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

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: 'Return to Nussbaum Riegel' by Tim Jones

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/

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

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: 'Going Back' by Tim Jones

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/

Not a Tuesday poem: let's talk about Baxter

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...

Vana Manasiadis interviewed by Tim Jones

About once a month Tim Jones interviews writers on his blog, Books in the Trees. This month it was the turn of Vana Manasiadis, author of Ithaca Island Bay Leaves: A Mythistorima, published by me. You can read the interview here: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/04/interview-with-vana-manasiadis.html.

I love this interview, partly just because it sounds like Vana talking, and she's back in Crete now and I miss her; but mostly because it's so alive and honest. I recommend it.

Also, if you missed her interviewed on National Radio by Lynn Freeman, you can listen to that here: http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/national/art/2010/01/31/poetry_-_vana_manasiadis.

Stuff to know about: Fantastic Voyages - Writing Speculative Fiction

And the next night you could go to:
That's probably all the info you need to know, but there's more here on Tim Jones's blog: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2009/08/fantastic-voyages-writing-speculative.html

Voyagers on the radio

Tomorrow (Sunday 7 June) Mark Pirie and Tim Jones, the editors of Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (an anthology I’m delighted to be in) are going to be interviewed on National Radio by Lynn Freeman.

They’re scheduled to be on between 2.30 and 3. If you don't catch them them, you can listen to them later at you leisure on the really rather fabulous Radio NZ site.

JAAM 26 is a finalist in Sir Julius Vogel Awards

I'm delighted that JAAM 26 is a finalist in the Collected Works section of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for science fiction and fantasy works.

JAAM 26 was guest edited by Tim Jones, and contained a number of speculative and interstitial stories and poems – hence its eligibility for the award. Hopefully this will be good publicity for JAAM.

All congratulations are to go to Tim himself, who assembled such a fine issue of JAAM, and who knew about the awards in the first place. Tim also deserves congratulations because his own book of short stories, Transported, is up against JAAM in the same category, along with The Invisible Road, by Elizabeth Knox.

JAAM has a couple of other connections to these awards too. Helen Lowe had poems and a story in JAAM 26, and they are part of the body of work for which she has been selected as a finalist in the Best New Talent category. Also published in JAAM was 'Banshee' by Darian Smith, which is a finalist in the Best Short Story category.

Members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy and Fantasy Association of New Zealand will vote at Conscription, the 30th New Zealand National Science Fiction Convention, in Auckland on Queen's Birthday Weekend.

Tim Jones has some more about this on his blog: http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2009/03/sffanz-press-release-finalists-for-2009.html

Exciting things

I am still internetless. Sigh... So I'm going to cram several posts into one.

Exciting thing 1: my book in Unity Books
My Iron Spine is now at Unity Books (finally). Yay! Unfortunately it isn't on the poetry end of the NZ books display table - you'll have to go and find it in the NZ poetry section, should you be looking for it.

Exciting thing 2: reading poetry at Paekakariki Fair
On Sunday I had lots of fun doing a couple of short poetry readings at the Paekakariki Fair, with Helen Heath, Tim Jones and Harvey Molloy. We read some poems, sold some books, bought some books, looked at lots of very cool stalls, slathered sunscreen on our burning selves, ate some gelato (at least I did anyway) and generally had a lovely day. Tim Jones has a more detailed account of it on his blog.

Exciting thing 3: poem from JAAM 26 is the Wednesday poem
Laurice Gilbert's fine poem 'Island Bay', published in JAAM 26, was the Wednesday poem in last Wednesday's Dominion Post. Hurrah! And congratulations Laurice.

Exciting thing 4: JAAM 26 is popular
Well, popular enough to need a reprint. We don't have an enormous print run, but it's run out and is being reprinted as we speak.

Interviews on Tim Jones's blog/Sonnet competition

Interviews on Tim's blog

Tim Jones has kicked off a wee series of interviews with other writers with an interview with poet and novelist Helen Lowe. (He has some others lined up, including one with me about My Iron Spine.) Helen Lowe is a writer I hadn't come across before typesetting JAAM 26, which has poems and a story by her in it. Her Her first young adult novel, Thornspell, has just been published by Knopf in the USA.


Sonnet competition

I'm not much of a poetry-competition enterer – I guess because there's only one winner in a competition, whereas if you send your poems to magazines (which I actually do quite infrequently as well, though I aim to do this more often), everyone who gets something accepted is a winner.

But you might be different. You might want to enter the Wellington Sonnet Competition 2008. If so, you'll find the following info most useful:

Poet and biographer Harry Ricketts is to judge the Wellington Sonnet Competition 2008. “Any fourteen-line of poem about Wellington will qualify,” he says, “because the sonnet is a still evolving form that I find fascinating. Poems submitted to the competition need not have a traditional rhyming scheme, although formal sonnets will also be welcome.”

The New Zealand Society of Authors is running the competition, sponsored by New Zealand Post, in aid of the Wellington Writers Walk. For a $10 entry fee, (plus $5 for each additional poem submitted), people will be in to win a $1000 first prize, $500 second prize, $250 third prize or one of the 10 highly commended prizes of $50. The closing date is 22 September 2008 and entrants can download forms and conditions from http://www.authors.org.nz/.

Harry Ricketts is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Film and Theatre and Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Born in London and educated at Oxford University, he has lived in England, Malaysia, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He is the author of eight collections of poems and the internationally acclaimed biography of Rudyard Kipling, The Unforgiving Minute, published in England by Chatto and Windus in 1999 and in the USA in 2000. He has published various essays and critical writings and edited collections of work by other poets. He is currently working on a composite biography of a dozen World War One poets and is co-editor of the quarterly review journal New Zealand Books.

Transported, by Tim Jones

I haven’t been getting too much time to read of late, but when I have snatched some time, I worked my way through Tim Jones’s recent short story collection Transported (Random House, 2008). Tim is a literary and blogging friend of mine, and he’s also the guest editor of JAAM 26, which I’ve just finished typesetting.

Transported is Tim’s second collection of stories – his first, Extreme Weather Events, was published in 2001 by HeadworX, who also published his two collections of poetry: Boat People (2002) and All Black’s Kitchen Gardens (2007). Unusually for a poet (I think?), he’s also published a fantasy novel, Anarya’s Secret (Redbrick). From all of that, you can see that Tim Jones is an extraordinarily flexible writer, with a rather large range of styles and interests – and not just between books, but also within books and within pieces. For example, some of the poems in All Black’s Kitchen Gardens are little poetic science fiction stories.

In a recent blog post, Tim talks about this mixing of the ‘literary’ and the ‘genre’ as ‘interstitial fiction’ – fiction that falls between the cracks and gaps of our usual categories. This crossover of ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ styles is an area Tim is obviously really interested in – in his own work and in that of others. In his call for submissions for JAAM 26 he particularly encouraged writers of ‘speculative fiction’ to submit.

And it’s definitely in evidence in Transported. In here, you’ve got orcs, philosophers, astronauts, poets (actually, the astronaut is a poet), flying people, politicians, alien neighbours, people in the future, people from the past, a girl who can make inanimate objects move just by walking past them. This isn’t your typical short story collection, and that’s what’s so cool about it.

My favourite stories probably are the ones that perhaps tend towards the literary. What do I mean by that? It’s a pretty loaded statement, and one I’m not going to be able to justify entirely, but I guess I mean the ones that tend towards a quiet, reflective tone; the ones in which maybe nothing much happens, but which are especially full of meaning.

Anyway, several of my fav stories combine, in terms of the subject matter, literary/high culture with the ordinary, the banal – what one might call low culture, should one wish to be snobbish (though I would never suggest such a thing.)

In ‘The Visit of M. Foucault to His Brother Wayne’, philosopher Michel Foucault comes to New Zealand and stays with his brother Wayne, a dairy farmer in Southland. Foucault is not especially good with farm work, but has some skill in milking. ‘Borges and I’ begins with the narrator and the South American writer Borges watching the rugby. The narrator advises Borges that ‘only woofters drink coffee at half-time’.

This imaginative combination of things considered high culture and things considered low culture is, of course, what Tim is doing in the entire book, and a great deal of his writing. He plays with this idea in another of the stories I particularly liked, ‘Measureless to Man’. When the poet Coleridge is having trouble with getting started on ‘Kubla Khan’, one of his attempts at a beginning also (though less successfully than Tim) combines high culture with the ordinary: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a block of council flats decree…’

Another thing that only just struck me about many of my favourite stories in Transported is that a significant number of them are the ones that have ‘real’ people in them – people from history. Others like this are the fantastically titled ‘A Short History of the Twentieth Century, with Fries’, which features ‘Lenin and his posse’, and ‘Win a day with Mikhail Gorbachev!’ I think this points to a preoccupation of mine, more than anything else – of sticking real people into fictional narratives, which is something I very much enjoyed doing in My Iron Spine.

One of the other stories that I really liked is ‘Said Sheree’. It’s kind of a love story between Sheree, a Tier One poet, and Miranda, a Tier Two poet. In this version of reality, New Zealand’s funding system for poetry has categorised everyone into various tiers. Because Miranda and Sheree are in different tiers, theirs is a forbidden – or at least not approved of – love. Along with the fantastic satire, and interesting ideas, it’s also a sweet, moving, and quite sad love story. I was also delighted with it when it mentioned that Miranda, the Tier Two poet, has two poems accepted for JAAM – I think that is our first mention in a published literary work!

Reading this collection I became aware of just how full of ideas Tim’s brain must be – I just can’t fathom how he came up with some of the ideas in these stories. I expect he is the kind of person with folders and folders full with so many ideas for poems, stories, novels that it would take a lifetime for him to finish them. So expect to see many more publications from him.

To read more about Transported, you can find links to and quotes from reviews on his blog here, and here.

Lindsay Rabbit at Poetry Society/JAAM 26 progress report/Congrats to Tim Jones

I prefer my posts to be tightly written, focused explorations, nay elucidations, of a single topic (surely you’ve noticed), but today I’m gong to cheat and do three-in-one.

Lindsay Rabbitt at Poetry Society

The May meeting of the Poetry Society is this Monday, 19 May, at 7.30pm, in The Greta Fernie Room, Leuven Belgian Beer Cafe, cnr Featherston and Johnston Sts, Wellington (New Zealand, for my international readers).

Lindsay Rabbitt is the guest poet. According to his website, he is ‘a New Zealand writer and multi-media artist based on the Kapiti Coast. He has published poems, essays and short stories. His latest book is These Lives I Have Buried, which was published as part of the Montana essay series, edited by Lloyd Jones and published by his Four Winds Press.’

While researching him on the net, I found this kind of random interesting tidbit in an interview with Bill Manhire: ‘Nowadays, whenever I meet Lindsay Rabbit, another poet who lives in Wellington, I have an immediate rapport with him, because we both grew up in pubs in the bottom of the South Island. There are things we know about that no one else in Wellington does.’

JAAM 26 progress report

Tim Jones, guest editor of JAAM 26, has posted on his blog a wee report about where he’s up to with compiling the next issue.

Basically, he’s read through heaps and heaps of submissions, has found some treasures, and now has to make some tough decisions. He’ll be getting back to submitters soon, and then we’ll start getting it ready for publication.

Sounds like it will be (another) great issue, and I’m looking forward to it.

Congrats to Tim Jones

While we’re on the subject of Tim Jones, congratulations are in order. Tim’s soon-to-be released second short story collection Transported has been long-listed for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.

This award, organised by the Munster Literature Centre, Ireland, goes to the author of the book judged to be the best collection of stories published in English for the first time anywhere in the world in the past year. Tim is one of four New Zealanders to be long list, along with Sue Orr, Elizabeth Smither and Witi Ihimaera. Congrats to all. Read more about it here.

Poetry Society: Tim Jones and Jennifer Compton

Last Monday was another good Poetry Society meeting. Everyone who was there during the open reading read at least one poem, including Alan who arrived a little later and without a poem. Lauris presented him with a random poem she'd printed off the net and he read it so fluently and beautifully, with such modulation, that I told him afterwards it was as if he'd practised for hours. But no, he said, he'd never seen the poem before in his life.

Tim Jones (guest editor JAAM 26, for which submissions are closing at the end of this month)was the guest reader. He read work from his latest book All Black's Kitchen Gardens, which came out last year, and his first book Boat People from 2002.

I was pleased he read my favourite poem of his, 'Going Back' (from All Black's Kitchen Gardens), about a journey home after the death of his mother.

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

Next month, Jennifer Compton will be the guest reader. She's a New Zealand poet and playwright, but has lived in Australia for many years. She's going to be the next Randall Cottage fellow. I've come across Jennifer's work quite often through JAAM, but it will be great to see her read in person.

The meeting is going to be at a new venue: in the Greta Fernie Room of Leuven, cnr Featherston and Johnston streets. The date and time are: Monday 21 April, 7.00pm.

JAAM 26 editor Tim Jones reads at Poetry Society

For you Wellingtonians, come along to the Poetry Society on Monday 17 March (this Monday), where to hear Tim Jones will be guest reader.

The reading is from 7 pm at the Paramount foyer, Courtenay Place. There'll also be an open reading beforehand.

Tim is a poet, novelist, short story writer and blogger. His second collection, All Blacks' Kitchen Gardens, was published by HeadworX last year.