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

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

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'

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

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)

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

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

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 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'

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)

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

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

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)

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

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

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/