.30pm with an open mic. There is a $5 entry fee ($3 for members).

The Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave St, Thorndon

On Thursday: Watusi Spring Sessions featuring Janis Freegard, Trev Hayes and Mike Tights

Spring sessions at the Watusi, 6 Edwards Street, Central Wellington (off Victoria St.) Thursday 18th November 8:30pm start, gold coin entry. There will also be an open mic (so bring your poems/songs) & live music from Reuben Wilson, Jordan Stewart & William Daymond.

On Saturday: Launch of Crumple, by Vivienne Plumb, published by me

(I'm definitely going to make it to this one)

3.30 pm, Saturday 20th November 2010
Aro Valley Community Centre
48 Aro Street
Aro Valley

More info here: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2010/11/wellington-launch-for-crumple-by.html

On Sunday: Saradha Koirala reads at the Ballroom Cafe

Guest Poet: Saradha Koirala
Musicians: Josie & Mary Campbell
Open mic session
Sunday 21 November, 4 - 6pm
The Ballroom Café, cnr Riddiford St & Adelaide Rd, Newtown

Also on Sunday: Lynn Jenner and Klezmer Rebs

In a unique Wellington arts event, the Klezmer Rebs will perform an intimate concert at the Ruby Lounge, featuring a special set of poetry with music by Raumati author Lynn Jenner.After the Klezmer Rebs first set will be a special 20 minute artistic partnership featuring the poetry of Lynn Jenner, from her highly praised recent book Dear Sweet Harry. Lynn’s poetry introduces you to Harry Houdini, the world’s greatest ever escapologist, and Mata Hari, a woman who did not so much dance as slowly and gracefully take off her clothes. The musical accompaniment is pushy, poignant, sweet and sad and hopeful, just like Houdini and Mata Hari, and it travels around the world just as they did.

Then the Klezmer Rebs return for a final set of their lively, tuchas-shaking music. Jewish soul music at its best.

The Ruby Lounge, Bond St, Wellington, 4 pm to 7 pm.

JAAM 28 is published, and so is Crumple!

2010-11-13T18:24:00.003+13:00

It's a busy mail-out weekend at my place, cos JAAM 28 has turned up, and so has Crumple. They are both gorgeous.

Jenny Powell on tele

2010-11-10T22:09:00.002+13:00

I meant to blog this last week, or perhaps the week before. I lose track. It is busy. Anyway, what I meant to blog was that Jenny Powell was interviewed recently(ish) about her new collection Viet Nam: A Poem Journey, and you can watch it here: http://www.ch9.co.nz/content/local-writer-turns-disappointment-poetry.

Tuesday Poem: Catches I Have Dropped by Scott Kendrick

2010-11-08T20:23:00.006+13:00

Catches I Have Dropped
For John Y, who understands.

Catches I Have Dropped
xxis a longer poem than
Catches I Have Taken.

For starters, well –
xxthat one on the boundary;
xxthe skull-ricochet skimming over for six...

Then there was Davis.
First senior match
xxand Davis, off balance, clips up a catch
xxto square leg – that’s me, the goggle-eyed sucker
xxwith knees set on ‘quiver’, arsehole on ‘pucker’
xxcoz it’s Davis, the legend, the regional rep.
He’s trialed for CD.
He’s only on three.
At square leg there’s me.
I didn’t have to move; it was chest high and looping,
xxa lolly-drop dolly in slow-motion,
xxdrooping
xxstraight at me,
xxstraight to me,
xxand then strangely – straight through me.
He went on to a hundred and thirty four.
I got sent to the outfield – dropped two more.

England.
August.
A field full of Poms,
xxin theory, my team-mates).
I’m plodding mid-on.
There’s nine more runs needed, we’re after two wickets.
The opener’s made eighty, been rattling the pickets
xxwhen he scoops it, quite firmly,
xxbut fairly straight-forward –
xxa gimme, a sitter,
xxa kitty in litter.
I reverse-cup; it pops
xxfrom my hands,

xxhangs,

xxand drops
xxso I grab for it, jab it
xxwith fingers of moss,
xxit spits forward – but heroically
xxI swing out an arm
xxto swat it (quite sweetly)
xxwith the flat of my palm...

Then on hands and on knees,
xxwith a gut-sucking awe,
xxI watch it skip down the outfield slope for four.

The bowler screams ‘You incompetent Kiwi prick!’
xxand he spits with great purpose. I look away quick
xxas he rages – a luminous, furious pink:
xxthe next ball goes for six. The opener buys me a drink

Yeah, I’ve dropped them all – there’s nothing, naught,
xxthat I haven’t at some crucial point not caught:
xxthe thick-edging flyers, the spooners, the grabbers,
xxthe lurch-swirling skyers, the skimmers – Oh Jesus!

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
It plunges at me, spinning, sizzling, whistling.
If, during after-match beers, you too
Could hear once again of the slow, looping sitter
You put down, and know then the laughter and bitter
Abuse of your team-mates, the merciless jibes
That sting like a quick one that bruises the thigh,
My friend, you would not mock with such high zest
Those fielders whose fingers have fumbled in shame.
For it’s wrong what they say, it’s a damned lie at best –
Cricket is not always a funny game.

Scott Kendrick is a poet, cricket fan, and father of two small boys who may follow in his cricketing passion, but I'm hoping they'll rather follow him into poetry. He has published two collections of poetry: Rhyme Before Reason (HeadworX, 2001) and Cold Comfort, Cold Concrete: Poems & Satires (Seraph Press, 2007).

'Catches I Have Dropped' is my favourite cricketing poem. I'm not much of a cricket fan, but if you've played any team ball sport you'll understand this poem. The pressure. The humiliation. I enjoy the poem's galloping rhythm and the rhyme that makes a funny poem funnier. I also enjoy the mock epic tone at the end. There's even allusions to Wilfred Owen ('Dulce et Decorum Est' - a much more serious poem) in the final stanza.

An earlier version of 'Catches I Have Dropped' was in Cold Comfort, Cold Concrete: Poems & Satires, but this version is in 'A Tingling Catch': A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864–2009, edited by Mark Pirie. This is, apparently, probably the first national anthology of cricket poems - other cricket poem anthologies have been international. And apparently there is a lot of cricket poetry out there. Cricket seems to attract more literary types than other sports, curiously. I'll leave it to others to consider why that might be.

I went along to the launch of the anthology at the Long Room at Basin Reserve. This was a big deal, I discovered from my co-attendees, who kept breathily making comments about being in the Long Room at Basin Reserve. But even I, ignorant as I am, knew it was a big deal when Don Neely, NZ cricket legend, took off his New Zealand Cricket tie and gave it to Mark.

Mark was working on the anthology for several years, and had to cut back from his original selection. He's started a blog for the anthology, and will be publishing things he had to miss out and other cricket-related literature: http://tinglingcatch.blogspot.com/

And for more Tuesday poems, visit the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

JAAM subscription drive

2010-11-07T19:05:00.003+13:00

If you don't subscribe to JAAM, the fabulous literary journal of which I'm the proud co-managing editor, then now is a good time to do it.

The subscription rate has been the same for years: $24 for three issues (I think this is because one long long ago we actually published three a year, rather than just the one we manage now). The time has come for a little price increase - it will be $20 for two issues. Still a bargain.

BUT, if you subscribe before the end of November 2010 you can subscribe at the old price of $24 for three. More info here: http://jaam.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/subscribe-now-and-save/

BTW JAAM 28 is due back from the printer any day now, after a couple of delays some of which I take entire responsibility for, and it is awesome.

Auckland launch for Crumple, by Vivienne Plumb

2010-11-07T10:37:00.003+13:00

You are invited to come along and help us celebrate the launch of Crumple, Vivienne Plumb's latest collection of poetry, and Seraph Press's latest publication.

6 pm, Wednesday 24 November 2010
The Women's Bookshop
105 Ponsonby Road
Ponsonby
Auckland

Crumple will be launched by Janet Charman. Copies will be available for purchase at $25. All welcome.

For more info about Crumple, visit: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/seraphpress/publications/crumple.html

If you can't make it, but still want to buy a copy, email me at seraphpress@paradise.net.nz, or visit The Women's Bookshop online: http://www.womensbookshop.co.nz/books/Crumple/047317717X.html

We're also launching Crumple in Wellington: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2010/11/wellington-launch-for-crumple-by.html

Wellington launch for Crumple, by Vivienne Plumb

2010-11-07T10:29:00.006+13:00

You are invited to come along and help us celebrate the launch of Crumple, Vivienne Plumb's latest collection of poetry, and Seraph Press's latest publication.

3.30 pm, Saturday 20th November 2010
Aro Valley Community Centre
48 Aro Street
Aro Valley
Wellington

Crumple will be launched by Kate Camp. Copies will be available for purchase at $25 (cash or cheque only). All welcome.

For more info about Crumple, visit: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/seraphpress/publications/crumple.html

If you can't make it, but still want to buy a copy, email me at seraphpress@paradise.net.nz, or visit The Women's Bookshop online: http://www.womensbookshop.co.nz/books/Crumple/047317717X.html

This launch is in our home patch - I proudly live in The Valley, and Vivienne used to live virtually next door to the park and community centre.

We're also launching Crumple in Auckland, where Vivienne mostly lives now: http://wingedink.blogspot.com/2010/11/auckland-launch-for-crumple-by-vivienne.html

Tuesday Poem: 'Rural Delivery' by Vivienne Plumb

2010-11-01T21:56:00.005+13:00

Rural Delivery

You are back in that country
you claim you would love to vacate,
and I feel like the stoic, white cottage
with its vacant windows, the one I noticed
from the car.

Our telecommunication connections
are frequently bad –
sibilance and echoes, white noise –
I hear sentences that may not be true,
the sound waves crash against my ears,
a distant subaudible shore.

I am that vast red corrugated-iron
roof we saw for sale outside Whanganui,
mute and inanimate;
although an appalling longing to see your face
has forced my thoughts to pack their own bags
and even as I speak,
they are filling out a destination card
and boarding a flight to meet you.

I am that green rural delivery box
on the grassy verge of a farm near Sanson,
a lop-sided patient receptacle
waiting for notification of our next contact.

I'm posting this poem – which features in Crumple, which I am about to publish – in celebration of the fact that I've just finished the final touches. I hope.

I have so many favourite poems in this book, and this is one of them. I'm going to use an extract from it on the back cover: 'an appalling longing to see your face/has forced my thoughts to pack their own bags/and even as I speak,/they are filling out a destination card/and boarding a flight to meet you', because it highlights some of the themes of the book - rootlessness, longing, travel - and also because I found it such an arresting image. It's so concrete - describing a feeling by describing an action.

Here's the rest of my back-cover blurb, which I agonised over last weekend:

In Crumple Vivienne Plumb takes us on a series of journeys, both geographic and metaphoric.

These poems have itchy feet, wandering from Poland, to China, through Italy, Australia and home to New Zealand. But is New Zealand home, or where in New Zealand is home? We roam up and down the country, we get lost in Kiwi icons which swing between hyper-real familiarity and unsettling surrealism, we find ourselves again and again on a long-distance bus.

Our constant travelling companions are Plumb’s sharp observation, her quirky sense of humour, and her skill of skewering both the ridiculous and the miraculous in the everyday.

‘Best not to endure life / in the shallows, better to dive deep –’; Crumple is, in the end, a celebration of life and living.

Vivienne Plumb, with a New Zealand mother and Australian father, has spent much of her life crossing the Tasman.

One of literature’s all-rounders, as well as six previous collections of poetry, she has written plays, short fiction and a novel.

Plumb has held many awards and residencies, including the Hubert Church Award for a first book of fiction, the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship and a University of Iowa International Writing Programme residency.

Not one to sit still, she is currently dividing her time between Auckland and Sydney, where she is completing a doctorate in creative arts.

For more Tuesday Poems, check out the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday Poem: 'Grey'

2010-10-26T20:36:00.002+13:00

I'm so late with my Tuesday poem today, so I thought I'd post one of mine, rather than sort of waste someone else's. 'Grey' was in Abstract Internal Furniture. I find now that I've gone off quite a few of the poems in there - one does that after a decade I suppose - but I still have a fond spot for 'Grey', and believe as much, if not more, now in the importance of grey, of that grey space, than I did then.

Check out all the other Tuesday Poems here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

In which I finally announce Seraph Press’s next publication: Crumple, by Vivienne Plumb

2010-10-24T13:06:00.008+13:00

I haven’t been meaning to be so coy about announcing this, but I’ve just been so busy. Alongside JAAM 28, I’ve also been working on Crumple for several months.

I’m really excited about this book. Of course I get really excited about all the books I publish, because I only publish books I love. And also I’m a big fan of Vivienne’s work. But this book also has come along at a time when the theme/story of it – at least in my interpretation of it – was exactly where I was at at the time.

I’ve been agonising this weekend over writing a blurb for Crumple, trying to make it evocative, without being an English-101 interpretation of the collection. But basically, for me, this book is a journey between ‘crumple is a word / I refuse to acknowledge’ ('crumple') to ‘Best not to endure life / in the shallows, better to dive deep –’, ('Forty-League Boots'); a journey which takes us all around the world – to Poland, China, Australia, Italy, and then back home to New Zealand. But is New Zealand home, or where in New Zealand is home? There is never a sense of settling, we roam up and down the country, we get lost in Kiwi icons which turn surreal, almost nightmarish. But no, there is a sense of settling, in the end. Home isn’t any one place, it is people, and it is life, and actually, it’s also people we’ve loved who are no longer alive.

Crumple is a serious book, but it wouldn’t be Vivienne Plumb’s if it wasn’t also frequently very funny. Her humour is quirky, deadpan, sharp. She has a way of skewering the ridiculous in the everyday, but also the beautiful and miraculous in the everyday.

This is the cover, or, at least, it is the cover as it is at the moment. I’m forever making teeny little adjustments to it, but it’s almost there I think. The image is a photograph I took (and only slightly photoshopped for emphasis) of the hearts on the fence in Vivian Street, Wellington, where the service station used to be. It’s been an ugly, fenced wasteland for a while now, but every time I walk past it and see the hearts on the fence, it makes me smile. The hearts were made by OutdoorKnit guerrilla knitters. I love them. I feel that by making beautiful things like this they’re giving everyone a big hug. There is so much ugliness, sometimes especially in cities, and it’s wonderful to make something colourful and beautiful. These hearts, and also the ‘It will all be OK/You are doing ok’ message on Buckle Street, were a source of comfort for me during Sean’s health ‘thing’ this winter (and they were right - it's all clear now). I felt that what they were saying in wool form has resonance with what Vivienne was doing in poetic words.

If you don't know Vivienne's work, there is a lot to catch up on. She's published six previous books of poetry - ranging from full-length collections: Salamanca and Nefarious, to various smaller volumes and one mini (Doppleganger, with Adam Wiedemann). I published Scarab: a poetic documentary, a hand-bound chap book which traced the illness and death of her son from cancer, back in 2005. (I have a small number of copies left if you want one - let me know.) She has also published a collection of short stories, a novel (Secret City) and a novella, and has written and published several plays. Phew! You can read more about her here, should you wish to continue to be amazed: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/plumbviv.html.

We’re going to be launching Crumple in Wellington on Saturday 20th November (afternoon) and in Auckland on Wednesday 24th November (evening), so if you’re in or near either of those places I hope you’ll be able to come and celebrate with us. More details about that soon.

And it’s not long now, so best I finish up everything with this book and get it to the printers as soon as possible!

In which Vana gets a website and blogs about Heading North

2010-10-23T16:30:00.003+13:00

Vana Manasiadis – whose debut collection, Ithaca Island Bay Leaves, I was extremely proud to publish last year – has got herself a website: http://www.vana-manasiadis.com.

She's also written a wee piece, a musing, on Heading North: http://www.vana-manasiadis.com/1/post/2010/10/heading-north-and-sometimes-looking-out.html. Vana was one of the first readers of Heading North, and her encouragement was significant to me when I was wondering what to do with it, or, indeed, whether to do anything with it. Hooray for people who get what you're doing and believe in your work!

Two posts in one day! Why yes, I am procrastinating.

What I did on my holiday, or, my visit to Cape Reinga and what I found there

2010-10-23T11:31:00.005+13:00

I recently wrote a bit about my latest Northland holiday on my work blog: http://blog.teara.govt.nz/2010/10/21/te-rerenga-wairua/. It's mainly about what an amazing place Cape Reinga – Te Rerenga Wairau – is, and how I have some pretty strong reservations about the landscaping and 'interpretation' they've done since I was up there last.

Northland has become a really special place for me. I wrote Heading North about the first trip Sean and I took up there. People have asked if I'm going to write another book about this trip. So far I haven't written any poetry about this, but I can see it being incorporated into a big epic poem/patchwork that I've been working on for a few months, alongside 'Cinema'. Actually, that's a lie. I have left 'Cinema' on the sidelines, was suddenly writing this new thing ('How to live'), while dealing with everything that was going on, and have recently abandoned both – temporarily, while I try to hurriedly finish off JAAM 28 and the thing I haven't quite finished, and think I'd better announce this weekend, before it's actually finished.

This is one of the things that has been keeping me busy:

2010-10-21T23:00:00.002+13:00

http://jaam.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/jaam-28-sneak-peek/

I'll tell you about the other thing as soon as I get a spare moment or two.

Tuesday Poem: 'White Heron Flying' by Jenny Powell

2010-10-18T20:30:00.008+13:00

White Heron Flying

Heat
and the jarring road
to Nha Trang
curdle into self distraction

Headache
and the relentless day
scatter seeds
of snivelling self doubt

Highway 1,
main road north
to the coast, place of Hao’s
heart and home

xxxxx Late night
xxxxx and a feast of welcome,
xxxxx forcing myself to food,
xxxxx craving Disprin and sleep

xxxxx Leave
xxxxx at 5 am for the beach
xxxxx crowds on sand and sea
xxxxx broadcasts of the ‘news’

xxxxx Lumber
xxxxx to Tai Chi, Hao lithe
xxxxx and graceful moving
xxxxx leopard like, camouflaged

Breathing
into the balance
of waves, turning the tides
shifting the spaces

Body
sinks and lifts
arms circle in backstroke
legs test the ground ahead

Briefly
resistance leaves
sink and lift, arms play
in patterns above, behind

xxxxx Tiredness
xxxxx dissolves, anxiety
xxxxx falls away shoulders
xxxxx drop back straightens

xxxxx Turning
xxxxx to the sun rising,
xxxxx breathing into the balance
xxxxx of sea and white feathered clouds

xxxxx Leopard
xxxxx faces heron,
xxxxx Hao follows my flight
xxxxx across his morning sky

Jenny Powell is a poet and teacher who lives and writes in St Clair, Dunedin.This poem comes from her most recent collection Viet Nam: A Poem Journey, which has just been published by HeadworX.

The book is a kind of travelogue around Vietnam, but with a twist. After having a Vietnamese teacher, Hao, stay with her family, Jenny had a strong desire to travel to Vietnam to visit him, but due to medical reasons, it is impossible. And so the poet turns inwards: 'Is it possible to love a country you have never been to? Is it possible to visit a country in your imagination?' she asks in the introduction. The poems show that it is.

The surprising thing about the poems, given their imagined nature, is the specificity. She visits markets, meets people, dodges traffic, and, in this poem, has a headache. It's the headache and the desire for disprin that, for me, anchors this poem in reality, while the leopard and the heron elevate the poeticism. It's definitely one of my favourite in the collection.

It's been a while since I've posted a Tuesday poem - my insane busyness is showing signs of slowing, so I hope to be a more regular poster again.

The other Tuesday poets are much more reliable. You can find them here, on the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

Not a Tuesday poem: let's talk about Baxter

2010-10-05T21:04:00.004+13:00

I've been a bit non-stop busy, and then away (a week and a half travelling around Northland!), and so have been not so great on the Tuesday Poem front. I will try to do better next week.

But, I want to direct your attention to a new post on Tim Jones's blog, where (in response to a question) he asks people about their thoughts on Baxter: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/10/tuesday-poetry-question-does-james-k.html.

I've just been doing a wee refamiliarisation study of Baxter, and so have been thinking about him a lot. I'm really interested to know what other people have to say about him - whether they read him, whether he's been influential, how they place him, and so on. So I hope you'll leave a comment over there on Tim's blog.

Ok, off to proofread JAAM, which is, yes, running a little late...

Interview with Miriam Barr

2010-09-17T22:23:00.002+12:00

I've been a slack blogger of late, and I don't think that's going to change much any time soon because I'm working on getting JAAM 28 off to the printers, and also working on my next Seraph Press publishing project, which I will announce as soon as I get the time to write a proper blog post about it (perhaps that will be tomorrow?), BUT, I just came across an interview with Auckland poet Miriam Barr (by Renee Liang) on The Big Idea, which I wanted to link to.

Miriam is the founding energy behind Side Stream poetry zine (which is how I first came across her). She's also an organiser of the long-running Poetry Live in Auckland (which is how I came to meet her in real life) and was the creative director of The Literatti, a poetry performance group.

Anyway, it's an interesting and in-depth interview: http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/news/blogs/talkwrite/2010/sep/75000-cultural-storytellers-miriam-barr.

And now I'm going to go and watch the news. Good night!

Tuesday poem: 'Finding the cracks' from Heading North

2010-09-13T19:41:00.003+12:00

Finding the cracks

I needed to find the edges
of myself, prise a little
let some daylight in

It’s only when touched
that we know
the limits
of ourselves, where our skin stops
where our self ends

a breeze
a hand
a tear

I'm posting another poem from Heading North, partly because I hadn't gotten organised enough to get a poem off anyone else, but also because I had a wee launchy afternoon tea celebration for it on Saturday. It was kind of fun to do a wee reading in my own lounge, which, with the doors to the dining room open, and the dining table removed, becomes quite a large space. Maybe I should host poetry readings ...?

'Finding the cracks' isn't really a very typical poem in the book - most of them are longer and more narrative. But this is kind of the non-narrative heart of it - the emotional story I guess.

Anyway, you'll find more Tuesday poems over here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/, check them out.

Tuesday poem: 'Soon, The Nobody' by Emma Barnes

2010-08-30T22:05:00.004+12:00

This poem is about the citizenship-less children of Zainichi Koreans
who have been living in Japan, tenuously and permanently, since the
Japanese occupation of Korea.

I find this poem really haunting. I think it's good to read it without knowing what it's about, and then good to read it again after reading the note. Well, that's what I did when I first read it in Landfall.

Emma Barnes lives and writes in Aro Valley, Wellington. She launched the first issue of her new literary magazine Enamel in early 2009, another issue was released in June. She's had poetry published in JAAM, Landfall, Catalyst and Best New Zealand Poems 2008, among other places.

Also, if you happen to be near Palmerston North this Wednesday, you can go see (and hear) her read at Stand Up Poetry at the library. All the details are here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=129034570476304&index=1.

And more Tuesday Poems can be found, for your delectation, at the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

Tuesday poem: 'Battle Rattle Sally' by Scott Kendrick

2010-08-23T21:58:00.002+12:00

Battle Rattle Sally
by Scott Kendrick

(If you can't view it here, you'll also find this video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnOnMa8ZbwI)

To celebrate getting broadband, one of the first things I did was to upload this video I made of Scott Kendrick performing this poem, impromptu, at his mumblemumble birthday last year. Where other people chant 'Speech, speech!' we chanted 'Poem, poem!' and we got what we wanted. Anyway, I quickly realised the version I'd uploaded was the wrong one, and this evening uploaded the proper version.

Battle Rattle Sally is from Scott's book Cold Comfort, Cold Concrete: Poems and Satires, published by Seraph Press (ie me) back in 2007. It's short, sweet, has a great rhythm, and was short enough for Scott to be able to remember this far into his party, which is quite an achievement.

Now that I'm on broadband, I have great plans of making and uploading more poetry videos, and of expanding the directory I was trying to create at NZ poets on video. We'll see if that actually happens, but I have good intentions.

Hope you enjoy this. More poems at the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday Poem: 'Cape Reinga, New Year's Day', from Heading North

2010-08-16T22:32:00.005+12:00

Cape Reinga, New Year’s Day

The yellow glow
through the roof of our tent
wakes us early

the sun is just peering over the hills
is still yawning and stretching
as we pack up and go

It’s only around the corner
where the tar-seal stops
and the gravel begins

from here, you must
slow down
you must prepare

When we get there
we don’t even speak

We walk down the seagrass slope to the lighthouse
I in my bare feet, feeling the prick and give

The sky vaults above us
the blue ocean glass
as the sun shines through

where the oceans meet
where souls depart

The light is brighter, whiter
thicker than anywhere else

We come together
photograph each other
holding my journal in front
with the date and time, as proof

CAPE REINGA
1/1/2004
7.15 AM

Back at the car park
We send a postcard to our southern selves
‘Remember this’

This is another from Heading North, because my copies of the book arrived today!! I had suspicions that they would be in most post box today, and so I went to check before going to work, and there they were! They are more gorgeous in the 'flesh' (or rather paper, card, cloth and ink) than in the pictures. The cover of each is also slightly different, slight individualised - the hill shape slightly different, the 'road' shapes wider or narrower.

This poem is probably the heart of the collection, for me at least. It's one of my favs. I read it tonight at the Poetry Society open reading to celebrate the books' arrival, and was very proud to be able to show some people my book. As a physical object it's a work of art, and I hope people will like the poems too!

Should you wish to purchase a copy, you can have a chat to me, or you can contact Parsons Bookshop in Auckland, who stock the books and do mail orders, or you can wait a short time and buy it from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, who have an online shop. You might want the ISBN, which is: 978-0-9864616-6-8. It retails for $45, which is a lot for a book of poetry, I know, but if you have a look at a copy, you'll see all the hand work that has gone into it, and you'll understand why.

Ok, so that's my Tuesday poem - for more Tuesday Poems visit the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/. This week is a really interesting poem by US poet Heather Davis, posted by US poet Eileen Moeller.

Tuesday Poem: 'Setting off', from Heading North

2010-08-10T20:00:00.009+12:00

Setting off

When you travel so
far, you’re searching
for new breath
driving faster - - leaving
old air behind

feeling the pressure
of the window - - between
work and work
it was now
or never

it was now

That's the opening poem in my sequence Heading North, which is being published as a book by Kilmog Press. I'm very excited! It's all happened quite fast, so I hadn't blogged about it yet. But already it's becoming an actual book! A beautiful, hand-made, hardback, limited-edition book! You can see it in the below, but you can view it in more detail on the Kilmog Press blog: http://kilmogpress.blogspot.com/2010/08/helen-rickerby-heading-north.html.

You can read more about the book here on Beattie's Book Blog, which already has the blurb: http://beattiesbookblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/another-poetry-collection-for-tuesday.html (completed only late last night). Or you can just read the blurb below:

In Heading North Helen Rickerby takes us on the road. This playful and reflective sequence explores the tensions and connections between the narrator and her lover on a road trip towards the tip of the North Island. The place where two oceans meet, Cape Reinga, is the calm in their subtle storm. Heading North is an inner and outer journey through the geography of Northland.

Helen Rickerby is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Abstract Internal Furniture (2001) and My Iron Spine (2008). She is co-managing editor of JAAM literary magazine and runs Seraph Press, a boutique poetry publisher. She lives in Wellington, in a cliff-top tower, and works as a web editor.

I've been meaning to blog about Kilmog Press again for a while now, ever since I bought copies of Michael Steven's first two books (there's already another now, so that shows how slack I am!). And I will do a proper blog soon, but for now I'll just say that I've always admired their gorgeous, work-of-art books, and I'm so excited that mine is going to be among them.

And of course, check out the official Tuesday poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog, and you'll find more Tuesday poems in the sidebar of that blog.

(Late) Tuesday poem: 'Looking for her' by Jenny Powell

2010-08-03T21:10:00.005+12:00

Looking for her

I looked for her
in tides of crisp

trees turning
toward the bitter

months I looked
across the desert

of a skinned sky
I looked inside

canals of open
ground I looked

in the eyes of every
mother-woman

and all this time
she was there,

inside my footsteps
of betrayal,

in each gasp
of cold air.

by Jenny Powell

Jenny Powell (previously Jenny Powell-Chalmers) lives and writes in St Clair, Dunedin. She's the author of five books of poetry, including two collaborative collections. Her sixth, Viet Nam: A Poem Journey is going to be published by HeadworX very soon.

It might be late, but it's still Tuesday. This poem by Jenny Powell is also from Locating the Madonna, as was 'The Madonna of the Ureweras' by Anna Jackson, which I posted for Poetry Day. 'Looking for her is another of my favourites from that collaborative collection, so I thought it would be a good follow up. Looking back over the book, there is a lot of variety in the types and tones of the poems. Earlier ones have a lighter tone, and towards the end, it is a little more reflective and serious. And quieter. The part of this poem that has always haunted me especially is the end - the last four lines: 'inside my footsteps / of betrayal, / in each gasp / of cold air.'

Also, the lovely Helen Heath has published my poem 'Enchantress of numbers' about Ada Byron (Ada Lovelace) as her Tuesday Poem on her blog: http://www.helenheath.com/2-aug-2010/tuesday-poem-enchantress-numbers-ada-byron-king-countess-lovelace-helen-rickerby (her site is up again, if you tried yesterday and failed to get through).

And you can find more Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog, including Claire Beynon's collaborative poem, which you can add a line to here: http://icelines.blogspot.com/2010/08/tuesday-poem-false-alarm.html

Launches and launches: part 2

2010-07-31T10:33:00.003+12:00

My week of launches (ok, so actually only two launches) began with the launch of the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa, up in Northland (the Wellington suburb, rather than the region), which was lots of fun.

Possibly the coolest thing about it was the venue. It was held in an old hall - the St Anne's Schoolroom - which apparently privately owned now. Its gorgeous and homely, with large windows which let the sun stream in, and full of lots of couches. It made me have a sudden desire to own a hall.

As well as a launch for the archive itself, it was also a launch for the archive's first publication, an anthology Rail Poems of New Zealand Aotearoa, and a collection by one of the founders of the archive, Niel Wright: The Pop Artist's Garland. Nelson Wattie did the launching, and there were readings from both books, and in fact a singing - Ron Riddell did a rendition of Peter Cape's 'Taumaranui on the Main Trunk Line', with most of my fellow audience members joining him on the chorus.

Afterwards I got to have a nose around the archive itself, which is housed next door. They're trying to collect as much New Zealand poetry as possible, and are keen for donations. Already they have around 3,000 volumes. While not yet comparable to The Poetry Library in London or The Scottish Poetry Library, it has similar aims - to value and protect poetry. Hopefully it will outgrow it's current home one day.

Launches and launches: part 1

2010-07-31T09:10:00.003+12:00

I'm still buzzing from the book launch last night. It was kind of historic - not only a joint launch (they seem to be becoming more and more common), but the books are from different publishers. Lynn Jenner's debut poetry collection Dear Sweet Harry is published by Auckland University Press, while John Newton's second collection (which famously has taken 25 years) The Lives of the Poets was published by Victoria University Press.

I'm particularly looking forward to reading Dear Sweet Harry, as I've enjoyed Lynn's work a lot when I've come across it. We published some of her poems in JAAM 27 (one of which was then published in Best NZ Poems 2009) and I was struck by her original voice. She said something last night about her husband encouraging her to let her poems be as weird as they need to be, and while weird sounds like a not-quite-right way of describing them, they are their own thing.

John Newton's work is new to me, so it will be interesting discovering it.

But what really got me buzzing last night was actually all the other people there. There was a convergence of poets, many of whom I mainly know from the internet, and it was really nice to see them in real life. Many were Tuesday Poets, including some from out of town. I've really found a bit of a community on the internet, mainly through blogging, and the Tuesday Poem phenomena has added to that. Thanks Mary! At big 'institutional' book launches I've often found, being a shy sort of person, that I can end up feeling very alienated. But not last night. Last night I felt I had a lot of poetry friends, and what a lovely bunch of people they are!

NZ Poetry Day poem: 'The Madonna of the Ureweras' by Anna Jackson

2010-07-30T00:04:00.000+12:00

The Madonna of the Ureweras

The Madonna of the Ureweras
tramps with muddy feet.
There is mud in her boots
right down to the soles
of her socks.

The Madonna of the Ureweras
knows both hunger and excess.
She knows the list you’ve drawn up
of your sorrows and pain,
she is with you
as you walk away
from the people you love best.

She knows the hunger
of dried apricots
and ryvita bread,
the hunger that feeds
quarrels, and leads you,
in desperation, into song.

The Madonna of the Ureweras
has trees in her eyes.
Her smile is a river
that runs
further than you have walked.
She is dawning on you like the sun.

By Anna Jackson

For National Poetry Day, some of us Tuesday poets are publishing a New Zealandish poem on our blogs. While thinking what I might like to post, this poem came immediately to mind - I mean, what's more New Zealandish than tramping. And getting annoyed with your family.

'The Madonna of the Ureweras' was published in Locating the Madonna, a collaborative project between Anna Jackson and Jenny Powell (then Jenny Powell-Chalmers), which was also the first book I/Seraph Press published. (I still have a few copies if you want one - extra special price of $10. It's an excellent book.) It's one of my favourite poems in the book. There are bits in there that pull at my heart. It's also quite a physical poem, with all that mud and walking and hunger. And then finally at the end, it's transcendent. I hope you love it as much as I do.

For more National Poetry Day stuff, well, it's probably everywhere. For more poems, visit the Tuesday Poem blog, which will have the Best Book of Poetry winners & finalists for 2010: Brian Turner, Bernadette Hall, Michael Harlow & Selina Tusitala Marsh, and links to more poems. Or for more Poetry Day events, visit: http://www.booksellers.co.nz/awards/new-zealand-post-book-awards/national-poetry-day-events-2010

Tuesday Poem: 'Camera'

2010-07-27T09:20:00.005+12:00

Camera

There are a lot of stairs to be climbed
each with a different kind of railing

Darkness is in the basement
her soul in the attic

The attic
is improbable

At first you think this is realist

You are mistaken

There is a key, there are labels
‘Eat me’ really means ‘fuck me’
‘Drink me’ means ‘open your soul’

‘See me’ means putting new eyes
in your sockets

The world transforms
when you look
through an aperture
restrict your vision with a frame

Didn't get organised early enough this week (or last week), so it's one of mine this week. 'Camera' was recently published in the second issue of Enamel magazine. I'm undecided still whether the title refers primarily to a camera for taking photos, or to the Italian word for room, but it's both really. It was inspired by a rather odd, cool, but ultimately not-quite-satisfying movie (for me at least), Fur.

More Tuesday Poems here on the official blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

Tuesday Poem: 'Spilt' by Helen Heath

2010-07-13T01:29:00.000+12:00

Spilt

The touch of your hand on my
breast brings little needles and
I let down first just a drop, another drop and
then when I’m sitting on you, over you
it’s a steady flow and the milk is everywhere.
I guess it’s not really a waste because
there is always more but I resent you a little because
it’s not yours and you think it’s funny and
I guess it is and I just need to let go.
You check to see if I have teeth down there and
if you can pass to the other side.
You do think I’m a goddess and
the children tear us apart, me to earth, you
up in the air or is it the other way around? And
our fingertips can’t quite touch and I cry down on you
or do you cry down on me?
The children walk all over me or
is it you?
Valley, hills, rivers and caves.

By Helen Heath

Helen Heath is a poet from the sea-side village of Paekakariki, on the Kapiti Coast. In 2009 she completed an MA in creative writing at Victoria University. Her poetry has been published in many journals in New Zealand and Australia, and she's almost finished polishing her first full-length book. You can find her shiny new website at: http://www.helenheath.com/.

I first read this poem when it was published in JAAM 26, edited by Tim Jones. I was immediately struck by its power - its rawness, its physicality. I often misread the title as 'Split', because it is a poem about being torn apart a bit, losing yourself a bit for the people you love. And, it's also a tender poem, it is full of love. And I've also always enjoyed its mixture of the domestic and the mythic. It's both intensely personal, but also universal.

When I was selected poems to go into Watching for Smoke - the rather attractive chapbook of poems by Helen Heath, which I published last year - I knew 'Spilt' would be my anchor and my jumping-off point. The themes it introduces are the themes that carry through the whole book - family, and particularly the different roles we have in them, such as mother, wife, lover, daughter, sister, and the tensions within and between them.

Anyway, I love this poem. I think it's awesome.

More awesome poems at: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/.

James McNaughton at this month's Poetry Society meeting

2010-07-12T17:51:00.000+12:00

This is probably the last of my sudden flurry of posts - at least before this week's Tuesday poem.

This month James McNaughton is the guest poet at the Poetry Society meeting. His first book, The Stepmother Tree, was in my recollection full of playful and kind of crazy fairytale-ish poems. I liked it. His second book, I Want More Sugar, was published in 2008.

Meeting will begin with an open mic, and is the same bat time, same bat place:

Monday 19 July, 7.30 pm
Upstairs at the Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave Street.

Anonymous poetry, a new mysterious zine

2010-07-12T09:51:00.000+12:00

Last week I was intrigued to be invited to join a Facebook group with the curious name of Eponymous Anonymous. Because the person who invited me to join was one of the several Helens of my acquaintance, at first I thought it might be some mega-group of Helens, but it was not.

What it is, is a project to publish 'a low budget, old school photocopied folded paper journal with no names attached. It might be one writer writing as dozens, or a dozen writers writing as one.'

Intriguing.

Generally we poets are trying as hard as we can to make a bit of a name for ourselves - get people interested in our work: 'If you liked that, then perhaps you'll like this.' We like to rack up a wee list of places our work has been published, we like people to know our names, we want our work to represent us. But along with our name comes restrictions, and sometimes opportunities. People might or might not publish our work because they have developed an idea about whether or not they like us or our work. We might feel restricted in what we we'll write about (or at least have published) because we're worried about what people might think, about what our mother might think, because it doesn't go with the kind of image we're trying to present as a poet.

The idea of anonymity makes me nervous, and excited. And a little bit free. I am going to try to write some work for this project that is a bit different from what Helen Rickerby, poet, might ordinarily do. I'm going to try to use the anonymity as an advantage, and a inspiration.

Interested?

You can visit the Facebook group here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=113800348667528 for all the info. (All the cool kids have Facebook groups. Did you know JAAM has a Facebook group?: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8420259164.)

All you have to do is write something that you are happy to have published anonymously and submit it to:

theeponymousanonymousproject AT gmail.com

Or even better get together with some poetical, piratical friends and create a few poems or a collection to submit together. Create a character, a cast of characters or simply be eponymous anonymous.

Submissions close 8th August.

BTW - if you're interested in the intriguing punctuation mark (top left), which Eponymous Anonymous is using as its image, it's called an interrobang (or a quesclamation mark). It is basically a !?, but as one character. It was invented in the 60s, and is not much used, as you might expect. I only know all this because, well I checked Wikipedia, but also because non-standard punctuation was a topic of conversation among my colleagues last year, because one of them really needed some kind of sarcasm mark. He was in luck, because there is the irony or sarcasm mark: ؟.

Poetry at the Ballroom Cafe, 18 July 2010

2010-07-11T17:39:00.002+12:00

This month's guest poets are Teresia Teaiwa, Hinemoana Baker and Simone Kaho, and the guest musicians are Hinemoana Baker and Chris White. Hinemoana's 2nd book of poetry, Koiwi Koiwi, will also be launched there.

There will also be an open mic.

Time: Sunday 18 July, 4-6pm
Place: The Ballroom Café, cnr Riddiford St & Adelaide Rd, Newtown

About the poets:

Hinemoana Baker is a Maori writer and musician with tribal links to Taranaki, Horowhenua and Otakou Peninsula.

Teresia Teaiwa, an African American Banaban I-Kiribati who was born in Hawai’i & raised in Fiji, has had work published in Side Stream and in 2008 produced a solo CD, I can see Fiji.

Simone Kaho, a poet with Tongan roots, has performed at Poetry Live in Auckland. Her work has been published in Live Lines III.

Enamel 2 out now

2010-07-11T10:45:00.003+12:00

The second issue of this stylish annual literary mag, edited by Wellington poet Emma Barnes, is out now. The cool cover image is by nine-year-old Ngahere Koa von Bassewitz-Wafe. As far as I can tell, it's one of those artworks where you scratch through the black crayon to reveal the coloured crayon beneath.

I have a couple of poems in here: 'Camera' and 'Unsavoury'. Inside, I found quite a few writers (mostly poets) I'd come across before, and a few new discoveries. Some particular highlights for me are Harvey Molloy's 'Bus stop'; Mariana Isara's 'Crush' (it took me a little bit to warm to this long, spacious poem, but by the end I was smitten); Helen Heath's poems about scientists Marie Curie ('Radiant') and Beatrice Tinsley ('Spiral arms'); Tim Jones's dystopia poems and 'Willie Pondexter by Sarah Jane Barnett. You'll also find fine work by Jennifer Compton, Craig Cliff, Angeline King, Sally Houtman, Reihana MacDonald Robinson, Susanna Gendall, Heather Elder, Debbie McCauley, Jenni Dowsett, Iain Britton and Vaughan Rapatahana.

And how can you get your paws on this excellent publication? You can purchase it on Trade Me - http://www.trademe.co.nz/Members/Listings.aspx?member=684524 - for $15, or for $20 you can get both Enamel 1 and 2. Or you can email the editor: enamel dot editor at gmail dot com. Or, I'm sure it you rocked up to your local bookshop and asked them to order it for you, and gave them the ISSN (1174-9199) they'd be able to do that.

Enamel has a blog here: http://enamelmag.blogspot.com/, and a recently created Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=137829206230906. They'll be calling for submissions for the next issue at some point (probably later in the year).

And now I'll leave you with the final section of Mariana Isara's love poem, 'Crush'

What I want is the obvious thing

you

to eat red berries with me

in a warm rose garden

smelling Katherine Mansfield

to lie with our pages touching

and origami

love's symmetry

I want to alliterate your dreams

Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa, launching and launching

2010-07-10T17:17:00.003+12:00

Up in the hills of suburban Wellington, things are afoot. Poetry things. Poetry things involving lots of books. Michael O'Leary, Niel Wright and Mark Pirie have been creating a the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA). Michael O'Leary (Paekakariki-based poet and publisher) has been working on it for years, but it now has a permanent home and can be used by researchers.

It's having its official launch, at which two books will also be launched, on Sunday 25th July. Full details below.

I should have blogged about PANZA ages ago, cos I've been helping them out with their website. But better late than never.

They already have an impressive catalogue, but they're always happy to accept your donations of poetry books and related stuff.

Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa launch invitation

HeadworX, ESAW and PANZA invite you to celebrate the launch and opening of The Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA).

The Pop Artist's Garland

As well as the official opening, two new poetry books are being launched:

The Pop Artist’s Garland: Selected Poems 1952–2009 by F W N Wright (HeadworX), a remarkably varied selected poems by Wellington poet Niel Wright, covering six decades of his writing life.

Rail Poems of NZ Aotearoa, edited by Mark Pirie (PANZA/ESAW). The railway has been a dominant presence in New Zealand life for a century, connecting freight and people. In this new collection of rail poems, editor Mark Pirie presents a fresh and vibrant journey through many facets of the railway and explores its significance in our daily lives.

Rail Poems of New Zealand Aotearoa

Contributors: Fleur Adcock, Marilyn Duckworth, Michael O’Leary, F W N Wright, Simon Williamson, Kim Eggleston, Louis Johnson, Jan Kemp, Fiona Kidman, Ron Riddell, Will Lawson, Jean Hamilton Lennox, Roger Wrighton, Hugh Isdale, Stephen Oliver, Peter Olds, M K Joseph, Rhys Pasley, Mark Pirie, Alistair Paterson and Peter Cape.

Special launch price of $15.00 for both books (Rail Poems of NZ Aotearoa is the first publication by PANZA’s publishing arm and is a free giveaway with The Pop Artist’s Garland).

Venue: St Anne’s School Room, 79 Northland Road (next door to the Poetry Archive at 1 Woburn Road, Northland, Wellington).

Time: 2-3pm

Date: Sunday, 25 July 2010

Books Launched by: Nelson Wattie

No EFTPOS available. Please pay by cash or cheque.