My Iron Spine gets some love, and what I'm doing today

Matchbox Studios, a really lovely art gallery/shop/studio on Cuba Street, has started stocking my Seraph Press books (ie published by me). I also took down some copies of my own books (ie written by me), and they're selling them too. And they've made My Iron Spine their 'zine' of the month! Simon Gennard's review is really lovely, and I'm buzzing that it's getting some nice attention when it's five years old.

What I'm doing today is working on the (hopefully) final revisions of its newest sibling. (I'll tell you more about that exciting news soon.)

I've taken the day off work to have a poetry day; so I've been moving some poems around the manuscript and reworking a couple of more troublesome ones that I know (and my readers have pointed out) aren't quite there yet, but which I still want in the book and so have to lift them. This one, 'Revolutions', has been in many forms over the years since I first wrote it. You can read it in an earlier form here: http://snorkel.org.au/015/rickerby.html.

But I've been turning it over, and around, in my mind, and this is what I've come up with. I'm much happier with it now. I hope you think it's better too:
(If you listen closely, you'll hear hammering and so forth, which comes from the builders working away downstairs, who also inspired a poem I wrote earlier this morning.)

And now back to the poetry!

Tuesday Poem: 'Deep water talk' by Kiri Piahana-Wong

Deep water talk

In honour of Hone Tuwhare

& no-one knows
if your eyes are
blurred red from
the wind, too
much sun, or the
tears streaking your
face that could be
tears or just lines of
dried salt, who
can tell

& you never can tell
if you are seasick,
drunk, or just
hungover—the
symptoms are the
same


& sea and sky merge
until the horizon is
nothing but an
endless blue line in
every direction, so that
you are sailing, not on
the sea, as you thought,
but in a perfectly blue,
circular bowl, never
leaving the centre

& you wonder who
is moving, you or
the clouds racing
by the mast-head

& you wonder if
those dark shapes
in the water are
sharks, shadows, or
nothing but old fears
chasing along behind
you

& the great mass of
land recedes, you
forget you were
a land-dweller,
feeling the pull
of ancient genes,
—in every tide, your
blood sings against
the moon

& food never tasted
so good, or water
so sweet—you've
never conserved water
by drinking wine
before—and rum;
and coke; and rum
and coke; and can
after can of cold
beer

& your sleep is
accompanied, not
by the road of traffic
on the highway,
but by the creaks
and twangs of your
ship as she pitches
and moans through
the dark ocean,
all alone

& you wonder—
where did that bird,
the great gull perching
on the bowspit,
come from?


Kiri Piahana-Wong is a New Zealander of Māori (Ngāti Ranginui), Chinese and Pākehā (English) ancestry. She has degrees in law and English literature from the University of Auckland, and has had a varied working life, including roles as a legal editor, sailing instructor, freelance writer, event manager and publisher. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems (Godwit), Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (AUP), Trout, and Ora Nui. She is also a performance poet, poetry slam champion, and a former MC at Poetry Live, New Zealand's longest-running live poetry venue. Kiri lives at Laingholm on Auckland's west coast.

This poem is the first poem in Night Swimming, the debut collection by Kiri Piahana-Wong. It's the perfect poem to begin the collection, a good, strong poem, heavy with silence and the weight of the Pacific Ocean. I think my favourite bit of the poem is: 'you are sailing, not on / the sea, as you thought, / but in a perfectly blue, / circular bowl'. Gorgeous!

Water runs through the poems of this book in many forms - rain, tears, swimming pools, ice, rivers, clouds, fog, but especially the sea. The poems themselves have a lot of variety though, in tone and in subject matter. The gravity poems like 'Deep water talk' are balanced with more conversational, busier poems. Other favourites in this collection are 'On Commerce St' both 1 and 2, which chronicle life in an inner-city apartment, and 'Continental drift'.

Night Swimming was published by Anahera Press, a small press which focuses on poetry by Māori and Pasifika writers, which Kiri founded in 2011. If you want to buy Night Swimming, you can buy it from the Anahera Press website, from a variety a bookshops including the Women's Bookshop, or by rocking up to your local favourite bookshop and ordering it, as I did.

For more poems, check out the Tuesday Poem blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/.

Tuesday poem: 'Swimming lessons with Virginia Woolf '

Swimming lessons with Virginia Woolf

Virginia and I
float downstream
Our overcoats billow
surround us
I worry my feet
will get caught
in the Medusa weeds
that wait in the shadows

‘We all have boulders in our pockets’
she says
‘Most we place there
ourselves, some we are given
Medea gifts, poison’

I watch the banks
as we pass
I roll onto my back
she laughs at my Ophelia
Now my hair is wet
‘Look,’ she says
and there are golden fish
swimming beneath us

Virginia with her friend Lytton Strachey

I've been away for the weekend. It was wonderful. Mere hours after leaving behind ordinary life and all those little obligations, I was scribbling away in my notebook. I felt like my writing brain had switched on. (I've been pretty busy lately, doing stuff like this: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/1/post/2013/07/the-rope-walk-has-set-sail.html).

As well as writing (and sometimes inspiring the writing) I was also finishing off a gigantic biography of Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee, which I had been reading for months. It's a fabulous biography, but it was helpful to have read a shorter and more strictly chronological biography just before. Because Lee's biography, rather than being strictly chronological, is arranged thematically. I feel that method of arrangement would likely have had Woolf's approval, being an experimental sort of writer, with an interest in pushing boundaries.

Part of the problem of reading the end of the biography more quickly, over a leisurely weekend, is that it had the effect of speeding up the later part of her life, which was a bit startling. And I felt like the book ended abruptly, with her death. While in does seem kind of sensible for a biography to end with the subject's death, I had felt certain hers would be different. She has not only lived on through her work, but actually grown in literary stature. I was expecting a detailed look at how Leonard Woolf (her husband) dealt with her literary legacy, how scholars, critics and of course readers have changed in their responses to her work. How she has influenced others who have come after. There was a bit of that, but in a rush. Perhaps I've just read too many biographies of Katherine Mansfield, where people are always arguing about that sort of thing - about whether her widower (John Middleton Murry) exploited her memory and her work. But I was surprised that there doesn't seem to have been any (that I've read at least) criticism of Leonard Woolf for publishing so much of her work posthumously, when she explicitly said on the back of the note she'd left for Leonard to find after she'd drowned herself in the River Ous, 'Will you destroy my papers'.

But I digress, as I often do. Reading about her, and about her death, sent me back to this poem. This is the final, finished version (which was published in My Iron Spine), but I wrote an earlier version, which I read again a wee while ago. It was much darker. Much more depressing. But it wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't right for Virginia (as I most impolitely think of her). Because although she had difficult times in her life, including at the end, when – in the middle of the Second World War, when she and her friends justifiably believed invasion might be imminent, and they were on the 'Black List' – she was so scared that she was going mad again that death seemed the better option. But most of her life wasn't like that. Most of her life she was ALIVE, and witty and busy and bitchy and a good friend and a challenger of the status quo and many many other things. So I didn't want my poem about her to be all doom and gloom. I wanted life and colour and hope, along with the rocks in our pockets.

Anyway, that's enough from me. If you head on over to the Tuesday Poem hub blog, you'll find lots more poems: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/.

You're invited

(I know that's too small to read, due to the silly design of my blog. Sorry. The details are here: http://www.facebook.com/events/202894136531214/)

Tuesday Poem: '1989' by Maria McMillan

1989

I became vegetarian
and the freezing works

closed down. My father
lost his job and sat all day

in each seat of the house
and stared at me. I never

knew where I would find him.
I liked him then, doleful

and angry, stuff opening
and closing in front of him

like the mouth
of some dumb fish.

Later there were fights.
Later he started smiling.

He chose the right-
hand side of the sofa.

His breath smelt different.
The city puckered

around the place
the works had been,

like skin around the
place it’s been punctured.

Heidi and me’d meet there
walk around the white

building, counting
the broken windows,

talk of man’s awesome cruelty –
how they’d stun the cows

before they killed them
to hide the fear

and keep the meat
soft and sweet.


So, what I've been doing lately is working on the book this poem is from, The Rope Walk, the next book I'm publishing as Seraph Press. This is Maria's first collection, but she's been writing for quite some time, which is apparent in the skill she brings to the poems in the book. The book is made up of 24 poems that tell the story, or bits of stories, of several generations of a family, from a rope maker in Scotland to an aerialist in New Zealand in the 1990s.


In a blog post Maria talks about some of what inspired her to write this poems (over almost a decade):

I became fascinated with the idea of waves of people from Scotland and England, leaving their countries, their parents, their siblings, the graves of their ancestors and coming somewhere new. And then sometimes awful ship journeys where babies died, and adults too. And then arriving somewhere so utterly different. There must have been so much grief with that. And then I started thinking about how every generation seems to go through some major losses, men being lost in wars, the soul destroying recession of the 1980s, the suicides, the bitter thread through all those years of violence against women. I think grief often isn't dealt with well, and what does that mean, and how does that get passed on down the generations. All that feeds into the book, You might not realise it reading the poems, some of which I hasten to add, are more joyful than sad, but all that stuff is going on there in the background. 

This poem, '1989', comes later in the chronology (though is towards the beginning of the book). It's one of my favourites, probably because it deals with my own era, and is the very year I date my own end of the golden weather (ie my childhood) from, because that was the year a lot of things (friendships, friends) began to fall apart. It has the lovely idealism, cynicism and understanding, but also a limited understanding, of youth. 'Man's awesome cruelty' (what a lovely phrase!) doesn't just extend to animals, of course, it extends to other people too.

One thing I just noticed especially now - as I had to add line breaks back in because stupid blogger took them all out - is how satisfying the line breaks are. There's some lovely subtle enjambment going on: never/knew, doleful/and angry. And also line breaks that serve to emphasise the final word of the line, rather than have us gliding on over. The final rhyming couplet is a oddly jaunty and creepy end.

As well as having gorgeous poems, the book is also going to have a gorgeous cover:

It's been letterpress printed by Joe Buchanan, Maria's partner, and yes, that is a die cut (ie hole) in the centre, through which we can see a linocut of a sailing ship, also done by the very talented Joe.

We're launching it on Saturday 13th July, at 3 pm, at the Aro Community Centre, Aro Street. Hope you can come along. Here's the Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/202894136531214/.

And now, if you're in search of other poems, head on over to the hub blog, where you'll find a poem about Palmerston North by Jennifer Compton, and links to other new Tuesday Poems:  http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/.

So, I seem to have published a bestselling book...

It's been a pretty cool week. After the book launches of the week before, we went away last weekend, and spent the weekend reading, writing, rebalancing, wandering around, watching DVDs and spending as much time as possible sitting in front of the open fire.

And then this week, on Thursday, I found out the The Baker's Thumbprint (the book I've just published) was number 7 on the NZ fiction bestseller list! Look here if you need proof (I certainly did!): http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/1/post/2013/05/the-bakers-thumbprint-debuts-at-no7-on-nz-fiction-bestseller-list.html.

I'm really blown away and excited. And kind of shocked. I know it's due to having the books turn up at bookshops the same week we had two launches (one in Auckland and one in Wellington), and it's also the first time I've sold all the launch books through bookshops, rather than directly, but it's also due to Paula Green, who has a very strong personal following. But I think it also is signalling that Seraph Press is getting to a new level of respect, which makes me very happy.

I doubt that the book will keep up quite that high level of sales, but Paula is going to be interviewed on Arts on Sunday on the radio tomorrow (http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/1/post/2013/05/paula-green-on-arts-on-sunday.html), so hopefully that will spark more interest.

And now I need to get the next book (The Rope Walk, by Maria McMillan) finished!

Tuesday Poem: 'The Nail' by Therese Lloyd

The Nail

Where I am—generic architecture
like a barn or a bach but
neither of those things
Feral fennel clots the air with ammonia
and the usual marks are everywhere—
burnt stumps and discarded branches
their currency clattering at the night-window

I've made a list of things I will steal:
a Crown Lynn cup and saucer
an ashtray printed with Foxton: the Foxy Town
and a remote control like the one I lost—
but I won't, I will leave this place
cleaner than when I arrived

If I could get things right on a small scale
if I could lay the right things
at the feet of the wooden women
who circle the ladder to heaven
Or reign Foveaux's rusty breath
to skirt these hingeless doors
But my vision is split like a horse's
and my pockets hurt from the fists
I've shoved in them

Round back the muttonbirders are dumping the buckets
of bodies in the kitchen sink
the ovens and deep fryers gearing up a notch
We prepare ourselves by mumbling a song
taught to us this morning
half naïve native, half colonial hucksters
sung to a Beatles tune
Standing on the grass, I let a nail
pushed from rusted metal
pierce the sole of my shoe

Therese Lloyd

This poem comes from Therese Lloyd's poetry collection Other Animals, which was published earlier this year, and which I've recently finished reading.There's a fresh voice in the poems. I particularly wanted to share this poem because there are several bits in it that when I read them I had that twinge you sometimes have when you kinda wish you'd written them.

In case you're nosey to know, they are: 'I've made a list of the things I will steal:/A Crown Lynn cup and saucer/an ashtray printed with Foxton: the Foxy Town'; 'if I could lay the right things/at the feet of the wooden women/who circle the ladder to heaven' and 'my pockets hurt from the fists/I've shoved in them'.

The last of these matches nicely with the the last few lines - the actor and the acted upon are switched - the narrator 'lets' the nail pierce her shoe (and, perhaps, more gruesomely her foot); the pockets are sore, not the fists.

I'm not quite sure what's going on in this poem, but clues suggest a stay on Stewart Island/Rakiura, or possibly one of the Tītī (muttonbird) Islands. It's certainly during muttonbird season. Where ever it is, it seems like the end of the earth.

As well as Other Animals, Therese has also had a very limited edition collection of her work, Many Things Happened, published by Pania Press. She spent a year attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop after being awarded the Schaeffer scholarship, and now is back living in Paekakariki.

And there are more Tuesday Poems, for your reading pleasure, over at the hub: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/.

Tuesday Poem: 'Thursday' by Paula Green

Thursday
(for Jenny Bornholdt)

If you look beneath the floorboards
of this poem you might find
endless days of rain and wind
on the Waitākere Ranges.

Between the walls you might see
a garden that needs spring plants.

You might stumble upon
the story of a mathematician
who knits patches for a quilt because she
can never recall what she saw
the month before

or the story of a philosopher
who walks in circles
to seek the meaning of life
or lost things or why the heart
and not the lungs
registers the pulse of love.

My house waits
with its creaking walls
and everything
is the same and then
different.

The wind crackles.
The bouillabaisse needs stirring.
Perhaps it needs more salt.


Paula Green

I can't believe it's launch week already. On Saturday we've got the Auckland launch of The Baker's Thumbprint, and then next week it's the Wellington launch.

'Thursday' is the first poem in the book, and as soon as I read this in the manuscript I was pretty sure this was a book I wanted to publish. It's just gorgeous. My favourite lines are 'why the heart / and not the lungs /
registers the pulse of love', but there are so many more to love. It's a quiet, contemplative beginning to playful and frequently energetic book, but it has several of the themes that continue through the whole - secrets waiting to be discovered, philosophy, place, home and lunch - there's always lots of good food in a Paula Green book!

As ever, more Tuesday Poems await over at the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/.

Launching The Baker's Thumbprint, Auckland and Wellington

If I haven't invited you already, then consider yourself invited!

We're launching Paula Green's new collection The Baker's Thumbprint (which I am/Seraph Press is publishing) in both Auckland and Wellington on the 18th and 21st of May. Come along to one or other, or both! The launch invitations are below, and the Facebook events are here for Auckland: http://www.facebook.com/events/468081233260334/ or here for Wellington: http://www.facebook.com/events/163956803780493/.

Tuesday Poem: 'Immigrant' by Fleur Adcock

In the above clip Fleur Adcock introduces and reads her poem 'Immigrant'. She's back in New Zealand for a visit from the UK, to launch her latest book, Glass Wings. I went to see her in conversation with Harry Ricketts last night, and I was fortunate enough to have afternoon tea with her on Friday. We very much claim her as a New Zealand poet - I certainly do, I see her as a foremother of us New Zealand woman poets - and yet she hasn't spent much of her life here in New Zealand. This poem is about a time when she was shedding her (unwanted) New Zealandness, when she'd escaped back to the UK, but New Zealand still had its claws on her.

More Tuesday Poems over on the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/.

Tuesday Poem: 'Sylvia and Ted'

This feels like cheating, as it's one I prepared earlier, but here's me reading my poem 'Sylvia and Ted':


More Tuesday poems on the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

Tuesday Poem: 'Sigourney Weaver and the Dream Father' by Emma Barnes

A few weeks ago was The Difficult Second Twitter Poetry Night NZ on Twitter. If you missed it, or want to relive it, you can find it 'Storified' here: http://storify.com/ashleigh_young/the-difficult-second-twitter-poetry-night. There were lots of wonderful poems in wonderful voices - the voices sound so warm. I shared 'Emily Dickinson at home'.

But the poem I wanted to share as my Tuesday poem is Emma Barnes's 'Sigourney Weaver and the Dream Father'. I also heard Emma read it recently at Valhalla (in Raumati, rather than the mythical place), and I like it very much. My fav bit is I think the bit where Sigourney Weaver turns the tap on the phone. You'll have to listen to it:

Also, it's the Tuesday Poem blog's third birthday (my god!) and so we're writing an accumulating communal poem. I've just left my bit: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/2013/04/3rd-birthday-communal-jazz-poem.html. More Tuesday poems in the sidebar, including my poem 'Curtains', which Mary McCallum is sharing on her blog this week: http://mary-mccallum.blogspot.co.nz/2013/04/tuesday-poem-curtains-by-helen-rickerby.html

Tuesday Poem: When X Doesn't Mark the Spot

When X Doesn't Mark the Spot 

There are images we can use
to explain how you are
feeling

We can say that
you have run out of masks
I ask you who you are
and you can only say
who you once have been

You are an actor
on stage
without a script
without a costume
the spotlight shines brightly
as you stand
alone and naked
on an empty stage

Another metaphor
is that you are a painting
all the colours have been removed
even the under drawing
the lines to guide the brush
have gone
all that is left is the primer
all that you have left is
a bare white canvas
and the knowledge that somewhere
underneath
there is a painting
waiting to be
discovered.


This was the first poem of mine to ever get published (well, anywhere other than the school magazine), back in, um 1995 maybe? It was in Poetry NZ, and I was very proud. I'm posting this in honour of the subject, who has had to put up with being in quite a few of my poems over the years. She's just had a special birthday and is coming to stay, briefly, for she is a woman of itchy feet.

More Tuesday Poems over here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/

Helens read poetry on the coast this week

Helen H and Helen L and some other cool folks, and I've written about it over on the Seraph Press site and find I'm to lazy to write about it here: http://www.seraphpress.co.nz/1/post/2013/03/helens-on-the-coast-this-weekend.html.

Second occasional Twitter Poetry Night NZ on Sunday

The first one was a great success (I blogged about it here: http://wingedink.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/twitter-poetry-night-nz-last-night.html), so I'm looking forward to the Second Twitter Poetry Night NZ on Sunday. Here's everything you need to know, probably: http://twitterpoetrynightnz.tumblr.com/.

Tuesday Poem: '4 March'

4 March

A man pulls bread out of his trouser pocket with a shaking hand
and throws it towards the pigeons

Sometimes I catch a glimpse
of all the sadness in the world



It's most unlike me to share just-written work, but sometimes I like to be unpredictable, even to myself. So, this is a poem I wrote earlier this evening.

More Tuesday Poems here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/

Tuesday Poem: 'Incident' by Fleur Adcock

Incident

When you were lying on the white sand,

A rock under your head, and smiling,

(Circled by dead shells), I came to you

And you said, reaching to take my hand,

‘Lie down.’ So for a time we lay

Warm on the sand, talking and smoking,

Easy; while the grovelling sea behind

Sucked at the rocks and measured the day.

Lightly I fell asleep then, and fell

Into a cavernous dream of falling.

It was all the cave-myths, it was all

The myths of tunnel or tower or well—

Alice’s rabbit-hole into the ground,

Or the path of Orpheus: a spiral suitcase 

To hell, furnished with danger and doubt.

Stumbling, I suddenly woke; and found

Water about me. My hair was wet,

And you were sitting on the grey sand,

Waiting for the lapping tide to take me:

Watching, and lighting a cigarette.

Fleur Adcock

I’m the editor of the Tuesday Poem blog this week, and I’m excited to have been able to share ‘Crayfish’, a new poem by Fleur Adcock – one of my poetic heroes. As I say over there, I was lucky enough to have read with her and Anna Jackson in London last year. Hearing her new poems sent me back to her old poems, and I recently re-read Tigers (Oxford University Press, 1967), which was Fleur’s second poetry collection.

I first discovered Fleur’s poetry in the later years of high school, and this was one of the collections I read and reread. Reading it again now, I can very much see why it appealed to me. I was a somewhat melancholy and romantic child, and I adored myth and surrealism (still do, though I’ve ditched most of the romanticism and quite a lot of the melancholy) and this book has those in spades, as does ‘Incident’, which is probably my favourite poem in this collection. In this, and in many of the other poems, there’s an underlying darkness. Other people aren’t to be trusted. Don’t close your eyes, or there’ll be nightmares, and when you wake someone might be watching you with mild interest, waiting for you to drown.

Do go check out the brand new poem by Fleur at the hub blog: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/, and there you’ll also find lots more Tuesday Poems in the sidebar.

Wednesday Poem: 'The Summer Day' by Mary Oliver

I'm a bit late for the Tuesday poem, but never mind. And I'm not going to post the poem here (not having permission and all), but I am going to link to it: http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html. I recommend you go read it now, before popping back to read this.

I'm not really familiar with Mary Oliver's poetry, though her name keeps coming up. I discovered this poem yesterday via a post by Helen Lehndorf. Helen had 'written' words from the last line on an apple pie (it's really worth a look), and linked to the poem. It's quite short, so I thought I'd read it.

For me, it didn't start out all that promising. It reminds me at first of a children's prayer or something, and nature poetry - oh nature poetry, I must confess you almost always bore me. But I kept going - it's just a short poem - and then it started picking up for me here:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields

And then it quietly and simply, with this kicker ending, becomes one of my favourite poems ever:

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

It's an end that could have very easily been a bit twee, and probably would be if it wasn't for that pairing of words from the top of the pie: 'wild and precious', which together in that context are a bit of a surprise, and delightful. They make me feel I could live wildly and preciously, just as she says (and I hope I do). I guess perhaps I should check out more of Mary Oliver's poetry then...

Head on over to the Tuesday Poem blog, where this week's editor Catherine Fitchett shares 'Fault' a poem by Christchurch poet Joanna Preston. It's a really restrained, powerful and very very good poem about the Canterbury Earthquakes: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/2013/02/fault-by-joanna-preston.html.

Tuesday Poem: 'Partying with Katherine Mansfield'

You can listen to me read it by clicking the play button above, and you can follow along with the text below...

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’


I've shared this poem by me previously (though quite a while ago), but it seemed appropriate to share it again as this weekend there was a big Katherine Mansfield conference in Wellington. I didn't go along, but several of my friends did and it gave me a good opportunity to meet another of our Tuesday Poets Kathleen Jones and her husband. Kathleen is the author of the the most recent (and, in my opinion) best biography of KM.

I recorded the poem in the very high-tech studio of my bedroom with my phone. If you listen hard around the 40-second mark and a couple of times after, you'll hear a screeching which was one of the neighbour kaka screaming around nearby. It was a bit of an experiment, but I'd first done this fairly successfully when we had Twitter Poetry Night a few months ago.

There are lots more Tuesday Poems, which you can reach from the hub blog, and at the hub blog you'll find a poem by C. K. Stead from his new book, with an introduction (or postroduction?) from by Mary McCallum: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz.

Ballroom Poetry becomes Meow Poetry

And Helen Heath and Lynn Davidson are the first guest readers. There's a Facebook event for it here, if you like that sort of thing: http://www.facebook.com/events/208400982636949/

Here's what they say: 

Poetry at Meow Cafe
 

Yes, we're back - Poetry at The Ballroom Cafe has found a new home at Meow
Cafe. New surroundings, but same wonderful mix of poetry and music, open
mic and guest performances.

Our first programme at Meow Cafe will include a special tribute to Kathy
and The Ballroom Cafe, so I hope you can join us.

Guest Poets: Helen Heath & Lynn Davidson
Guest Musicians: Ramon Oza & Susie Colien-Reid of Black Eyed Susie
Plus open mic, starting at 4pm
Time: Sunday 17 February, 4 - 6pm
Place: Meow Café, 9 Edward Street, Wellington City