Tuesday Poem: 'Spilt' by Helen Heath

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/.

Best New Zealand Poems 2009

Well, no poems from my two 2009 Seraph Press publications (Watching for Smoke and Ithaca Island Bay Leaves) were included in Best New Zealand Poems 2009, though I think they totally deserved to be (well, I would wouldn't I?).

Seraph Press and Watching for Smoke did get a wee mention in 2009 editor Robyn Marsack's introduction though, when she talks about chapbook publishers:

I was glad to see some very beautifully designed and printed publications: from Neoismist Press, from Seraph Press – one with its string and knitting needle (fortunately not impounded at the Post Office), from Gumtree Press and Fernbank Studio/Wellington Plains.

I was pleased that she did include a couple of poems from from JAAM 27 (edited by Ingrid Horrocks): ‘North’ by Sarah Broom and ‘A Hassidic story might start . . .‘ by Lynn Jenner.

JAAM also gets a mention in the intro:

Poets shouldn’t take for granted the handsome New Zealand periodicals – such publications are few and far between here in the north. Landfall, Sport and JAAM suggest a very confident literary culture, and they’re the tip of it – Takahe, Bravado, the online issues such as 4th Floor and Turbine, all create a sense that poets have plenty of ways of getting poems out to readers.

Huh, does that make us the institution?

Where can I get me a copy of Watching for Smoke?

Well, seeing as you asked: if you don't already have one, you can get yourself your very own, made-with-love copy of Watching for Smoke, by Helen Heath by:

• buying a copy off either myself or Helen, if you should be lucky enough to know one or other or both of us personally
• emailing me at seraphpressATparadise.net.nz to order a copy
• buying it off Helen's Etsy shop - she just popped it up today, complete with some lovely, lovely photos
• buying it Unity Books Wellington, if you wait a few more days until I take in the copies for them
• asking your nice, friendly local bookshop to order a copy from me - they might like to know the ISBN, which is 978-0-473-15379-3.

I've also just updated my Seraph Press website - an uncommon occurrence I'm afraid - to include information about Watching for Smoke, and the upcoming (soon!) Ithaca Island Bay Leaves, by Vana Manasiadis.

Watching for Smoke launch, and my Poetry Society reading

I’ve been a bit quiet lately. While this has partly been because my computer is still being fixed (Dad has replaced so many bits of it, in order to find out what wasn’t working, it’s going to end up as a different computer altogether), mainly I’ve just been recovering from a whole bunch of things, including the launch we had for the latest Seraph Press book, Watching for Smoke by Helen Heath (and getting lots of books made beforehand), and the reading I did at the Poetry Society the day after.

Watching for Smoke launch

This was lots of fun. I’d gotten a bit anxious because instead of arriving an hour beforehand to set up, as I planned, we got there with 15 minutes to spare due to a girl falling off her motorbike close to our place, and my kind friends bringing her up to the house to have a cup of tea and attend to her grazes. I needn’t have worried though – there were already people in the kitchen putting jam and cream on pikelets, and my team of family and friends helped us finishing setting up in record time (thanks guys!).

Being in an old church hall (St Peters in Paekakariki), and with treats such as the aforementioned pikelets, it had the feeling of a ‘ladies-a-plate’ sort of event, but in the best possible way. Kids ran around, or danced to the fabulous music of Dan, Stefan, and another musician whose name I’m afraid I didn’t catch.

Dinah Hawken launched the book. As well as being a poet admired both Helen and myself, Dinah is Helen’s supervisor for her MA in creative writing. (Helen will be putting the finishing touches to her portfolio, perhaps at this very moment.) Dinah said lots of lovely things about the book and about Helen’s poetry in general. She also said that she kind of wished that all poetry books could be just little books, like this chapbook, rather than having to be larger volumes. While I’m a fan of larger poetry books too, there is something very satisfying about the smallness and concentration of a chapbook.

Helen then talked and read a few poems, including one not from Watching for Smoke which she read especially for her father. We sold quite a few books, but I still have a few left (and a few left to make – though not too many). If you want to buy one, I’ll sell them to you for $15 direct – just email me at Helen.RickerbyATparadise.net.nz. Unity Books in Wellington will have some soon, where they’ll be $20.

Voyagers event and my reading at the Poetry Society

It was a bit of a busy day – immediately before my reading I attended the Wellington event for the Voyagers New Zealand science fiction poetry anthology publicity tour. (This must be the best-publicised book in NZ in recent history – and it’s actually published by an Australian

company.) Co-editor Tim Jones, who was MCing, kindly let me read first, so I could sneak off early to get myself together. I was very sorry to have missed most of the other readers, but I did end up really needing the time to get a bite to eat and, mainly, spend ages mucking around with my friend Angelina’s computer to get the datashow working. Actually, I didn’t muck around with it much, it was mainly my new heroes Angelina and Poetry-Society attendee Lonnard, who finally beat it into submission – or rather facilitated communication between the computer and the projector.

As always, the reading began with an open mic, and I thought it an especially good one. One of the highlights was Harvey Molloy reciting 'Caedmon’s Hymn' in Old English.

Everyone was wondering what I was going to do with the datashow, but I started off my reading low-tech, so they had to wait. I read some of my new poems that are playing with various ideas related to cinema, and then I showed them my wee video poem, ‘Calling you home’.

The main thing I used the datashow for was just to show an image while I read my poems. I’d tried this at my reading in Palmerston North in May, and it seemed to go well. So I expanded it a bit this time and while reading poems from My Iron Spine about women from history, I showed an image of the woman the poem was about (except Marie Curie, for whom I was unable to find a picture before my borrowed computer refused to connect to the internet any more that afternoon). So I had pictures of Kate Sheppard, Minnie Dean, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. My final poem was ‘Artemisia Gentileschi’, which is basically talking about her life while talking about her paintings, so it was really great to be able to have people look at the paintings while listening to the poem. It made a lot more sense to a lot of people, and I think helped them to get the funny bits (there are one or two) in the middle of what is mostly a fairly grim, raw poem (it gets much more hopeful at the end).

We had quite a lively question time, and my favourite question I think, was ‘Did you realise that all those women looked like you?’ I didn’t, and I still don’t really think they do.

Invitations to stuff

If I haven't yet invited you to either the Watching for Smoke book launch (Sunday 3.30 St Peter's Hall Paekakariki) or my reading at the Poetry Society on Monday (7.30 Thistle Inn 3 Mulgrave Steet Thorndon), then I have probably lost your email address (hopefully temporarily) when my computer died (but the hard drive is hopefully ok), or you live out of town and I thought it was to far for you to come. I have discovered that, while Facebook is kind of a bit waste of time, it is really good for inviting people to stuff.

The other thing I should invite you all to is a reading for the Voyagers science fiction poetry anthology. We contributors are reading at the Wellington Central Library at 5.30 on Monday (just before my Poetry Society reading). There's also a reading at the Paraparaumu library on Tuesday at 5.30 (but I'm not entirely certain if I can make that).

There are Voyagers readings all around the country - Dunedin last night, Christchurch tonight, and after Wellington there will be some in Auckland. I think this is one of the best-promoted books I can remember, ever. (Oh except perhaps those boy wizard books and anything by Dan Brown.)

Launching Watching for Smoke

Come along to help us celebrate the launch of:

Watching for Smoke

by Helen Heath.

on Sunday 18th October at 3.30 pm in St Peter’s Hall, Beach Road, Paekakariki.

This hand-bound poetry chapbook will be launched by Dinah Hawken, and will be available for sale at $15 (RRP $20).

There will be bubbly, there will be scones, there will most likely be tea and coffee, there will be music. We hope you can come.

This is the first of two books I (ie Seraph Press) am (is) publishing this year. I'm already starting to organise the launch for the next one (Ithaca Island Bay Leaves), which will likely be very very early December.

Waiting for Watching for Smoke

Actually, I'm not waiting at all, because it won't get finished if I just sit around. Instead I'm working towards Watching for Smoke, the poetry chapbook by Helen Heath, which I'm (ie Seraph Press) about to publish/am in the process of publishing.

From the very first, when I suggested a chapbook to Helen, it was quickly obvious it was going to have to be something special. Of course, all the books I publish are special - I don't publish very much, and I'm totally in love with everything I do publish; I feel I have to be - it's not as if I have a surfeit of time to just throw away. But one of the first things Helen mentioned when we first talked about this book was knitting needles.

If you know Helen, or read her blog, you'll know that as well as being an accomplished poet, she's pretty crafty. Crafts are even mentioned in one of the poems, 'Hooks and needles': 'those hooks / those needles / what we craft.//We make our beds / and sometimes / we bleed on them'. So knitting needles incorporated into the book seemed very appropriate. But how? It sent my mind spinning in various directions, and I've made quite a few prototypes, to see what might work and what won't.

I've also talked to lots of people, who have given me lots of ideas. This has been quite a collaborative process, particularly with Helen herself, but thanks also to Emma, who suggested the grey card, Lesley, who gave me some ideas about how to cut it, and Art-and-my-life Pauline, who sent me a consignment of knitting needles all the way from Mosgiel.

So now I have a final design. The books will have a wrap-around cover, which will fasten with a knitting needle or crochet hook (mostly needles - crochet hooks are hard to come by cheap), and will have a cut-out through which the title shows. They're going to be beautiful - fittingly so, to match the poems they contain. The cover is the aforementioned grey card (the colour is 'Twilight' in English, and 'Crépuscule' in French), and it's all going to be bound together with red hemp thread (the same thread I used with yellow covers on Scarab). I'll have pictures soon!

So now I'm working on how to make it happen - and happen 100 times. It is involving much fiddly cutting, but I've been inventing ways to make it all a bit easier and repeatable. I've been using those problem-solving skills you're always supposed to demonstrate in performance reviews. I've made templates out of bits of plastic from some folder I found in the study and which neither Sean nor I were particularly attached to, and using not one but two different kinds of craft knife.

Getting the text pages printed was the easy part - I sent my pdf off to the lovely folks at Wakefields Digital (who remain my fav printers) and a full of beautifully printed and folded arrived on my doorstep a couple of days later.

So I'm going to spend the rest of today constructing more of these little treasures. Fortunately I don't have to get them all done at once, but I do need to get enough done for Helen to take to Palmerston North on Wednesday, for her guest reading at Stand Up Poetry at the Palmerston North Public Library.

And watch this space for details of the launch we're planning to welcome Watching for Smoke into the world - probably late-ish in October.

Stuff I’ve been doing

Got sick, read at Voyagers launch even though I should have stayed home under a blanket. Was fun.

While sick, read a lot.

Sorting out final details of Helen Heath’s Watching for Smoke – will post about that soon (!)

Finished off JAAM 27 and sent it off to print. Very excited about this. It looks gorgeous! I’ll write more about this when it comes back from the printer and is ready to go out into the world.

Project announcement: ‘Watching for Smoke’ by Helen Heath

Busy busy busy. Along with the projects I’ve already written about – JAAM (which I’ve been typesetting), video poems, Ithaca Island Bay Leaves, my own poetry – I’ve also been working putting together a new Seraph Press publication. It's going to be a limited-edition hand-bound poetry chapbook by Helen Heath, called Watching for Smoke.

Helen is a poet and all-round crafty person from Paekakariki. Over the last few years I've been getting to know her and her poetry a bit better, not least through her blog Show your Workings, and I've done a few readings with her and other people. I've been finding her work more and more compelling, and earlier this year I had a chat with her about it being time for her to get a chapbook of her work out into the world. She's taken up the challenge.

I was given a lot of latitude with this. I had an idea of what I wanted this book to be, and she's let me build it with her poems. I knew I wanted the anchor to be her poem 'Spilt', which was in the latest issue of JAAM (26). I love this poem. It does so much. It's so physical, almost uncomfortably so (well, probably it is actually uncomfortable for some). And it's so personal, and yet really universal, like many of my favourite poems are. And it's both domestic and mythic. 'Spilt' has become both the anchor and the jumping-off point for the collection.

To me, the chapbook is tied together by all the different roles we have, especially in our families, such as mother, wife, lover, daughter, sister, and the tensions within and between them. It represents only an aspect of the work Helen is doing, but it's one of the aspects I really enjoy. I'm liking how the poems circle back and around in time, with connections to each other. You'll know what I'm talking about when you read it.

My schedule is to have this all done by the time Helen reads at Stand Up Poetry in Palmerston North - so a couple of months. It's already typeset, and we've both got some ideas for the cover design. It's going to be hand-bound, and may have knitting needles incorporated into some how! I'm going to try to make some demo versions in the next few days, see if what I'm imagining in my head is actually feasible. Such fun!