Thank you for 2009

 
   
“On those evenings when I need to fall in love with my life again, I step out the door, down the front steps, and past the iron gate that surrounds our town house. For emphasis, I slam the gate and listen for the clang that reverberates, travelling down each iron post.
   
I’m outside my life now, a visitor at the gate.”
   
- Rebecca McClanahan, Word Painting
(Writers Digest Books, 2000)
   
   
May 2010 bring you everything you need and may you look at life with new eyes.

Cocktail hour with Liz Gallagher

Liz Gallagher by Vladi Valido

     
Liz Gallagher was born and brought up in Donegal, Ireland. She has been living in Gran Canary Island for the past 14 years. She has an Education degree and a Computer Science degree. She is at present doing research for her doctoral studies. She began writing about five years ago and has won a variety of awards in both Ireland and the US: Inclusion in the Best New Poets 2007 Anthology (Meridian Press, Virginia University), First Prize in The Listowel Writers’ Single Poem Competition 2009 and she was selected by Poetry Ireland for their 2009 Introductions Series in recognition of her status as an emerging poet.
     

The Wrong Miracle (Salt Modern Poets, 2009)

       
Liz, welcome to Johannesburg and cocktail hour at peony moon.  It’s been a heady experience following The Maximus Miracle Tour.
         
I hope something on the menu tickles your taste buds.  We have Absinthe, Acapulco Sunrises, Alabama Slammers, Alchemist’s Punch, Banshees, Barry Whites, Bitches Brew, Fuzzy Navels, Beijing Mules, Blueberry Martinis, Screwdrivers, Sex on the Beach, Singapore Slings and, of course, Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters.
         
Hi Michelle, it is wonderful to be here in South Africa.  It’s my first time and I know it will be an experience to remember.  Thanks so much for having me and for preparing such an interesting cocktail menu.  Some of these drinks are just too irresistible, so I shan’t even try.  Thanks, Michelle, all of my cocktails I love shaken but not stirred.
       
     

A favourite 'living on the edge' house along Las Palmas promenade

    
I see you have your photo album tucked under your arm.  Tell me something about your life in the Canary Islands.
        
Well, we live in the country in a protected valley.  We have a little tumbledown farm that we are looking after and renovating very slowly!  We both work as English Teachers in the Aula de Idiomas in Las Palmas University in the afternoons which is nice as we avoid all rush hour traffic to the city.  The light and spring-like weather practically all the time make it a very pleasant place to live.  The Canarian people are very sociable and outgoing and thus there are always things happening on the island from WOMAD  to the Las Palmas International Film Festival and of course there are always local festivals of song and dance to celebrate grape picking, olive picking, almond picking, water festivals, mud festivals … literally you name it, and they have a festival for it.
       
It is nice having the mornings free as I either write or study for an hour or two and then go to the farm with our dogs.  The quietness and sense of calm in the country contrasts with the very energetic busy atmosphere of the villages and cities.  All in all, it is a nice place to live in and it lends itself very well to hibernating and escaping the world which suits me fine, at times. I feel very lucky to be here and remind myself not to take it for granted.
      
      

Man Imitating Nature

     
Would you describe your writing process, Liz.
    
I usually write early in the morning and quite often take part in daily writing challenges with fellow poets to help get motivated.  I normally get inspired by a line or phrase and go where that takes me.  I sometimes write in white text into the screen for a timed period of maybe anything from ten minutes to 30 minutes.  This usually takes the form of what I like to call ‘mental-rioting’ as explained in TFE’s interview:
     
“The idea of writing in white font is to temporarily avoid Ms. Inner Critic who is usually on 24/7 duty casting an eye on what has been written, she will have her time to do that in the next re-drafting stage but for the tentative beginnings of a poem, I like to give free reign to whatever is in my head.  The first draft usually contains the absolute bones of where the poem is going and where it has landed.  I usually leave the first draft aside for a few weeks and then return to it to view it anew.  My revision usually deals with cutting excess and such like and tweaking here and there by substituting words and phrases but the basic thought and sentiment of the poem remain the same.”
     
     

The Three Wise Men on Canteras Beach, Las Palmas

      
The royalties from The Wrong Miracle sales are going to Sands (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Charity).  Tell me about the support services Sands offers to those affected by the death of a baby.  How can people get involved?
     
Sands have a website here.  There are so many different ways to support Sands.  On their website, they outline some very practical ways, and they say the following:
     
“The death of a baby is a devastating experience.  The effects of grief can be overwhelming, and in the early hours and days parents can be left feeling dazed, disorientated, isolated and exhausted.  It can be hard to take in information, to make decisions or to imagine how you are going to cope.  At Sands there are people who understand what it’s like because many of us have been through this experience ourselves, and we are here to offer support and information when you need it.
     
Early moments of loss  There are choices you can make about what happens to your baby and to you in the early hours and days of their death.  These decisions, whether they involve keeping momentos of your baby or decisions about naming your baby, can have an impact on how you will feel about this time in years to come.  You may want to talk to someone or read about the feelings of other parents who have been through the same experience.
     
Important practical information   There are some things that you may have to do after your baby dies including registering your baby’s death and deciding about a post mortem and funeral. In this section we also include information about your post-natal check as well as any benefits you may be eligible for.
     
A bereavement journey  We understand that the death of a baby is not a one-off event but an emotional journey, that affects every aspect of your life. In this section we look at issues such as going home and back to work, thinking about a new baby, and remembering your baby in the years to come.
     
Family and friends  As well as supporting mothers and fathers, we are also here to help other members of your family, especially other children you may have and grandparents. Many people may be touched by your baby’s death, whether they be close friends or relations, and all are welcome to contact us for support and information.
     
Second trimester loss  Your baby may have died during its 2nd trimester. The death of a baby can happen to any one of us at any stage and Sands aims to provide support no matter what your situation.
    
Talk to someone  You may want to talk to someone who can listen to how you feel or can help you think through what you want to do.  You can do this by calling our national helpline or by exchanging experiences via our forum.  It may help to hear the stories of other bereaved parents in our personal experiences section, from our list of publications, or indeed from the various articles and media which have covered the issue of baby loss. We have a network of over 90 local groups around the UK and you may want to find out whether there is one close to you, or indeed you may prefer to find other support links – listed here in alphabetical order.”
      
Michelle, you asked how people can become involved. Here are a few of the ways:
    
Becoming a member
Donating
Getting involved with fundraising
Raising awareness
    
Thanks very much for asking about Sands, Michelle.  It’s great to have an opportunity to highlight what they do. 
   
Thanks also for being a great hostess and having me on your blog.  The cocktails added to the festive spirit.  I’ll be taking note of a few of the recipes to host a similar occasion when I get back to the Canaries.  I have enjoyed the experience.  Happy Festive Season to you and yours, Michelle, and lots of best wishes for the New Year.
      
Thank you for your whirlwind visit, Liz.  All the best for the rest of The Maximus Miracle Tour and I look forward to keeping in touch next year.
    
   

Cacti burst

Caligula on Ice and Other Poems

Tim Turnbull

       
Tim Turnbull grew up in North Yorkshire, lived in London in his thirties and now resides in Perthshire. His latest collection Caligula on Ice and Other Poems is available from Donut Press.
       
       
Troll
Tim Turnbull
    
After that nasty goat business
he screwed his profile down,
plucked all his warts, sold off the bridge
and moved into a flat in town,
  
found himself a decent tailor,
an innovative cutter
who could disguise his lumps and humps,
then to stop the snarls and splutters
  
took some elocution lessons;
saw to his deportment;
found the private members’ clubs
where a better social sort went,
  
learnt the art of modish small talk,
how to flatter or to charm
with just a smidge of erudition
or great big bucket-loads of smarm;
  
who to ignore, who to trample,
when be early, when be late,
when reveal his brutish nature
in order to intimidate
  
and armed with these new social skills
he launched into the world
to make himself a better gnome
by getting status, cash and girls.
  
He took a job in publishing,
PR or some such-like
and shimmied up the slimy pole,
scaled to mildly giddying heights,
  
till with his air of seriousness
and his grave demeanour,
he won the reverence from his peers
you might give to a hyena.
  
But look into his gimlet eyes,
they’re wells of boiling rage.
He hardly can contain himself
inside that well groomed, urbane cage.
  
Which begs the question, doesn’t it,
how such a frightful beast
could make its way so smoothly
in the business world when it’s unleashed?
  
The answer’s pretty obvious,
and not a little grim –
the whole of London is awash
with semi-housetrained trolls like him.
   
  
Published in the StAnza anthology,
Skein of Geese (The Shed Press, 2008),
edited by Eleanor Livingstone.
  
Buy Caligula on Ice and Other Poems (Donut Press, 2009).
  
Visit Tim’s website.
 

Caligula on Ice and Other Poems

Cover design by Liam Relph, based on the artwork Repository (2009) by W. Hunt.
 

'The Raffish Look'

Cocktails and Miracles

   
   
Make a date to join the charming Liz Gallagher, author of The Wrong Miracle (Salt Modern Poets, 2009), for cocktail hour (or the whole day) on 17 December 2009.
 
The Maximus Miracle Tour is now well under way. If you need to catch up with what’s been happening, here are Liz’s tour dates and hosts:
   
28 October 2009 – Event Museum, Arlene Ang
5 November 2009 – The Art of Breathing, Brenda Nixon
12 November 2009 – Women Rule Writer, Nuala Ní Chonchúir
19 November 2009 – The People’s Lost Republic of EEjit
3 December 2009 – More about the Song, Rambling with Rachel Fox
10 December 2009 – Savvy Verse & Wit, Serena M. Agusto-Cox
14 December 2009 – Savvy Verse & Wit, Serene M. Agusto-Cox II
17 December 2009 - Cocktails at peony moon
2 January 2010 – Theory of Iconic Realism, Jeanne Iris Lakatos
11 January 2010 – The Truth about Lies, Jim Murdoch
     
Liz will be chatting about her life in the Canary Islands and her writing process. She’ll also tell us a little more about Sands: Stillbirth & neonatal death charity, the organisation which is receiving the royalties from sales of The Wrong Miracle.
  
In the meantime, here’s what people having been saying about
The Wrong Miracle:
    
“Liz Gallagher’s poems seize us from the first line and tug us along, startled and exhilarated by the tumbling originality of her words.”
- Laurie Smith, Magma
    
“Whether about an untranslated paragraph on shooting ducks or breakfast cereals, Picasso and a sexual snap, Liz Gallagher’s poems are proof that everyday movements generate power and magic. The Wrong Miracle is the work of a master illusionist – a fusion of the surreal and the domestic, the strategic and the spontaneous – where perception is challenged and subtly reinvented.”
- Arlene Ang, The Pedestal Magazine
   
“These are poems that may surprise: sprinkled with humour and vivid word pictures. The verbal twists take you by a friendly matter-of-fact hand to show you other truths. Liz Gallagher owns a true poet’s eye for detail paired with a flair for oddly compelling juxtaposition. Her poetry wants to show you this other thing it has found, like a cat displaying its catch. (as in her poem) ‘Just look what the cat dragged in’.”
- Barry Harris, Tipton Poetry Journal
   
“Long lines with suprising phrases and rushing, tumbling images mark the narrative trend of Liz Gallagher’s poetry. The poems lean into the strength of these narratives, rely upon the poet’s willing experimentation with varietal voice, and in so doing, create a distinctive diction – one with instrospective vision that bubbles out of earthy perception, like a choice mineral spring.”
- Eve Anthony Hanninen, poet, writer, artist & editor
of The Centrifugal Eye
   
*
   
Liz blogs at Musings.
  
Order your copy of The Wrong Miracle here.

Tea and Imagination

Tea and peach blossoms

     
“Each cup of tea represents an imaginary voyage.”
 
– Catherine Douzel

I Would Like to Describe

'Coiled Creature of the Night' (from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope)

      
“we fall asleep
with one hand under our head
and with the other in a mound of planets”
   
- Zbigniew Herbert
   
from ‘I Would Like to Describe’ by Zbigniew Herbert,
The Collected Poems 1956 – 1998 (Ecco, 2007)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Eight

    
    
Leanne O’Sullivan
     
Train to Gorey by Liz O’Donoghue (Arlen House)
The Last Geraldine Officer by Thomas McCarthy (Anvil Press)
The Sun-fish by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Gallery Press)
    
    
Janet Sutherland
   
Conversation with Murasaki by Tom Lowenstein (Shearsman Books)
The son by Carrie Etter (Oystercatcher Press)
A Sleepwalk on the Severn by Alice Oswald (Faber & Faber)
  
  
Jo Hemmant
  
Beneath the Rime by Siriol Troup (Shearsman Books)
Furniture by Lorraine Mariner (Picador)
Facing the Public by Martina Evans (Anvil Press)
The Handless Maiden by Vicki Feaver (Jonathan Cape, reissue)
  
  
Christine Swint
  
Slamming Open the Door by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
(Alice James Books)
The Bible of Lost Pets by Jamey Dunham (Salt Modern Poets)
Sassing by Karen Head (WordTech Communications)
  
  
Carolee Sherwood
  
Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler (Penguin Books)
Displacement by Leslie Harrison (Mariner Books)
Shelter by Carey Salerno (Alice James Books)
  
  
Julie Buffaloe-Yoder
  
Some Misplaced Joan of Arc by Leah Angstman
(Alternating Current Press)
light dark light by Tom Kryss (iniquity press/vendetta books)
Shadow Box by Fred Chappell (LSU Press)
  
  
Sally Evans
  
Chasing the Ivy by Maureen Almond (Biscuit Publishing)
Adrian: Scotland Celebrates Adrian Mitchell,
edited by Chrys Salt & John Hudson (Markings)
Bho Leabhar-Latha Maria Malibran /
From the Diary of Maria Malibran by Christopher Whyte (Acair)
   
   
Helen Moffett
   
Hypen by Tania van Schalkwyk (The UCT Writers Series /
Electric Book Works)
Oleander by Fiona Zerbst (Modjaji Books)
Please, Take Photographs by Sindiwe Magona (Modjaji Books)
   
   
Juliet Cook
   
Moth Moon by Matt Jasper (BlazeVOX Books)
The Ravenous Audience by Kate Durbin (Akashic Books)
shana linda~pretty pretty by Nanette Rayman-Rivera
(Scattered Light Publications)
   
   
Heather Ann Schmidt
   
Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
A Civic Pageant by Frank Montesonti (Black Lawrence Press)
Lovesick by Howie Good (The Poetry Press)
   
   
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
  
[+!] by Kane X. Faucher, Matina Stamatakis, John Moore Williams
(Calliope Nerve Media)
stains: early poems by Lori A. May (Bohemian Street Press)
Bone Dream by Moira MacDougall (Tightrope Books)
  
  
Claire Keyes
  
Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts by Ann Fisher-Wirth
(Wings Press)
  
  
Cheryl & Janet Snell
  
shana linda~pretty pretty by Nanette Rayman-Rivera
(Scattered Light Publications)
Making Good Use of August by Sherry O’Keefe (Finishing Line Press)
Chaperons of a Lost Poet by John Vick (BlazeVOX Books)
  
  
Rachel Dacus
   
In Praise of Falling by Cheryl Dumesnil
(University of Pittsburgh Press)
Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease,
edited by Holly J. Hughes, foreward by Tess Gallagher
(Kent State University Press)
  
   
*
     
Thank you to all the generous writers who’ve participated
and to the bloggers who’ve included links on their blogs.
     
And thank you, readers.

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Seven

 

 
Bill Allegrezza
 
Sonnet 56 by Paul Hoover (Les Figues Press)
Clampdown by Jennifer Moxley (Flood Editions)
The Book of Frank by C A Conrad (Chax Press)
 
 
Ren Powell
 
Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts by Ann Fisher-Wirth
(Wings Press)
Stalin in Aruba by Shelley Puhak (Black Lawrence Press)
Then, Something by Patricia Fargnoli (Tupelo Press)
The Mother/Child Papers by Alicia Suskin Ostriker
(University of Pittsburgh Press, reissue)
 
 
Amy MacLennan
 
Fear of Moving Water by Alex Grant (Wind Publications)
A Brief History of Time by Shaindel Beers (Salt Modern Poets)
In the Voice of a Minor Saint by Sarah J. Sloat (Tilt Press)
  
  
Pam Thompson
  
Unexpected Weather by Abi Curtis (Salt Modern Poets)
The Clockwork Gift by Claire Crowther (Shearsman Books)
Relinquish by Meryl Pugh (Arrowhead Press)
  
  
Claire Askew
  
Nothing Unrequited Here by Heather Bell (Verve Bath Press)
Dances with Vowels: New and Selected Poems
by Kevin Cadwallender (Smokestack Press)
Cover Story by Dave Coates (Forest Publications)
  
  
Geraldine Green
  
Poppin’ Johnny by George Wallace (Three Rooms Press)
The Hunt in the Forest by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
Inside a Turtle Shell by Robert Savino (Allbook Books)
  
  
Roy Woolley
  
Plan B by Paul Muldoon (Gallery Press)
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
Over by Jane Draycott (Carcanet Press)
  
  
Jocelyn Page
  
Endpoint and other poems by John Updike (Knopf)
Furniture by Lorraine Mariner (Picador)
Weeds and Wild Flowers by Alice Oswald (with etchings
by Jessica Greenman) (Faber & Faber)
  
  
Rustum Kozain
  
Oleander by Fiona Zerbst (Modjaji Books)
  
  
Jayne Fenton Keane
 
Best Australian Poems 2009, edited by Robert Adamson
(Black Inc.)
  
  
Amy Key
  
Chronic by D A Powell (Graywolf Press)
Like This by Diana Pooley (Salt Modern Poets)
Poemland by Chelsey Minnis (Wave Books)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Six

 
 
Matt Merritt
 
The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philip (Salt Modern Poets)
Sounds in the Grass by Matt Nunn (Nine Arches Press)
The Clockwork Gift by Claire Crowther (Shearsman Books)
 
 
Aine MacAodha
 
The Watchful Heart – A New Generation of Irish Poets –
Poems and Essays, edited by Joan McBreen (Salmon Poetry)
Listen by Shirley Howard Hall (Victory Graphics & Media)
New Selected Poems 1984 – 2004 by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador)
 
 
Heather Fowler
 
Ka-Ching! by Denise Duhamel (University of Pittsburgh Press)
A Brief History of Time by Shaindel Beers (Salt Modern Poets)
The Dance Most of All by Jack Gilbert (Knopf)
 
 
Graham Mummery
 
The Burning of the Books by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books)
The Embrace: Selected Poems by Valerio Magrelli,
translated by Jamie McKendrick (Faber & Faber)
Reaching Out to the World: New and Selected Prose Poems
by Robert Bly (White Pine Press)
 
 
Sue Guiney
 
Cailleach: The Hag of Beara by Leanne O’Sullivan (Bloodaxe Books)
mainstream love hotel by Todd Swift (tall-lighthouse)
Recital by John Siddique (Salt Modern Poets)
A Lope of Time by Ruth O’Callaghan (Shoestring Press)
 
 
Fiona Robyn
 
Broken Sleep by Sally Read (Bloodaxe Books)
Ohio Violence by Alison Stine (University of North Texas Press)
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe
(W. W. Norton & Co.)
 
 
Naomi Woddis
 
Continental Shelf by Fred D’Aguiar (Carcanet Press)
Suckle by Roger Robinson (Flipped Eye Publishing)
a pint for the ghost by Helen Mort (tall-lighthouse)
 
 
Dzifa Benson
 
Bird Head Son by Anthony Joseph (Salt Modern Poets)
Lara by Bernadine Evaristo (Bloodaxe Books)
  
  
Jeet Thayil
  
Poems: 1959 – 2009 by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  
  
Amy King
  
Stars of the Night Commute by Ana Božičević
(Tarpaulin Sky Press)
   
   
Ben Wilkinson
 
The Tethers by Carrie Etter (Seren Books)
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
  
  
Angela Kirby
  
Nowhere’s Far, New and Selected Poems 1990 – 2008
by Phil Bowen (Salt Modern Poets)
Poppy in a Storm-Struck Field by Lynne Wycherley
(Shoestring Press)
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
   
   
Dara Wier
  
Barn Burned, Then by Michelle Taransky (Omnidawn Publishing)
The Plot Genie by Gillian Conoley (Omnidawn Publishing)
Lost Alphabet by Lisa Olstein (Copper Canyon Press)
Legend of the Recent Past by James Haug
(The National Poetry Review Press)
Pink & Hot Pink Habitat by Natalie Lyalin (Coconut Books)
The Difficult Farm by Heather Christie (Octopus Books)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Five

 
 
Jody Allen Randolph
 
Painting Rain by Paula Meehan (Carcanet Press)
Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande Books)
Apocalyptic Swing by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Persea)
Dismantling the Hills by Michael McGriff
(University of Pittsburgh Press)
 
 
Patrick Chapman
 
mainstream love hotel by Todd Swift (tall-lighthouse)
In Sight of Home by Nessa O’Mahony (Salmon Poetry)
a compact of words by rob mclennan (Salmon Poetry)
 
 
Ivy Alvarez
 
One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds (Jonathan Cape)
Cross-Talk by Siobhán Campbell (Seren Books)
To Be Eaten by Mice by Robyn Mathison (Ginninderra Press)
 
 
Inua Ellams
 
Bird Head Son by Anthony Joseph (Salt Modern Poets)
City State: New London Poetry, edited by Tom Chivers
(Penned in the Margins)
Things to do before you leave Town by Ross Sutherland
(Penned in the Margins)
 
 
Colin Will
 
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
Rays by Richard Price (Carcanet Press)
The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philip (Salt Modern Poets)
 
 
David Floyd
 
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
Charismatic Megafauna by Tamsin Kendrick
(Penned in the Margins)
‘We needed coffee but …’ by Matthew Welton (Carcanet Press)
  
  
Hazel Frankel
 
What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems by Ruth Stone
(Bloodaxe Books)
The Missing by Sián Hughes (Salt Modern Poets)
A Scattering by Christopher Reid (Areté Books)
  
  
James Womack
 
‘We needed coffee but …’ by Matthew Welton (Carcanet Press)
A Scattering by Christopher Reid (Areté Books)
The Song of Lunch by Christopher Reid (CB Editions)
 
 
Barbara Smith
 
The Sun-fish by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (Gallery Press)
Occupation by Angela France (Ragged Raven Press)
The Wrong Miracle by Liz Gallagher (Salt Modern Poets)
The Fire Step by Tom French (Gallery Press)
The Treekeeper’s Tale by Pascale Petit (Seren Books)
The Opposite of Cabbage by Rob A. Mackenzie (Salt Modern Poets)
 
 
Ruth Ellen Kocher
 
Arc & Hue by Tara Betts (Willow Books)
Mixology by Adrian Matejka (Penguin)
 
 
Kelly Cherry
 
Shadow Box by Fred Chappell (LSU Press)
News of the World by Philip Levine (Knopf)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Four

 
 
Angela France
 
The Clockwork Gift by Claire Crowther (Shearsman Books)
Chora by Nigel McLoughlin (Templar Poetry)
Bundle o’Tinder by Rose Kelleher (Waywiser Press)
 
 
Susan Richardson
 
Weeds and Wild Flowers by Alice Oswald (with etchings
by Jessica Greenman) (Faber & Faber)
A Sleepwalk on the Severn by Alice Oswald (Faber & Faber)
I Spy Pinhole Eye, poems by Philip Gross
with photographs by Simon Denison (Cinnamon Press)
 
 
Collin Kelley
 
Carpathia by Cecilia Woloch (BOA Editions)
Sassing by Karen Head (WordTech Communications)
An Urgent Request by Sarah Luczaj (Fortunate Daughter Press)
This Pagan Heaven by Robin Kemp (Pecan Grove Press)

 
Katrina Naomi
 
One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds (Jonathan Cape)
Laughter Heard from the Road by Maggie O’Dwyer
(Templar Poetry)
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
 
 
Arlene Ang
 
The Wrong Miracle by Liz Gallagher (Salt Modern Poets)
Fair Creatures of an Hour by Lynn Levin (Loonfeather Press)
In the Voice of a Minor Saint by Sarah J. Sloat (Tilt Press)
 
 
Laurie Byro
 
Carta Marina: A Poem in Three Parts by Ann Fisher-Wirth
(Wings Press)
Poems from the Women’s Movement, edited by Honor Moore
(Library of America)
Watching the Spring Festival by Frank Bidart
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
 
 
Ray Givans
 
The Year of Not Dancing by C L Dallat (Blackstaff Press)
Natural Mechanical by J.O. Morgan (CB Editions)
Darwin, A life in Poems by Ruth Padel (Chatto & Windus)
 
 
Ross Sutherland
 
Migraine Hotel by Luke Kennard (Salt Modern Poets)
Watering Can by Caroline Bird (Carcanet Press)
Weather A System by James Wilkes (Penned in the Margins)
 
 
Kelli Russell Agodon
 
Sharp Stars by Sharon Bryan (BOA Editions)
Then, Something by Patricia Fargnoli (Tupelo Press)
Upgraded to Serious by Heather McHugh (Copper Canyon Press)
 
 
Crystal Warren
 
Flashes by Carol Leff (Aerial Publishing)
Strange Fruit by Helen Moffett (Modjaji Books)
Oleander by Fiona Zerbst (Modjaji Books)
 
 
Derek Adams
 
Furniture by Lorraine Mariner (Picador)
Beneath the Rime by Siriol Troup (Shearsman Books)
The Girl with the Cactus Handshake by Katrina Naomi
(Templar Poetry)
 
 
Liesl Jobson
 
Impredehora by Yvette Christiansë (Kwela Books with SnailPress)
Al is die maan ‘n misverstand by Danie Marais (Tafelberg)
Hyphen by Tania van Schalkwyk (The UCT Writers Series/
Electric Book Works)
  
  
Chris McCabe
 
West End Survival Kit by Jeremy Reed (Waterloo Press)
How To Build a City by Tom Chivers (Salt Modern Poets)
The Burning of the Books by George Szirtes and Ronald King
(Full Circle Editions)
Undraining Sea by Vahni Capildeo (Egg Box Publishing)
Rays by Richard Price (Carcanet Press)
Weather A System by James Wilkes (Penned in the Margins)
Furniture by Lorraine Mariner (Picador)
Madeleine’s Letter to Bunting by Kelvin Corcoran
(Longbarrow Press)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Three

 
Liz Gallagher
 
The Missing by Siân Hughes (Salt Modern Poets)
Tolstoy in Love by Ray Givans (Dedalus Press)
In the Voice of a Minor Saint by Sarah J. Sloat (Tilt Press)
 
 
Pamela Mordecai
 
Naming the Mannequins by Nic Labriola (Insomniac Press)
Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand, with
an introduction by L. C.  Sanders (Wilfred Laurie University Press)
Hope’s Hospice and Other Poems by Kwame Dawes
(Peepal Tree Press)
 
 
Andrea Porter
 
The Burning of the Books by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe Books)
The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philip (Salt Modern Poets)
Faber New Poets: Fiona Benson (Faber & Faber)
 
 
Carrie Etter
 
Elsa Cross: Selected Poems, edited by Tony Frazer
(Shearsman Books)
Assorted Poems by Susan Wheeler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Clockwork Gift by Claire Crowther (Shearsman Books)
  
  
Ann Drysdale
 
Darwin’s Microscope by Kelley Swain (Flambard Press)
No Panic Here by Mark Halliday (HappenStance)
Missing the Eclipse by Joan Hewitt (Cinnamon Press)
 
 
Sascha Aurora Aktar
 
Bird Head Son by Anthony Joseph (Salt Modern Poets)
Poetry State Forest by Bernadette Mayer (New Directions)
Orphaned Latitudes by Gérard Rudolf (Red Squirrel Press)
 
 
Giles Goodland
 
Darwin by Tony Lopez (Acts of Language)
The Summer of Agios Dimitrios by Peter Hughes
(Shearsman Books)
Undraining Sea by Vahni Capildeo (Egg Box Publishing)
 
 
Catherine Daly
 
luce a cavallo by Therese Bachand (Green Integer Press)
The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet (Ahsahta Press)
Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988 – 2008 by Norma Cole
(City Lights Books)
 
 
Tim Wells
 
Caligula on Ice and Other Poems by Tim Turnbull (Donut Press)
Poemland by Chelsey Minnis (Wave Books)
City State: New London Poetry, edited by Tom Chivers
(Penned in the Margins)
 
 
Jacqueline Saphra
 
West End Final by Hugo Williams (Faber & Faber)
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
Farewell My Lovely by Polly Clark (Bloodaxe Books)
 
 
Sophie Mayer
 
Undraining Sea by Vahni Capildeo (Egg Box Publishing)
The Son by Carrie Etter (Oystercatcher)
The ms of m y kin by Janet Holmes (Shearsman Books)
Cold Spring in Winter by Valérie Rouzeau, translated
by Susan Wicks (Arc Publications)
The Joshua Tales by Andra Simons (Treehouse Press)
 
 
Katy Lederer
 
Free Cell by Anselm Berrigan (City Lights Books)
Delivered by Sarah Gambito (Persea Books)
The King by Rebecca Wolff (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part Two

 

 
  
Roddy Lumsden
 
Like This by Diana Pooley (Salt Modern Poets)
Through the Square Window by Sinead Morrissey (Carcanet Press)
Undraining Sea by Vahni Capildeo (Egg Box Publishing)
Chronic by D A Powell (Graywolf Press)
Fort Red Border by Kiki Petrosino (Sarabande Books)
Taste of Cherry by Kara Candito (University of Nebraska Press)
  
  
Jane Holland
 
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
Suit of Lights by Damian Walford Davies (Seren Books)
A Century of Poetry Review, edited by Fiona Sampson
(Carcanet Press)
 
 
Anthony Joseph
 
Orphaned Latitudes by Gérard Rudolf (Red Squirrel Press)
How To Build a City by Tom Chivers (Salt Modern Poets)
Undraining Sea by Vahni Capildeo (Egg Box Publishing)
 
 
Katy Evans-Bush
 
Caligula on Ice and Other Poems by Tim Turnbull (Donut Press)
The Song of Lunch by Christopher Reid (CB Editions)
How To Build a City by Tom Chivers (Salt Modern Poets)
  
  
David Caddy
 
Music’s Duel: New and Selected Poems by Gavin Selerie
(Shearsman Books)
Conversation with Murasaki by Tom Lowenstein (Shearsman Books)
Practical Water by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Press)
 
 
Anne Berkeley
 
The Clockwork Gift by Claire Crowther (Shearsman Books)
The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philip (Salt Modern Poets)
A Scattering by Christopher Reid (Areté Books)
 
 
Simon Barraclough
 
instead of stars by Amy Key (tall-lighthouse)
The Borrowed Notebook by Chris McCabe (Landfill Press)
Frankie, Alfredo, by Liane Strauss (Donut Press)
  
  
Shaindel Beers
 
Cradle Song by Stacey Lynn Brown (C&R Press)
Packing Light: New & Selected Poems by Marilyn Kallet
(Black Widow Press)
War Dances by Sherman Alexie (Grove Press)
Petals of Zero Petals of One by Adam Zawacki (Talisman House)
   
   
Rob A. Mackenzie
 
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
The Ambulance Box by Andrew Philip (Salt Modern Poets)
Rays by Richard Price (Carcanet Press)
 
 
Valeria Melchioretto
 
Bird Head Son by Anthony Joseph (Salt Modern Poets)
The Tethers by Carrie Etter (Seren Books)
Blood/Sugar by James Byrne (Arc Publications)
 
 
Gaia Holmes
 
The Hunt in the Forest by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
Fruitcake by Selima Hill (Bloodaxe Books)
Hammers and Hearts of the Gods by Fred Voss (Bloodaxe Books)

Some Favourite Poetry Collections of 2009: Part One

 
  
I hope you will enjoy these recommendations and consider buying a few collections, pamphlets and anthologies published this year by a range of presses. A huge thank you to the poets who gave me their choices for the year.
  
What’s your favourite volume of 2009? Feel free to include your recommendations in the comments section.
 
 
Moniza Alvi
 
Natural Mechanical by J O Morgan (CB Editions)
Cold Spring in Winter by Valérie Rouzeau, translated by
Susan Wicks (Arc Publications)
Continental Shelf by Fred D’Aguiar (Carcanet Press)
  
 
Ian Duhig
 
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
Grain by John Glenday (Picador)
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century, edited by
Clare Pollard & James Byrne (Bloodaxe Books)
  
 
Sheenagh Pugh
  
How to Fall by Karen Annesen (Salt Modern Poets)
The Men from Praga by Anne Berkeley (Salt Modern Poets)
A Village Life by Louise Glück (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
  
 
Dorianne Laux
  
End of the West by Michael Dickman (Copper Canyon Press)
Cradle Song by Stacey Lynn Brown (C&R Press)
Snowbound House by Shane Seely (Anhinga Press)
  
 
Alison Brackenbury
 
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
Nothing Like Love by Jenny Joseph (Enitharmon Press)
Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books)
 
 
Clare Pollard
  
Caligula on Ice and Other Poems by Tim Turnbull (Donut Press)
Third Wish Wasted by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe Books)
Farewell My Lovely by Polly Clark (Bloodaxe Books)
  
 
Tamar Yoseloff
  
The Men from Praga by Anne Berkeley (Salt Modern Poets)
How to Fall by Karen Annesen (Salt Modern Poets)
Beneath the Rime by Siriol Troup (Shearsman Books)
The Clockwork Gift by Claire Crowther (Shearsman Books)
  
 
Annie Freud
  
Rain by Don Paterson (Faber & Faber)
Furniture by Lorraine Mariner (Picador)
Faber New Poets: Heather Phillipson (Faber & Faber)
  
 
John Wilkinson
  
Stress Position by Keston Sutherland (Barque Press)
Weak Link by Rob Halpern (Slack Buddha Press)
Clampdown by Jennifer Moxley (Flood Editions)
  
 
Marilyn Kallet
 
Practical Water by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Poetry)
Warhorses by Yusef Komunyakaa (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
paperback)
Sassing by Karen Head (WordTech Communications)

Leontia Flynn

” … the furthest distances I’ve travelled
have been those between people.”
 
- Leontia Flynn, ‘The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled’
These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Peter Reading on posterity

“There’s no posterity to write for.  I’m writing now for mutated arthropods.”
  
- Peter Reading interviewed by Robert Potts, Oxford Poetry,
Winter 1990/91

Sri Aurobindo on shadow and light

 
“You carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realisation perfect. Always you will see that within you the shadow and the light are equal. If you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use one to realise the other.”
 
- Sri Aurobindo

Things To Do Before You Leave Town

 
Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. He was included in The Times’s list of Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. His debut poetry collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town (Penned in the Margins), was published in January this year. Ross is also a member of the poetry collective Aisle16 with whom he runs Homework, an evening of literary miscellany in East London. His one-man poetry/comedy show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman, debuts at the Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington in January 2010. Visit Ross’s website.
 

Ross Sutherland

    
 
Critical praise for my last relationship
Ross Sutherland
   
At first glance, our faces appeared little more
than frayed notes, hinting at a distant mood.
Yet, on reflection, there was something compelling in that fraying:
My beard was loaded with the channeled pressure of something
                                                       being said.
Her eyes were not one thought, but two.
   
If you kept your nerve and stuck with us
You would have found that each day we spent together
had a distinct tone and shape.
Our subject range was impressive:
A man regresses himself through his previously owned automobiles,
A snow crystal grows synthetically on a petri dish,
Ovid laments his exile from Rome.
   
In winter, we underwent an odd shift of register.
Humour masked an aposiopesis. I trailed off into northern slang.
My invocation of a lost England was haunting in its fragility,
A place Frank Ormsby at the Belfast Telegraph described as
                                                      ‘a world of cries’.
  
She was as personal as Emily Dickinson.
I was as striking.
We were happy spanning joy and death together.
Cutting out every word we dared,
then walking out upon empty streets,
heat rising up into the negative space above us.
  
There were occasional poor lines,
but they were made noticeable by their rarity.
A meditation on the exchange of Christmas gifts
whilst well written,
felt too much like a generic picture of despair.
  
   
 
Published in Things To Do Before You Leave Town
(Penned in the Margins, 2009).
  
Buy Things To Do Before You Leave Town.
  
Check out a new animation based on another of Ross’s poems from Things To Do Before You Leave Town.

Patricia Leighton’s The Burgundy Madonna

Patricia Leighton is an ex-middle school teacher from Worcestershire, United Kingdom, who has been writing poems for a number of years on and off (with time out to indulge in some children’s writing). She has work published in a number of magazines including Rialto, Iota, Fire, Dream Catcher, Nottingham Poetry International, Obsessed with Pipework, Spokes and a couple of Bridport Prize anthologies.
 
 
The Burgundy Madonna
Patricia Leighton
 
Lady, was there always this distance,
this gap of mutual love?
 
Mixing his colours with holy water,
crushed relics, prayers, was this
what the iconographer perceived
dipping his brush deep into his soul?
 
Sturdy and capable, your right hand
supports the Child’s bottom,
thumb tip open, pointing away:
‘So, this is it …’
And the Child perches,
stiff in blue and gold,
his face fitting like a flesh glove
between your cheek and eye,
feet resting delicately together,
onto the twin of that large hand.
 
There could have been a warmth
but, almost grotesquely,
you hold the figure of a young man:
head, limbs, torso
perfectly proportioned,
his face already written upon.
 
No infant dribblings,
no soft roundnesses,
no puffy vulnerability
of baby flesh,
no unmapped
innocence.
 
Was this it? Your eyes stare
at no-one but the painter
and over decades, centuries,
into how many other eyes
in candlelit churches, hovels,
apartments, palaces, galleries?
So much looking.
Would there have been so much
if there was no way in?
 
 
Previously published in Dream Catcher, Issue 19.
  
Subscribe to Dream Catcher.

There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond

  
Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features — including Miranda July, Janie Geiser, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Potter, Cindy Sherman, Samira Makhmalbaf, Sadie Benning, Agnès Varda, Kim Longinotto, and Michelle Citron — There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries between artistic, industrial, political, critical, and disciplinary practices. Editors Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer have assembled scholarship that responds to women’s work in the interstices between different branches of the film industry, modes of filmmaking, national or transnational contexts, exhibition media, and varieties of visual representation in order to assess the exchanges such work enables.
  
Essays in the first three sections of There She Goes explore connections at the level of curation and exhibition, while the subsequent four consider local connections such as those between the film and the audience or between works within an oeuvre, down to those occurring on the surface of the film. Contributors reach beyond traditional screen cinema to interact with a larger field of artistic production, including still photography, music videos, installation art, digital media, performance art, and dance. Essays also pay particular attention to a variety of contextual factors that have shaped women’s filmmaking, from the conditions of production and circulation to engagement with various social movements and critical traditions, including, but not limited to, feminism.
  
By foregrounding fluidity, There She Goes presents a an exciting new appraisal of feminist film culture, as well as the intellectual and affective potential it holds for filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Scholars of film and television studies and gender studies will appreciate the fresh outlook of There She Goes. 
  
  
“The agenda of this volume is to examine the flows within and through feminist film culture by both foregrounding contemporary figures that embody the polymorphous potential of the present and revisiting, in order to re-vision, the past through a newly ground lens. The result is a collection of essays that draws attention to practices, texts, and producers whose interstitial nature makes them difficult to recognize in a discursive field conditioned by disciplinary divisions. Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features, There She Goes seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries — be they drawn around artistic, industrial, political, or critical practices. When Rachel Kushner asked Miranda July what kind of project she intended to tackle in the wake of the success of her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), July replied, with characteristic whimsy and sharp insight, “I have a gigantic plan, Rachel, and it involves performance, and fiction, and radio, and the WWW, and TV and features that are both ‘conventional’ and totally not. And when I’m done with my plan, when I’m very old, hopefully there will be a little more space for people living with profound doubt to tell their stories in all different mediums. Also Hollywood won’t be so sexist.” Locating her work as a commercial filmmaker within a much larger field of cultural production and social change, July functions as exemplar of a contemporary film culture wherein people and products are moving with increasing frequency among venues (gallery, theater, festival, and online), materials (celluloid and digital video), locales (including those in both the “First” and “Third” Worlds), modes of production (studio-financed and “independent,” auteurist and collaborative), and artistic roles (actor, director, producer, and writer) … There She Goes announces a new appraisal of filmmaking that is tied to and celebratory of feminist notions of fluidity and reinvention, as well as their intellectual and affective potential for filmmakers and filmgoers alike.”
   
from There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond, Editors: Sophie Mayer and Corinn Columpar (Wayne State University Press, 2009)
  
Buy There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond.

Marion Ashton

Marion Ashton

  
Marion Ashton works part-time as an English Advisor for an international geological consultancy company, both in the United Kingdom and in Houston, Texas. She is currently doing the MA course in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott as tutors. She moved to Texas with her husband in 2001, and lived there for five years. That experience, together with all the travel involved, provided inspiration for many of her most recent poems, often to do with issues of personal identity and the strangeness of shuttling between two very different worlds. She has been widely published in poetry magazines, and is currently working towards a first collection. 
  
  
Cherries
Marion Ashton
 
My first time in your house – different from ours –
wide-arched hallway, Persian rugs, antique urns,
we, flushed intruders, skiving the last hours
  
of school – Physics, and magnetic force patterns:
how the filings had leapt into linking tracks,
plotting North to South fields of attraction
  
across thin paper sheets. You turned the locks
and drew the curtains so we’d not be seen,
but in that dusk room, lined with leather books,
  
the cherries in their china bowl still shone
like rubies. I’d only tasted Marascinos –
speared, lipstick-bright in Babycham;
  
these were French Burlats: blood-red globes,
plump on dark stalks, ripe for taking. One by one
we ate them, testing smooth skin in our mouths,
  
breaking into the flesh, teasing out the stones,
kissing them, picked clean, into each others’ palms.
  
  
An earlier version of ‘Cherries’ was published in Seam, Issue 29.
     
Read more of Marion’s poems at Arvon Friends Online and in her online pamphlet.

‘Augusta Fabergé’ in Ouroboros Review

Cover art by Jennifer Delaney

    
I’m very pleased to have a new poem, ‘Augusta Fabergé’, included in the fourth issue of ouroboros review alongside wonderful work by fellow bloggers: Sophie Mayer, Annie Clarkson, Matt Merritt, Arlene Ang and Deb Scott, among many others.
  
Collin Kelley conducts an absorbing and candid interview with Cecilia Woloch, author of Sacrifice, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, Late, Narcissus and Carpathia (BOA Editions, 2009), while Louisa Adjoa Parker asks important questions about black and minority ethnic publishing in the United Kingdom.
  
This issue also contains arresting visual art by Jennifer Delaney, Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Julie E. Bloemeke, Deb Scott and Jéanpaul Ferro.
  
Read it here.

Stephanie Leal’s Metrophobia

    
Stephanie Leal is originally from New Jersey, USA. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007 and is studying for her PhD in Philosophy. She currently lives in Norwich. Visit her website.
      

Stephanie Leal by Alexandra Bone

 
Boston Tea
Stephanie Leal
 
December 16, 1773
 
Sixteen sips from Chinese porcelain
espy the arbitrary day, the decisive act.
 
History began mohawking the bay:
vulcanizing sand dunes
 
cracking into champagned water,
bumbling with stamped-out Liberty,
 
the smuggling thief; a unanimous
continental conspiracy
 
to remember the misrepresentation,
remember the gunpowder;
 
convulsing welkin
obscures feathered headdress.
 
The tea still washes up
on the shores of Boston;
 
nothing was damaged or stolen
except a padlock
 
that was accidentally broken,
but anonymously replaced one week after.
    
   
Mrs Darling’s Kiss
Stephanie Leal
  
Lines lifted from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
   
Her mouth, a nightlight, conspicuously
sweet and mocking. On it was a kiss,
hung on the right-hand corner of her lips,
unobtainable. And yet he, clad in leaves
and juices that ooze from trees, easily
stole that kiss away. She pirouettes. Miss
Darling, now released from her innocence,
forgets how to fly, forgets how to see.
 
Although she is now dead and forgotten,
fairy dust still sparkles on the wood floor
(dog hair mixed with strands of white silk cotton).
She asked for a kiss, he gave an acorn.
Sewing youth to shadow never softens
the wrinkles: Napoleon slams the door.

      
Published in Metrophobia (Penned in the Margins, 2009).
   
Read more about Metrophobia.

Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf

  
Sarah Hesketh was born in 1983 and grew up in Pendle, East Lancashire. She attended Merton College, Oxford and holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. In 2007 her collaboration with composer Alastair Caplin was performed at the Leeds Lieder Festival. She currently works as Assistant Director at the writers’ charity English PEN. Visit Sarah’s website.
  
  

Sarah Hesketh by Benjamin Thompson

  
July
Sarah Hesketh
  
               A month
                              of leaping trout.
The villagers dusted earth from their boots,
muttered of meanings caught lurking in the corn.
   
It befits such tales to begin with a stranger.
And so she seemed: the pots unwashed,
the blackberries gone to rot inside the door.
Nights were worse.
  
I am thrice blessed by moonlight, he declared,
and she kissed his scars in brazen view
of that common nunnery gossip.
  
Later, when the cows wouldn’t calve,
and her neighbour held a barrel
to the head of his hound, she would testify, only
  
to this: that his night-rushed skin
turned to smoke come the morning.
And the rising light across sky-rocked fields,
came like a command from home.
  
  
The Ravensbrück Seamstress
Sarah Hesketh
 
She bites buttons from the coats of dead men.
Fillets the seams of grain sacks for thread.
Spits when repairing the outline of stars.
 
Mud is murder on the hems. They come to her
for pockets that might save a photograph, a ring.
Cuffs are fashionably frayed that year. Waists cinched in.
 
When Reuben dies by the train track, in the rain,
twelve girls are wearing his socks by lunch.
Each thick red stitch she forces through their collars
 
irritates the skin, reminds them to struggle.
They break ice for mirrors for a treat when it’s cold,
worn faces, suddenly respectable to themselves.
  
  
Published in Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf
(Penned in the Margins, 2009).
   
Read more about Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf.

George Ttoouli’s Static Exile

George Ttoouli

   
George Ttoouli was born in London in 1979 to Greek parents. An Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme, he co-founded the Heaventree Press in 2002, has worked in the education team at the Poetry Society, and co-edits poetry blogzine, Gists & Piths. He is now mostly skint, in Coventry. George’s articles, reviews, poems, short stories and essays have been published widely. In 2004 he received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship to work on a novel, which he still hasn’t abandoned. Static Exile (Penned in the Margins, 2009) is his debut collection of poetry.
    
    
Nearing Extinction
George Ttoouli
  
You know this feeling.
The air carries a sense of erasure
and for the first time you notice
the streets are scrubbed of anyone
who might offer the phantom you’ve become
a smile. The last bus pulls from the kerb
like a page ripping out of a diary and every pavement
is a shapeless mask, all the escalators full
in other directions. You are
the only person on the platform
to which no train will arrive.
Something in you expects this, made a choice
to fill the streets with negative spaces
and the tyres of every feeling you have in you
to the point of bursting on the first bend.
First though, a flood; some dark mist
congeals into a whisper and scours the streets,
tubes, shops and cafés, kitchen counters
full of plastic-wrapped packets and bottles,
cuts clean with its meniscus every trace
of people from the surface. This is more
real than you imagined, the skin
of the manmade dulled to a dark grey,
until the world is a unified obsidian
though soft like the flank of a panther
nearing extinction, growling yet.
   
   
Published in Static Exile (Penned in the Margins, 2009).
   
Order Static Exile.
      

  
   
Join Penned in the Margins for the launch of George Ttoouli’s Static Exile and James Wilkes’ Weather A System at The Slaughtered Lamb, 34-35 Great Sutton Street, Clerkenwell, London, EC1V 0DX, on Sunday, 8 November, from 8pm till late. 
Nearest tube: Farringdon.
    
Simon Turner and Holly Pester will be supporting Ttoouli and Wilkes.
  
Entry is free.

Alison Brackenbury’s Bookkeeping

Alison Brackenbury

   
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she has worked for almost twenty years in the family metal finishing business. Her work has appeared in over fifty anthologies and has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award. She has recently scripted three programmes for BBC Radio 3, including Singing in the Dark, a celebration of the stubborn survival of traditional song: ‘Evocative, amusing, and utterly compelling’, Radio Times Choice. Her latest collection is Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008). ‘A quiet lyricism and delight’, The Guardian ‘Mellifluous art’, Poetry Review, ‘Grace and authenticity’, Poetry London. New poems can be read at her site. Visit Alison’s Carcanet author page.
  
  
Bookkeeping
Alison Brackenbury
 
These are not (you understand) the figures
which send cold judgement into the backbone
which leave us, workless, shrunk at home
staring in a sky grown black with leaves.
 
These are like the ticking of a clock,
the daily sums, a van’s new brakes,
three drums of trichloroethylene on the back
of a thrumming lorry; yet they take
a day to make: thin bars of figures. While
I try to balance them, light scurries round
like a glad squirrel. Radio music stales –
until shut off.
  
What’s left when it is done,
the green book closed? There is no sea to swim
no mouth to kiss. Even the light is gone.
Bookkeepers drink over-sugared tea
lie in dark rooms; are always hunched and tired.
  
Where I stretch up the low bulb burns and whirls.
And in it, I see him. The dusky gold wing folds
across his face. The feathers’ sharp tips smudge
his margins.
  
Sunk, in his own shadows, deep
in scattered ledgers of our petty sins:
he, the tireless angel:
Unaccountably, he sleeps.
  
  
Published in Alison Brackenbury’s Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1991).
  
Read an interview with Alison published in Iota.
  
Order Alison’s latest collection, Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008).
  
Order Alison’s latest pamphlet, Shadow (HappenStance, 2009).

Fiona Robyn’s Blogsplash

 
  
Fiona Robyn is going to blog her next novel, Thaw (Snowbooks), starting on the 1st of March next year. The novel follows 32 year old Ruth’s diary over three months as she decides whether or not to carry on living.
  
To help spread the word she’s organising a Blogsplash, where blogs will publish the first page of Ruth’s diary simultaneously (and a link to the blog).
  
She’s aiming to get 1000 blogs involved – if you’d be interested in joining in, email her at fiona@fionarobyn.com or find out more information here.

The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love

     
Internationally renowned as a filmmaker, writer and composer, Sally Potter has always been a provocateur: as a feminist filmmaker and performer, a leading light of the BFI Production Board generation, a British filmmaker Oscar-nominated for a low-budget costume drama, and a pioneer of digital cinema. Drawing on exclusive access to archival materials and in-depth interviews with Britain’s most independent director, The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love opens up vivid historical, political, and cultural vistas to give the first full account of this extraordinary career.
            
“It seems only fitting that Sally Potter’s interactive digital archive is called SP-ARK. Fire is at the heart of her work, both visually and metaphysically. Onscreen, it signals the intensity of artistic labour that her films record, metaphorising both the ‘spark’ of inspiration and the energy of work. Fire’s meaning alters to trace the progress of empire in Orlando, from the burning torches that herald Elizabeth I to the burning trenches that mark Orlando’s passage into the reign of Elizabeth II. Fire burns on ice in the reign of King James, as Orlando falls in love. Fire makes steam in the hammam in Khiva. It burns in the hearths of the Great House in contrast to the damp green of the Victorian era as Orlando tends to Shelmerdine’s ankle. In early drafts of the screenplay, fire burnt the house to the ground as Orlando’s class rage turned her into the first Mrs. Rochester. In the finished film, torches burn in the Khan’s courtyard just before war breaks out, but fire is never simply associated with danger or madness. It marks moments of transformation. When fire meets ice, it is an elemental reflection of Orlando’s divided self. Flames burn on water at the opening of The Man Who Cried. They are like a screen of ‘reverie’ in which Suzie sees her memories unfolding.”
    
from The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love by Sophie Mayer (Wallflower Press, 2009)
      

Sally Potter

  
More about Sally Potter
  
Sally Potter’s work has, from the early 1970’s, embraced dance, performance, theatre, music and film. Since her first cult hit with Thriller (1979), Potter has concentrated on film and directed her first feature, The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie, in 1983. Potter then made a short, The London Story, and several documentaries before the internationally acclaimed and multi-award winning Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton. This was followed by The Tango Lesson (1996) and The Man Who Cried (2000), starring Christina Ricci, Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett and John Turturro. In 2004 Potter made Yes, starring Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, and Sam Neill. Potter then directed Carmen for English National Opera in Autumn 2007. Potter’s new film, Rage, starring Judi Dench, Jude Law, Steve Buscemi, Simon Abkarian and Dianne Wiest is released in 2009.
  
Visit Sally’s website and blog.
   
Book for the forthcoming Sally Potter showcase at the
British Film Institute.

Jo Hemmant’s The Den

Jo Hemmant

  
Jo Hemmant spent many years working as a journalist and editor and only began writing poetry the day her youngest son started school. Her work has appeared in or is upcoming at Horizon Review, qarrtsiluni, blossombones, bluefifth review, Equinox, South, Decanto, Dream Catcher, Fire and Obsessed with Pipework. She lives with her husband, her two sons, aged eight and six and a menagerie in the burbs outside London. Last year she co-founded ouroboros review, a poetry and art journal that appears both online and in print, and set up Pindrop Press, a small independent poetry press. The first book is due off the presses in 2010.
  
  
The den
Jo Hemmant
 
For his sixth birthday, a tent.
Two-man, pop-up, no tripping
over a cat’s cradle of guy ropes and pegs.
 
It covers most of the floor in his room,
is kitted out with what boys like –
Top Trumps, action figures, plastic insects.
He begs me to read to him there that night.
  
Crawling in, I notice that the millimetre-thin skin
cuts out noise, the air’s new with polymers.
We shine a moon on the roof with the torch
and find ourselves in a field, staring up
through a plastic square at a sky
deep and dark as a coal mine’s throat.
  
Outside, the fire has cooled to amber.
Menace storybooks the woods.
  
  
Read more of Jo’s work in Horizon Review.

Sophie Mayer’s Her Various Scalpels

Sophie Mayer by Lady Vervaine

      
Sophie Mayer writes passionately and politically about poetry and film anywhere and everywhere she can, including Horizon Review, Esprit de Corps, Blackbox Manifold, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and Artesian. She blogs about reading as Delirium’s Librarian, and is a regular contributor to the review blog for Chroma journal, where she is commissioning editor. Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009), her first solo poetry collection, was the auspicious start to a very exciting three-book year, followed by The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009)and (as co-editor) There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2009). Her next collection, The Private Parts of Girls, will be published by Salt in 2011, and she has future plans for encounters between poetry and film. Visit Sophie’s website.
   
   
Rearranging the Stars
Sophie Mayer
  
after Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient
  
Lost you. Out here, where a call to prayer shivers
stone into song, where night falls like knives,
  
there’s a trick to the sky, how you see it, smell
what’s coming. It is like reading. It’s so small
  
at first, and granular, then overwhelms: eyes,
mouth, hands, hair. You cannot possibly sleep.
  
But you do, lulled by wind and waking. Stories –
his stories, more stories than there could be stars –
   
breathe around you with their shine, draw hearts
on dirty glass. You know what they find in deserts:
   
fragments. Texts under sand winds, brilliant disasters.
And you, in secret, on fire with new constellations.
   
   
Previously published in Staple 71: The Art Issue (Summer 2009).
  
  

  
pieuvres / lèvres (lilies / lips)
Sophie Mayer
  
Did I realise then that I would spend my whole life
with their lipstick on my face. Other girls and their kisses
 
goodbye. I know that now, having watched soft asses
walk away from me, having been paid my tithe
 
for watchful quiet. For the flattery of desire. Ingrown
hair, that’s what it’s like: turning against the razor
 
blade and on itself. Like my toes, curled mazily
through each other with waiting, waiting that flows
 
up my calves and out my mouth. A shower in reverse:
a fountain, inwards out: And what was in her,
 
I felt that too. All her hardness in my fingers
rattling her stem. All those flower words, perverse
 
euphemisms for a force like an ocean
in a swimming pool. Did she not see
 
what poured out of (her into) me? Salt of her sea,
stick of her sap. And it’s not the explosion
 
that I’m talking about, her wet cunt a concrete
underpass around my hand. It’s the light that thrums
 
from her lily-mouth, her pollinated tongue
extended like a stamen. Like a beesting hot-sweet
 
under the skin, a tear oozing from an eye. An ingrown
hair turning outwards against skin tough as petals
 
under drops of rain. The pain of it like cold metal,
like waiting. The stem of spit plunges down
 
and you wonder that such softness does such hurt.
No softness in the doing: spit’s active as a limb,
  
a cock, a race, a city street. It dances itself thin.
The stem of things. Wet birth. My first.
 
 
Buy Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009) here.

Michael Swan

Michael Swan

    
Michael Swan works in English language teaching and applied linguistics. He has been writing poetry for many years, driven no doubt by an unconscious need to prove that grammarians have souls. His poems have been published widely in magazines, and have won a number of prizes. He clings to the belief that it is possible to write good poetry that is neither difficult nor boring, and he often finds humour a useful tool in dealing with a seriously confusing universe. Michael’s first collection, When They Come For You, was published by Frogmore Press in 2003 and was very well received. He is now looking for a publisher for his second collection.
   
      
comb
Michael Swan
   
I was sure
it was her comb
lying on the pavement.
And I ran after her
shouting
‘Excuse me
but you dropped your comb’
and she turned
a woman I had never seen before
and she told me
no
it was not her comb.
She seemed unwilling
to discuss the matter further
and walked on
rather quickly.
She had hair like yours
and the comb, too
was like one of those
you used to leave everywhere
on tables, shelves, windowledges,
in the car, on your pillow.
 
I was sure it was your comb.
  
  
© Michael Swan 2005
  
Read more of Michael’s work at poetry p f.

Karin Koller’s Bikes

Bikes
Karin Koller
  
It was a time when children free-ranged on pavements
binding friendships based on games and pecking orders
and bikes. My big sister leading the way
on her green two-wheeler, stopping to pass orders
back down the convoy: Roger with his stabilisers
who grew up to run a coat-hanger company
and become the most boring man in the world to all
except his wife who had a long history of forbearance –
followed by Roger’s brother Martin on his large red trike
Martin who was hopeless at maths
but opened a shop called Belt & Braces
and ended up a millionaire, and then Tony
on his silver scooter pushing dreams of fame
till his one-hit Under the Smile of Love
reached number 56 in the charts for a week
and at the end of the line my little sister pedalling skew-whiff
on the broken metal trike, the one with tiny wheels
and a single right handlebar – the bike which lasted
forever, and which we all loved best.

Ruth McIlroy’s Just Idiot Talk

Just Idiot Talk
Ruth McIlroy
   
“Hey, Sassenach! Ye gie me the boak,
Yir patter stinks; youse’ll get it noo,
Ye cannae say a’thing, ya muckle-face numpty”.
   
But, ya wee keelie, I’ll jist dae it efter.
Missed yersel’ there now, eh no, hen?
Ken, this’s barry, nae tother a ball.
  
  
Glossary
   
Just Idiot Talk
Just an idiolect consciously employed to gain acceptance from a dominant social group
    
Hey,Sassenach
Excuse me, English person
   
ye gie me the boak
you make me feel nauseous
   
Yir patter stinks
your way of presenting yourself to the world is fundamentally flawed
   
youse’ll get it noo
you (singular or plural) are about to experience retribution
   
ye cannae say a’thing
I would advise you not to answer me back
  
ya muckle-face numpty
you ill-favoured person of limited common sense
  
But, ya wee keelie
But, you young person from a challenging home environment
  
I’ll jist dae it efter
I’ll just do it later
  
Missed yersel’ there now
you didn’t see that one coming
  
eh no, hen?
did you, my friend/acquaintance
  
ken, this’s barry
you know something, I feel a lot better
  
nae tother a ball
no bother at all
   
   
© Ruth McIlroy 2009

Vicki Feaver’s The Handless Maiden reissued

Vicki Feaver

  
Vicki Feaver lives in South Larnarkshire in Scotland and divides her time between painting and poetry. ‘Marigolds’ is from The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape, 1994) which won a Heinemann Prize and a Cholmondeley Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. The Handless Maiden has recently been reissued by Jonathan Cape.
  
  
Marigolds
Vicki Feaver
  
Not the flowers men give women –
delicately-scented freesias,
stiff red roses, carnations
the shades of bridesmaids’ dresses,
almost sapless flowers,
drying and fading – but flowers
that wilt as soon as their stems
are cut, leaves blackening
as if blighted by the enzymes
in our breath, rotting to a slime
we have to scour from the rims
of vases; flowers that burst
from tight, explosive buds, rayed
like the sun, that lit the path
up the Thracian mountain, that we wound
into our hair, stamped on
in ecstatic dance, that remind us
we are killers, can tear the heads
off men’s shoulders;
flowers we still bring
secretly and shamefully
into the house, stroking
our arms and breasts and legs
with their hot orange fringes,
the smell of arousal.
  
  
Published in The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape, 1994).
  
Read more about Vicki and her work at Contemporary Writers and the Poetry Archive.
  
  

Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig

     
Ian Duhig has written five books of poetry. The last two of these, The Lammas Hireling and The Speed of Dark (both from Picador) were PBS Choices. His last published short story appeared in Comma’s The New Uncanny, which won the Shirley Jackson Best Anthology Award for 2008, while his most recent musical collaboration, a contrafacta with the Clerks called ‘After the Mass’, appears on their CD Don’t Talk – Just Listen, from Signum Classics, 2009. His next book of poetry is forthcoming from Picador, with the working title of Jericho Shanty.
    
    
goths
Ian Duhig
   
I love them. They bring a little antilife and uncolour
to the Corn Exchange on city centre shopping days
as if they had all just crawled out of that Ringu well,
so many Sadakos in monochrome horrow, dripping
silver jewellery down flea-market undead fashions.
They are the black that is always the new black,
their perfume lingers, freshly-turned-grave sweet.
    
Black sheep, they pilgrimage twice a year to Whitby,
through our landscape of dissolved monastery and pit,
which they will toast in cider’n'blackcurrant, vegan blood.
They danse macabre at gigs like the Dracula Spectacula.
Next day, lovebitten and wincing in the light, they take
photographs of each other, hoping they won’t develop.
    
   
Previously published in Stand.
   
Read more about Ian at Contemporary Writers, the Poetry Archive and PIW.

Roy Woolley

Roy Woolley

    
Roy Woolley has had poems published in The Wolf, The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Poetry News and the anthology Saturday Night Desperate from Ragged Raven Press. He also compiled a pamphlet celebrating ten years of the Gay London Writers’. He recently graduated with distinction from the Mst in Creative Writing at Oxford University.
    
    
from The Pasiphaë Treatment
Roy Woolley
   
Scene 1. An open field. A white bull grazing.
Haunches muscular and clean.
Pasiphaë is helped from the carriage by a servant.
Close-up. Her face as she studies the bull.
The rope in her hands. Fade-out. Country sounds.
  
Scene 2. Flashback to the cord she wears at her wedding.
Brassy light. Crowds in the forecourt. The tinnitus
of instruments being tuned. Soft snowfall
of flowers at her feet. Her husband’s backward glance
as a bridesmaid leans over the balcony.
 
Scene 4. The present. Her room in the palace. Night.
Her face in the mirror. The stars above Crete.
Close-up to the costume Daedulus made –
a white sheet to cushion her body.
The horns for her temples. The cool felt mask.
   
Scene 9. She’s in the mirror again, facing herself
sideways, tracing the shape of her belly
with the palms of her hands. Night songs.
The city shutting down. The sound of the sea.
She feels her child move when she looks at the stars.
  
Scene 15. Fade to the balcony spyglass. A room
draped in black. Mirrors facing the wall.
The scars on her hands. Her bandaged breasts.
Her deep set eyes. The camera pans across the city.
Construction sounds grow louder. Our first sight of the maze.
   

Pasiphaë and the Minotaur, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Semyón Isaåkovich Kirsánov

   
“Poetry, if it’s genuine, is not a racing car rushing senselessly around and around a closed track; it is an ambulance rushing to save someone.”
   
- Semyón Isaåkovich Kirsánov

Horizon Review: Issue Three

 
  
  
I’m very pleased to have two poems and an interview with 
Pascale Petit in the third issue of online literary journal,
Horizon Review. 
  
The issue is filled with good writing:  poetry, fiction, reviews,
interviews and articles.
    
Read more here …

Janet Sutherland’s Hangman’s Acre

  
 
  
Janet Sutherland was raised on a dairy farm in Wiltshire, lived twenty years in London and now lives in Lewes. Her second collection, Hangman’s Acre (Shearsman Books, 2009), is to be published on 15 October 2009. Of her first collection, Burning the Heartwood (Shearsman Books, 2006), reviewed in Poetry Review, Judith Kazantzis said the “poems are questioning, tender, guarded”. Her work has appeared in many magazines including Poetry Review and Poetry Wales and in anthologies including The Virago Book of Love Poetry and The New British Poetry 1968-88. She has read widely including at venues in Brighton, London and at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Read more about Janet and Hangman’s Acre on her Shearsman author page  and website.
  
 

Janet Sutherland

 
   
Assemblage des Beautés
Janet Sutherland
 
Bone monkey has set up shop in the airing cupboard.
It’s warm in there. Silverfish take refuge in his skull
and slide around his ribs. Worn sheets have ruched between
his bones like the petals of old roses – Assemblage des Beautés
for instance – so cherry red and full it almost seems
there is blood again and a heart beating like crazy.
  
  
Previously published in Poetry Review (Volume 99:2 Summer 2009).
  
  
Nearer
Janet Sutherland
 
rain is falling under sodium lights
the municipal toilet roof is bathed in gold
up station street the tarmac shines and little rivers
writhe and coil along the roadside gutters
 
it’s late     the traffic light in broken pieces
scatters across the deserted lane
in amber, red, red and amber, green
in all the houses darkness slowly deepens
  
in this town on a night like this     my heart
glitters     each footfall takes me nearer
to your bed   and to the dark where I will
lie with you this little time     I thought
  
it could not be like this   but I was wrong
walking on light and water     coming home
  
  
Published in Hangman’s Acre (Shearsman Books, 2009).
  
  
Bath launch of Carrie Etter’s pamphlet and Janet Sutherland’s second book
  
Monday 26 October, 6.30pm, Carrie Etter and Janet Sutherland launch new collections at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, 14 – 15 John Street, Bath, BA1 2JL. Phone: 01225331155. Email: books@mrbsemporium.com.
 
Shearsman Books December 2009 Reading
 
Tuesday 1 December 2009, 7.30pm, Alan Wearne and Janet Sutherland at Swedenborg Hall, Swedenborg House, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way (entry on Barter Street), London, WC1A 2TH. Email: editor@shearsman.com.

me and janine, vickers shipyard, barrow-in-furness, 1973

Geraldine Green

       
Geraldine Green is a Cumbrian poet whose work has been anthologised in the United Kingdom, North America and Italy. As well as having two poetry collections published by Flarestack, The Skin (2002) and Passio (2006), her work has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Orbis, Seventh Quarry, Poetry Cornwall, Smoke, Rain Dog, Citizen 32, Neon Highway, Envoi and Obsessed with Pipework.
    
She’s read at diverse venues in the United Kingdom, North America, Greece and Italy, including the Bowery Poetry Club NYC, Wordsworth Trust Grasmere, International Women’s Arts Festival Kendal, Woody Guthrie Festival Oklahoma, Dylan Thomas Centre Swansea, Colony Café Woodstock, River to River Festival Beacon, NY, Poetry on the Lake Orta Italy, Apples and Snakes Kendal and Falmouth, Rooftop Celebrates! Skiathos Greece, Smalls Jazz Club and Cornelia Street Café, NYC, as well as Solfest Cumbria, Poetry in the Park Albany NY, Everyman Theatre Liverpool and the University of Connecticut, Branford House. She’s been lucky enough to have had her poetry backed at WoodyFest by the wonderful music of David Amram.
    
Currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing Poetry, Geraldine is Associate Editor of Poetry Bay magazine and Associate Editor (UK) of www.poetryvlog.com.
     
Find out more about her on poetry p f.
     
  
me and janine, vickers shipyard, barrow-in-furness, 1973
Geraldine Green
     
legs swinging and us licking ice creams on the sub dock
our platform shoes cool and wonderful and the men
whistling and shouting hey love, gi’e us a lick!
and when we turned and gave them you know a
sidelong look they laughed but me and janine we
knew they didn’t mean anything by it they were just
joshing so anyhow we sat there with our ice creams
trickling down the side of the cones golden and crisp
the flakes falling onto our mini skirts and we knew
we’d have to go back in soon but the day was warm
it was warm it was summer and we were seventeen
we looked good and we knew it and we loved it when
the sailors came in foreign submariners from argentina
israel the middle east and russia listening to their funny
accents and they came here to vickers to board their subs
and them other subs being built alongside our own ‘revenge’
and ‘resolution’ and them going on patrol in the baltic or
the pacific and me and janine dreaming of smuggling
ourselves on board to wake up in a foreign port
somewhere which was just about when the hooter
would go and we had to go back in to our dusty offices
on the sub dock with the sun blocked out and tippex and
pens and a deep pile of papers with typos to correct.

Jocelyn Page’s Pufferfish

Jocelyn Page

   
Jocelyn Page is a poet from Connecticut, USA, who currently lives in South East London. Her work has appeared in Smiths Knoll, The Interpreter’s House, City Lighthouse anthology (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and on various music websites including the Royal Philharmonic Hear Here project. In 2008 her work was Highly Commended by The New Writer Prose & Poetry Magazine. Her debut pamphlet will be published in 2010 by Tall Lighthouse.
  
  
Pufferfish
Jocelyn Page
 
You’re on your way to the mall
to an air-conditioned day
 
where customers will be right
& you’ll need to ask a manager
 
to authorize any refund, when driving
through that octopus of an intersection
 
where you’re always surprised your light’s green
you’ll see his car & your bowels’ll prickle
 
then swell like a pastry bag prepped to pipe
you’ll see someone else where you used to be
 
that spot in the car that was yours
like the chair at the dining room table
 
where Dad always sits & nobody else
would even think of sitting there.
 
& she’ll be in the middle of that bench seat
next to him, the stick shift denting her thighs
 
& you’ll drive by, changed.
It’ll be with you then, you’ll carry it
 
like a terminal diagnosis
all nine hours of your shift
 
& between sales it’ll dwarf you
at the cash register it’ll hide
 
& in the stock room you’ll feel faint
all day long it’ll loiter
 
like a pufferfish, ready to flood itself
big onto the scene or rest alert
 
behind the treasure chest
small, ready & all about the poison.
 
 
Read more of Jocelyn’s poetry here and here.

Adiós, au revoir, arrivederci

 

     
I look forward to catching up with you upon my return from the writing retreat.

Kim Addonizio on fear of failure

 

Kim Addonizio by Leon Borensztein

  
“Fear of failure is the biggest thing that blocks creativity. It makes you give up too soon on a project, or on a writing life.”
  
- Kim Addonizio, about creativity interview, 2007
  
  
” … How many days
are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say
one true thing about it –”
  
- Kim Addonizio, ‘The Numbers’
Tell Me (BOA Editions, 2000)

The South Coast

 

 

 

 

Alice Oswald

  
“Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can’t choose, the one that writes itself.”
  
- Alice Oswald, Get Writing, 2004

Julia Copus on writing poems

  
“Writing poems is a bit like panning for gold. You have to be prepared to sit for a long while in the cold murk of the river-bed and grow heavy with alluvial dust for the sake of the gold it contains.”
  
- Julia Copus, New Blood (Bloodaxe Books, 1999)

Vona Groarke on writing

 
“When I write, it’s like running my hand over a length of cloth, picking out patterns, testing the give, rubbing the fabric between thumb and forefinger to feel out the texture and the flaws.”
 
- Vona Groarke, Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005)

Reading: Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood – and a selection of review and interview links

   
    
“The books I end up writing are the ones that I would rather dodge altogether, but those are really the only ones I can write, because those are the ones I’m obsessed by. It would be so much easier to write an update of Pride and Prejudice and have everything turn out happily. If you don’t have conviction about it, you can’t do it.”
   
- Margaret Atwood
   
   
Erica Wagner’s interview with Margaret Atwood in The Times,
15 August 2009.
   
Sinclair McKay’s interview with Margaret Atwood in The Telegraph, 20 August 2009.
   
Ursula Le Guin’s review of The Year of the Flood in The Guardian,
29 August 2009.
   
Bernadine Evaristo’s review of The Year of the Flood in the Financial Times, 5 September 2009.
   
Philip Hensher’s review of The Year of the Flood in The Observer,
6 September 2009.
   
Jane Shilling’s review of The Year of the Flood in The Telegraph,
7 September 2009.
   
Fredric Jameson’s review of The Year of the Flood: ‘Then You Are Them’ in the London Review of Books, 10 September 2009.
   
Caroline Moore’s review of The Year of the Flood in The Telegraph,
10 September 2009.
   
Jane Ciabattari’s review of The Year of the Flood: ‘Disease And Dystopia In Atwood’s Flood” in NPR, 10 September 2009.
   
Adam McDowell’s interview with Margaret Atwood: ‘Margaret Atwood, planet smasher’ in the National Post, 11 September 2009.
   
John Barber’s interview with Margaret Atwood: ‘Atwood: ‘Have I ever eaten maggots? Perhaps …” in the Globe and Mail, 12 September 2009.
   
Philip Marchand’s review of The Year of the Flood: ‘Eloquence and irony do battle in Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Year of the Flood” in the National Post, 12 September 2009.
   
Darryl Whetter’s review of The Year of the Flood: ‘Atwood’s pen returns to apocalyptic theme’  in the Chronicle Herald, 13 September 2009.
   
Visit The Year of the Flood website.
   
Visit Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood blog.

Tamsin Kendrick’s Charismatic Megafauna

Tamsin Kendrick

      
Peter Pan Versus Captain Hook
Tamsin Kendrick
    
My friend vouched a theory that all men were either
Peter Pans or Captain Hooks. I don’t know about you but
   
I know where I stand. Look what that bastard did to poor Wendy;
Tinkerbell too. I’ll have no truck with flighty boys.
   
Give me instead the feel of steel on my thigh,
the screams of pirates trapped in the boo-boo box.
   
But most of all give me the whispery hair under the wig,
the gnarled hand, the hook trailing red lines down my abdomen.
   
He pulls my hair, holds his hook to my mouth, then, suddenly shy,
his mouth. No thimbles in sight. Finally, a real kiss.
  
    

   
 
Waiting for the Post
Tamsin Kendrick
   
End with Amen or a clap?
I get confused.
I lose my place.
Is this a circle we’re standing in?
Are we standing stones?
Is there magic here?
  
I think there are things in here with us.
A Jack-in-the-box, purple corners,
tumours perhaps?
An incessant buzzing.
Bruises on our knees.
And as we look we find bruises everywhere,
blue and black from front to back.
  
I remember when outside meant away
and I was always a stranger,
alien and wild in unfamiliar streets,
erupting from my own womb.
Can’t you see my footprints
on the ocean? I’ve been here before.
Was it for a long time? Or a short time?
I don’t know.
  
I don’t remember much.
Reality flinches. I pull my knees up.
Balance on the surface of things.
A waxed stare. Bleached fingers.
A postcard sent from Feltham.
A broken branch on lavender seas.
A silk hat, a felt slipper.
  
Just things
and things I wanted.
   
   
Published in Charismatic Megafauna (Penned in the Margins, 2009)
    
Read more about Tamsin and Charismatic Megafauna here.

Reading: Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs – and a selection of review and interview links

Photograph of Lorrie Moore by Linda Nylind

     
“The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, ‘Write something you’d never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!’”
   
- Lorrie Moore, Elle interview, September 2009
   
   
“The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It’s kind of rude, and yet really it’s where art comes from. It’s not the same as courage. It’s closer to bad manners than to courage. [...] if you’re going to be a writer, you basically have to say, ‘this is just who I am […]‘. There’s a certain indefensibility about it. It’s not about loving your community and taking care of it — you’re not attached to the chamber of commerce. It’s a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.”
    
- Lorrie Moore, Elle interview, September 2009
   
   
  
   
Michiko Kakutani’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘First Time for Taxis, Lo Mein and Loss’ in the New York Times, 27 August 2009.
   
Jonathan Letham’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘Eyes Wide Open’ in the New York Times, 27 August 2009.
   
Aja Gabel’s review of A Gate at the Stairs in The Virginia Quarterly Review, 27 August 2009.
   
New York Times excerpt from A Gate at the Stairs, 28 August 2009.
   
Mokoto Rich’s profile of Lorrie Moore: ‘Hate, Love, Chores: Lorrie Moore’s Midwest Chronicle’ in the New York Times, 1 September 2009.
   
Stephanie Zacharek’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘People like Lorrie Moore are the only people here’ at Salon, 1 September 2009.
   
Ron Charles’ review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘With Novel Twists, Moore Paints Both Darkness and an Age of Enlightenment’ in
The Washington Post, 2 September 2009.
   
Kelsey Keith’s ‘Mini interview with Lorrie Moore, Patron Saint of Our Bookshelf’ at Flavorwire, 2 September 2009.
   
Edan Lepucki’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘It’s Not You, It’s Me: Thoughts on Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs’ at The Millions, 3 September 2009.
   
The transcript of Scott Simon’s radio interview with Lorrie Moore: ‘Lorrie Moore On Writing And A ‘Very Crowded’ Life’ on NPR,
5 September 2009.
   
Glen Weldon’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘Moore’s Hallmark Mix Of Wit, Heartache in ‘Gate” on NPR, 5 September 2009.
   
Geeta Sharma Jensen interviews Lorrie Moore: ‘No longer an exile’ in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, 5 September 2009.
   
Anna Mundow interviews Lorrie Moore: ‘Wry, young everywoman in 9/11 era’ in The Boston Globe, 6 September 2009.
   
Tom Alesia interviews Lorrie Moore: ”Gate’ expections’ at Madison.com, 6 September 2006.
   
Tom Nissley’s interview with Lorrie Moore at Omnivoracious,
8 September 2009.
   
Lisa Moore’s review of A Gate at the Stairs in The Globe and Mail,
9 September 2009.
   
Megan O’Grady interviews Lorrie Moore at Vogue Daily’s ‘People Are Talking About’, 10 September 2009.
   
Maureen Corrigan’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘Wonder, Bemusement Reign in Moore’s ‘Gate” at NPR, 11 September 2009.
   
Amy Hanridge reviews A Gate at the Stairs at Bookslut,
September 2009.

Reading

 
    
     
Edited by Sophy Kohler (who is also the Cape Assistant Editor of BOOK SA), Imago publishes poetry, short stories and creative essays by University of Cape Town past and present students and staff. The journal is designed and produced by Sophy Kohler and Electric Book Works.
    
Issue 1 includes contributions by Simon Abbott, Diane Awerbuck, Leila Bloch, Kyle Fullerton, John Higgins, Karen Jennings, Matthew Kalil, Jordan Kantey, Matthew Koehorst, Sophy Kohler, Emma Lombard, Peter Merrington, Masande Ntshanga, Redvers, Farrah Schwab, Oliver Strang and Nick Wicht.
    
Email queries to imago.journal@gmail.com.

An interview with Tom Chivers

 
    
Tom Chivers was born in 1983. A writer, editor and promoter, he is Director of live literature organisation Penned in the Margins, Co-Director of London Word Festival and Associate Editor of international journal Tears in the Fence. In 2008 he was the first ever Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London. In September 2009 BBC Radio 4 broadcast his documentary about the poet Barry MacSweeney.
     
His first collection, How To Build A City, was published by Salt in 2009. A sequence of poems, The Terrors, has appeared as a limited edition chapbook from Nine Arches Press, described by Iain Sinclair as ‘dark London history, dredged and interrogated’.
    
         
Tom, what did you enjoy about studying Medieval English Literature at Oxford?
      
Grappling with medieval literature at university was an extraordinary privilege, but a slog too. I had to learn Old English (Anglo-Saxon) from scratch and even some of the Middle English dialects are pretty demanding. Beowulf, Pearl, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, most of Chaucer and countless other texts have really nourished my love of language, of eccentricity, humour and the exotic. My final year dissertation was entitled ‘Literary Practice in Late Medieval London’ and certainly extended the depth of my knowledge of and interest in London history. My thesis proposed that the socio-political conditions of the city at that time (1350-1500) created a peculiarly heightened sense of textual anxiety. I think we’re going through something similar now, with the internet, blogging, e-books and the rest.
      
Salt recently published your Crashaw Prize-winning collection, How To Build A City. How did you decide upon the title?
      
How To Build A City is the title of the longest piece in the book, a prose narrative I sometimes refer to as a kind of failed travelogue to the East End. Initially it appeared as an A3 poster pull-out in the underground literary magazine The Edgeless Shape – if I remember correctly, one of the editors, Caleb Klaces, came up with the title during a conversation at his kitchen table!
     
The volume is divided into two parts.  How did you order the poems?
     
With difficulty. I knew I wanted the title piece in the middle, the sequence of fragments ‘Thom, C & I’ at the end, and some short poems at the beginning. The rest just fell into place during the editing process. The first part of the book focuses on the city; the second part is more of a miscellany, with poems set in Israel, Nepal and the Peak District.
     
     
Tell me about your relationship with London and, in particular, the East End?
      
I was born and raised in South London but have lived in the East End for the past five years. I identify with the city very strongly. I suppose it’s a kind of pride, but not a static, smug sense of belonging but a flawed, fluid impulse to describe the urban environment. Or rather, to evoke and work-out my subjective relationship with that environment. I don’t believe in a poetry that speaks truths or captures a knowable ‘reality’. I am suspicious of those who do. I admire the Futurists, the way they engaged with the speed and ruthless modernity of urbanism. I don’t care much for their decline into low-level Fascism, however.
      
When I first moved to the East End I felt as if I had betrayed my roots south of the river. I know that sounds pompous, but hey … It’s a very strange area. It’s a terminus zone for journeys of exile: French Huguenots, Russian Jews, Bengalis, Somalis. I live on a historic street market, reputedly where cockney rhyming slang was invented. That might sound romantic and sometimes it is, but usually it’s just very loud. I don’t get much sleep.
     
    
Which local East End haunts would you recommend to a first-time visitor?
     
The whole area around Spitalfields is fascinating, although I would recommend avoiding the rather mawkish Jack the Ripper tours. The tiny alleys off Middlesex Street are worth hunting down, as well as the grand Georgian houses on Fournier, Princelet and Wilkes Streets. Further south, near the Tower of London, is one of the most beautiful and undiscovered buildings in the city: Wilton’s Music Hall. So much of the East End, particularly around the Docks, was destroyed during the Blitz, so it’s a blessing this crumbling gem is still here.
     
Can you briefly describe your chapbook, The Terrors?
      
The Terrors is a sequence of ‘imagined emails’ written to inmates at London’s notorious Newgate Prison between 1700 and 1740. Still with me? Good. The poems steal from various sources including The Newgate Calendar, a popular anthology of prison tales which combines celebrity, voyeurism and moral snobbery with shameless gore. I’ve incorporated some of the tone and language of the original, as well as oblique references to modern places of terror, such as Abu Ghraib and the Big Brother house.
      
     
As director of Penned in the Margins, you promote live literature in the city. Is the spoken word scene thriving in London?
     
Yes, thriving and surviving! The last five or six years has seen a genuine revival in interest in spoken word, and a lot of energy has been generated by independent promoters. The extent to which that revival will extend beyond transitory media attention and occasional culture industry buy-in is yet to be decided. But I am personally excited about what is being written, read and performed. I see my role as an instigator of activity and nurturer of talent. I’m in it for the long haul.
     
Penned in the Margins has also published anthologies, Generation Txt and City State: The New London Poetry, as well as full collections by David Caddy, Tamsin Kendrick, Ross Sutherland, Stephanie Leal and Sarah Hesketh.  Does conflict exist between your work as an editor and your own writing?  How compatible are the two?
     
That’s a probing question indeed. Speaking frankly, there are some ways in which my work as an editor/promoter has actually stymied my own creativity. But now I’ve had my first collection published, I feel more justified in carving out time to write. In general I’m concerned with drawing a distinct line between my professional work and my writing, but that line is often blurrier than I’d like. I’m lucky enough to work with writers who inspire and influence me – Iain Sinclair, Ross Sutherland, James Wilkes, et al. Being a poet also helps me edit other people’s work as I hope to bring sensitivity and attention to language to the process.
         
Would you name a few of your favourite poetry collections? Why are they important to you?
    
The Book of Demons by Barry MacSweeney for its passion, dark comedy and jagged edge. Seamus Heaney’s North for the visceral language and for risk. The wildly musical poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins have been an inspiration (as well as Alice Oswald, whose first two books channel that music brilliantly); I connect with the humour of Ashbery and the controlled energy of the New York poets, as well as the relentless innovation of Allen Fisher, Geraldine Monk, and others. Of more recent volumes, D.S. Marriott’s Hoodoo Voodoo takes some beating for its haunting evocation of the Afro-Diaspora experience. I think Chris McCabe is mining some important veins too.
    
Thank you for your time, Tom.
  
Read more about Tom and How To Build A City here.
    
Follow Tom’s blog, this is yogic.
 
Read more from Tom at the Londonist and Gists and Piths. Tomorrow, he’ll stop by Baroque in Hackney and on Friday he’ll visit Mercy Recommends.

Jane Hirshfield on not writing

 
“Any time I’m not writing (which of course means most of the time) finding my way to a new poem feels entirely impossible. There have been many times in my life when I’ve gone months without writing. This happens frequently enough that I’ve come to think of them as necessary fallows, from which I often emerge with an altered set of poetic energies.”
  
- Jane Hirshfield, MiPoesias interview (2005)

Sarah Hills’ Floral Planet

 
“Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.”

- John Burnside

 

 

 

 

 

 

Siriol Troup’s Beneath the Rime

      
The Final Stretch
Siriol Troup
   
Having used dogs to haul their sledges over the pack ice towards the North Pole, Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen finally reached open water on August 6th 1895, with only two dogs left.
    
Lift your head from the snow, Kaifas,
this is the final stretch. One hundred
and forty-six days, over six hundred
miles on the ice. Tomorrow
at the glacier’s edge there will be open
water and the plash of little waves
against canvas. The sledges will fall
silent, the kayaks will dance like Samoyeds.
   
Bear blood on the wind, a wounded
bear-cub lowing in the distance, no cartridge
to spare for his pain. His wails track us
across the floe, a bitter requiem
for the fresh meat in our gut. Do you
remember, Kaifas, how this journey
began? The market at Berezov,
the stink of reindeer skins and brandy,
   
the Ostiaks in their reincalf caps
bartering for dogs? How far we have come
since then, following the twisted line
of lichen across the Urals
to the frozen lanes of this white world.
Forty we were at the beginning,
beautiful dogs, thick coats, pricked ears, bright
eyes, ready for anything. Now we are two,
   
Kaifas and Suggen, high-priest and thug,
waiting under the dark water-sky
while our masters wave their hats and celebrate
with chocolate. So many deaths, and I
have watched them all: the ones I barely knew
who strangled on their ropes; my brother
Gammelen taken by a bear; poor Job, poor
Fox, torn into pieces by the other dogs,
    
Livjaegeren felled by Johansen’s spear,
his skinned flesh thrown to us for supper;
Katta, Kvik, Baro, Klapperslangen,
Potifar … I have sat by their corpses
and waited for their souls to fly up
from this hostile land towards the forests
of Siberia where the earth is soft
and wolves howl louder than the Arctic wind.
    
Now we have served our purpose. See, Kaifas,
how the sky fills with birds – little auks,
skuas, kittiwakes, fulmars, ivory gulls,
terns tacking through the mist like prayers.
Bear-breath puckers the snow-drifts, the air
is brackish with seal-fume. We face
each other’s masters, they cannot face
their own. Two shots – two easy deaths –
   
but who will watch our corpses on this last
sheet of floating ice while they set off
in their swift kayaks, paddling towards the land?
   
   
Wall
Siriol Troup
  
All evening there were rumblings: my father
sweating in black tie, my mother snared
in a cocktail frock that swished like a fan.
Even the garden ants were playing up,
pouring from cracks in the lawn
with rustling wings pinned to their metal backs.
  
I put on my new petticoat and climbed
over our fence into the wood. A bristling
of needles, the chill of pine; arrows carved
in the bark, leaking a sour grey sap.
I knew I must follow the signs or be bundled
into the oven, eaten by witches, trapped
  
forever in the fairy-tale. But it was hard to keep
my head while night-owls thrummed like tanks
and waves of thunder boomed through the dark
like guns. My feet were numb, my hem was ripped,
the bread behind me on the path blew away
where it fell, a gust of silver crumbs.
  
We woke next day to road blocks and barbed wire,
a twitching of commentators and politicians.
No one had planned to build a wall, they said,
though it was obvious to any child
that wolves had turned at dawn into Alsatians,
masking their snarls and growls with doggy smiles.
  
  
Published in Beneath the Rime (Shearsman Books, 2009).
   
   
Read more about Siriol and Beneath the Rime here.
   
Order Beneath the Rime.
   
Read ‘Willow Pattern’ at Carrie Etter’s blog.
  
Read ‘Flint, Rime, Paint: An Interview with Siriol Troup’ at
Andrew Philip’s blog, Tonguefire.
   
Read more of Siriol’s poems at poetry pf and The Poem.

Claire Crowther’s The Clockwork Gift

  
   
Abuelita
Claire Crowther
  
Praise to the grandmother high on a balcony.
Its wearied fencing shuts space into miles.
She scrubs a coconut shell.
Pours dirty water over a herb pot.
Dust from black deposits under her feet blow
towards a terracotta emperor astride
a vent rattling out hot air.
She varnishes her hundredth soap dish
while seven floors below, white van roofs
lie like water lilies and glittering gems
of cars are packed with crystalline couples.
 
I praise the turret she hangs on.
Gardenless, it humbles the low villas,
the opal-crusted scarab beetles on wheels.
  
  
Outside the Beauty School
Claire Crowther
  
Twilight Hour for Senior Customers.
The trees turn, in a May
that pulls their branches gently inside out,
and paints charcoal bark with green polish.
 
While trees think they’re not trunk-stopped
on one spot, it is as good a season as any
for wings to pulse, swollen reddish-pink;
for a heart to rise to it, float up and beat in the wind.
  
  
Published in The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman Books, 2009).
  
 
Read more about Claire and The Clockwork Gift here.
   
Order The Clockwork Gift.
   
Visit Claire’s website.
   
Read ‘Petra Genetrix’ on Carrie Etter’s blog.
   
Read Rob A. Mackenzie’s review at Surroundings.
   
Read Sophie Mayer’s review at Delirium’s Library.

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Dark Art

Jacqueline Saphra

    
The Dark Art
Jacqueline Saphra
  
I once knew a wife with rattling bones,
whose face was made of rice cakes
whose blood was made of consommé
whose skin was hard as eggshell.
There was no melting her.
Her child swallowed nothing
but greens and goat’s milk;
he was spindly and failed to thrive.
    
I once knew a wife, plump as a doughnut
with buttered hands and a floury lap
whose babies always wanted more.
Her sighs weighed heavy on the rolling pin,
her crusts were never tender,
there was fury in her kneading;
her loaves would take on air and multiply;
her children grew too fat.
    
I once knew a pitiless wife
who smelled of peach and salt
who warmed her skin like a caramel glaze.
She kept a secret book of recipes,
lured her husband with a calculated sauce,
then killed him slowly
with foie gras, double cream and hollandaise.
    
    
Visit Jacqueline’s website.
    
Order Jacqueline’s pamphlet, Rock’n'Roll Mamma (Flarestack Publishing, 2008).

Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder

 

  
“My way of finding a place in this world is to write one.”
  
- Barbara Kingsolver, from ‘Stealing Apples’, Small Wonder: Essays (Harper Perennial, 2003)

Eavan Boland, from ‘Letter to a young woman poet’

  
“Occasionally I see myself, or the ghost of myself, in the places where I first became a poet. On the pavement just around Stephen’s Green for instance, with its wet trees and sharp railings. What I see is not an actual figure, but a sort of remembered loneliness. The poets I knew were not women: the women I knew were not poets.  The conversations I had, or wanted to have, were never complete.
  
Sometimes I think of how time might become magical:  How I might get out of the car even now and cross the road and stop that young woman and surprise her with the complete conversation she hardly knew she missed.  How I might stand there with her in the dusk, the way neighbours stand on their front steps before they go in to their respective houses for the night: half-talking and half-leaving.”
  
- Eavan Boland, from ‘Letter to a young woman poet’

A Drakensberg Weekend

 

 

 

Liz Gallagher’s The Wrong Miracle

  
Spring the Life Fandango
Liz Gallagher
 
I want something and there are twinges in my heart.
My heart twinges so badly that I fear the act of dropping
 
down dead before I get what I want. How is that for
momentum or for a god that has the sauciest way of telling
 
me that I have pushed the boat out too far, I have let
the boat land with a splash and a hoot and I am left in mid
 
ocean without a paddle – the paddle they had warned me
about, the paddle that takes on a life of its own and even beats
  
me over the head in my dreams to make me wake
up in the middle of the night with a bunch of hair stuck in my
  
mouth and my cat licking the back of my hand, frantically
reaching a high meter of lickability that says the big gong is
  
going to gong and tell me Time’s Up. I’d hoped to never want
something as badly as I want this – all the karma and jinxing
  
in the world could take it from me with one loose crack
of the whip. I could be sent marching the long way home
  
without the thing I want badly tucked up in my inside
pocket near my heart, no, on my heart, which now has stopped
  
twanging and is doing a la-la-la beat. It is not about wanting
to hold your hand nor about shaking all over, it’s about seeing
 
a tiny dream, like a foamy insole for a favourite winter
boot (a size too big), become something I can lay
myself on and spring, spring, spring the life fandango.
 
 
from The Wrong Miracle (Salt Publishing, 2009).
  
Read more about Liz and The Wrong Miracle here.
  
Visit Liz’s blog.

Scottish poet Rob A. Mackenzie interviewed on his De-Cabbage Yourself! tour

 
   
Rob A. Mackenzie was born and brought up in Glasgow.  He received a law degree from Aberdeen University and then abandoned the possibility of significant personal wealth by switching to theology at Edinburgh University.  He wrote over seven hundred songs and doubled on guitar and saxophone for cult art-rock bands Pure Television and Plastic Chicken.  Despite airplay on Radio Scotland and a rash of gigs in tiny Glasgow pubs, he failed miserably to achieve rock stardom.  He spent a year in Seoul, eight years in a Lanarkshire housing scheme, five years in Turin, and now lives in Edinburgh with his wife and daughter where he organises the Poetry at the Great Grog reading series by night and works as a Church of Scotland minister by day.  His pamphlet collection, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005.  The Opposite of Cabbage was published this year by Salt Publishing .  His poems, articles and criticism have featured in many literary publications over the last decade or so.  He is an associate editor with Magma magazine. He blogs at Surroundings and at the Magma blog.
    
Rob, will you describe the Glasgow of your childhood?  What were the main social, political and cultural influences of your youth?
    
I lived in the south-west of the city.  Like most boys, I was a football fanatic.  My great uncle took me to games (I maybe won’t mention which team) and I played for my Boys Brigade team until I became a teenager and left the BB.  I was a chess fanatic and played for an under-18 team when I was 12.  I also learned the bagpipe and entered many competitions.  A big change took place when I turned 15 or so.  I dropped the bagpipe in favour of the guitar and started a band.  Glasgow briefly became the centre of everything that was happening in UK music during the 80s.  Indie pop music, particularly the jangly guitar variety, was vital to me.  I sat in my bedroom and listened to The Smiths, Orange Juice and Josef K.  I watched Woody Allen movies and read Graham Greene novels.  I guess I was typical of a certain type of teenager – the kind who wears black clothes and finds solace in Joy Division lyrics.  I might have had better fun hanging around outside the chip shop and going to parties, but it’s too late now.
      

North view from Seoul Tower. Photograph by David Gómez-Rosado used under a Creative Commons License.

    
You spent a year in Seoul.  Would you recount something of that experience?
      
It was a great experience, from 1989 to 1990.  I studied Korean liberation theology, taught English, and generally had a great time meeting people and travelling around a country many people would never think of going to.  I loved the food, the friendliness of the people, the clamour of the city, the maccoli houses (maccoli is a Korean alcoholic drink, made from rice, more like beer than wine) and the beauty of the countryside.  The country was a still a little unstable, despite 1988’s democratic election, and there were protests daily on the streets.  The college where I was studying was shut down for two months due to student unrest.  There was often tear gas in the air and I learned to carry a hanky around with me to cover my nose and eyes, just in case.  But people, especially young people, seemed positive about the future and were excited over the new freedoms.  They wanted to talk all the time about politics, the west, and Korean identity.  When I returned to Scotland, people seemed really jaded and cynical in comparison, and I often wonder whether Koreans have become similarly cynical over the last twenty years or not.
     
Later, you moved to Turin for five years.  Has living in other countries, among different cultures and languages, affected your writing and the way you see the world?  Has moving around the world been beneficial for you?
     
That’s hard to know.  I’ve enjoyed the experiences I’ve had living abroad.  It’s widened my social and cultural experience, helped me understand what it’s like to live as a foreigner, and introduced me to some great people.  It also, perhaps, gives me a particular perspective on Scotland.  I can look at how things are done here and compare it to other places.  I’ve no excuses when I’m small-minded.  Of course, there are strengths to living in the same place for an entire life as well.
      

Portici di Piazza Vittorio, Turin. Photograph by fededotcom used under a Creative Commons License.

    
You’re the organiser of Poetry at the Great Grog in Edinburgh.  Tell me about the history and some of the highlights of the reading series.  How does a Great Grog poetry evening unfold?
     
It began when Scottish poet, Roddy Lumsden, who lives in London, asked me to organise a venue for him to read in during a trip to Edinburgh.  I found the Great Grog Bar and decided afterwards that I could do it more often.  It’s now developed into a monthly series – three or four poets read each time.  The event has recently moved from the Great Grog to the Jekyll & Hyde Bar, which suits the readings better, and the event is now called ‘Poetry at the…’.  Poets read for 15 to 20 minutes with a short break after each reading.  There are no gimmicks, no bells and whistles – just quality poems.  As organiser, I wouldn’t want to pick out highlights.  I’m grateful to everyone who has read.  Really, there have been no poor readings at all and I hope that continues.
    
The Guardian is currently running a series called Writers’ Rooms.  Will you describe your creative space?
    
My office is chaotic.  I don’t have enough space on my bookcase.  Books and CDs are spread all over the place in no particular order.  In one corner is my computer, where I tend to write.  At another wall, there’s a desk, which is rarely free from clutter.  That’s dominated by my day job – notes, admin, forms to fill in, stuff I need to read for professional reasons.  Copies of The Opposite of Cabbage lie morosely in a box on the floor.  Pictures drawn by my seven-year-old daughter adorn the walls.  A naked bulb hangs from the ceiling.  There are no curtains or blinds at the window, which overlooks my neighbour’s garden.  As I write this, their washing is being soaked by a sudden downpour…
     

Rob Mackenzie photographed by Gerry Cambridge.

    
How transformative has fatherhood been for you?  Has it made you feel differently about yourself?  Has it changed your outlook on life?
    
I don’t think it’s possible to exaggerate how much becoming a parent changes a life.  Everything begins to revolve around your children.  This is made more complicated for my wife and I because my daughter is autistic.  She is extremely intelligent, with unbelievable memory, sight, hearing etc, but she also has real difficulties, especially in social situations.  One thing I realised quickly was how few resources are directed to the condition compared to many other disabilities.  We spend a lot of time agitating for support and help, often being met with official indifference and excuses.  We get the feeling that countries such as Australia and (to an extent) the USA are far more geared up to deal with autism, although I could be wrong.
    
I don’t feel that children and young people are valued much in the UK at the best of times compared to, for example, Italy.  I doubt I would have been as aware of this if I hadn’t been a parent.  And is the UK the only country in the world where it’s actually cool to be apathetic?  I think that’s because deliberate apathy is only a short step from helplessness.  Having a child means I can’t afford to be apathetic.
     

The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt Publishing, 2009)

     
Could you name a few of your favourite books?  Why are they important to you?
     
I’ll stick to five, otherwise I could go on forever.  Tomorrow, I’d probably choose different books.  In no particular order:
    
Harmonium by Wallace Stevens:  His debut collection from 1921.  It’s like a foundation for me when I come to write. Nothing has been easily won or thoughtlessly written.  I return to this collection periodically to remind myself what poetry can be.
    
The Truth of Poetry by Michael Hamburger:  on one level, an international overview of 20th century poetry but, on another, an uncompromising and visionary view of what poetry has been and could be.  Warning: this book may change the way you see every poem you read or write.
    
Black Sea by Neal Ascherson:  ostensibly a chronicle of the history, culture and people of the Black Sea region, this fascinating book delves into deep questions of human identity.  Ascherson shows how past events in this region resonate powerfully in the present day.  It’s also terrific writing.
    
Jesus and Judaism by E.P. Sanders:  I appreciate heavyweight, well written, impeccably researched theology, and this is one of the most interesting books I’ve read.  The book questions and revises received opinion but, unlike populist books on Christianity, knows what it’s talking about.
     
Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann:  can’t recommend this book of poems enough.  One of the best poets of the 20th century’s tail-end?  I think so.
     
*
     
Read more about The Opposite of Cabbage.
    
Visit Rob’s blog, Surroundings.
    
If you haven’t been following Rob’s book tour and want to catch up on his interviews, do check out his previous hosts.  
    
Rob’s next tour stop is Nic Sebastian’s Very Like A Whale on
10 August 2009.  See you there.

Entering the Mind of Poetry

 
   
“Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections – language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who and what we are.  It begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration.”
  
- Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperPerennial, 1998)

Hazel Frankel on Counting Sleeping Beauties

 
Hazel Frankel lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, close to where she was born.  She is an artist, calligrapher and teacher, currently registered for a doctorate in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.  A collection of poetry, Drawing from Memory, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2007.  Counting Sleeping Beauties (Jacana, 2009) was shortlisted for the 2006/07 European Union Literary Award.
  
Hazel writes:
   
“When I began writing, I had no intention of writing a novel – I didn’t know I could.  I wrote small vignettes that were poems in prose, but when I gathered these together they were like beads, jewels waiting to be strung.
  
Spanning the pogrom years in Lithuania and 1950s South Africa, Counting Sleeping Beauties weaves a delicate tale of despair, loss, love and attachment to place.  It evokes the post-war years in heartbreaking detail, tracing relationships within an extended family and their struggles with guilt and grief.
 
A multigenerational story, the Jewish family is central to the narrative.  Its values are explored through the voices of the bobba, Leah, the mother Susan, the young girl, Hannah, and the extended family member, the domestic worker, Sina.  It blends South African histories and cultures using a polyglot of Yiddish, Sotho, Afrikaans and English to build the characters and express their viewpoints.
 
My main impetus was to uncover how the characters were affected differently by one critical event and how this complicated their relationships.  I worked outwards from this kernel and framed it with a narrative that begins in the present, returns to the past and concludes in the present.  Isolation is an important theme, as the characters never communicate their feelings or opinions with each other.
 
Set in an era familiar to me, I drew on my memories of Johannesburg when the Wits Rag Parade with its floats and queen was an annual highlight, when the woman’s place was almost unarguably in the home and the domestic worker had no status or rights.  I enjoyed the explorations, making discoveries and learning as I went along.
 
The title of the book was initially Girl on a Swing, which indicates the pivotal role of the child, then Stone House, pointing to the overriding impact of place, but Counting Sleeping Beauties carries multiple meanings, and the way it combines with the cover image is both beautiful and sinister.
 
The novel has been many years in the making and has gone through numerous incarnations – originally there were six voices, two of whom were male.  This created a concatenation.  Instead, by focusing on the women I could emphasise the drama of the domestic.
 
Although I dreamed of being an artist, finding that I’m a writer is an unexpected delight.  The processes are not that dissimilar: one word, one sentence, one paragraph, one stroke at a time, a few minutes here or there may be enough to catch a thought or idea or image, each a link in an episode, a chapter, a painting.  In both writing and painting, nothing happens until there are marks on the page.”
  
*
  
Hazel’s exhibition of paintings opens at The Thompson Gallery, 78 3rd Avenue, Melville, Johannesburg, on Sunday, 2 August, at 15h30, where Counting Sleeping Beauties will be available.
  
Counting Sleeping Beauties will be launched at Exclusive Books, Sandton City, Johannesburg, on 11 August, 18h00 for 18.30.

C K Williams’s The Singing

 

    
I’ve been reading C K Williams’s ninth collection, The Singing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), for which he received the 2003 National Book Award.  The four part volume includes meditations on family, relationships, aging, mortality and bereavement.  The final section concerns terrorism, destruction and the nature of civilization.
   
I am awed by ‘The Hearth’, a reflection on war, moved by the tender ‘Elegy for an Artist’ dedicated to Tucson painter Bruce McGrew and, in the final stanza of ‘Lessons’ (previously published in Tin House), find five lines particularly striking in their honesty and simplicity:
   
” … And the way one can find oneself strewn
so inattentively across life, across time.
Those who touch us, those whom we touch,
we hold them or we let them go
as though it were such a small matter.”
   
There’s a flare of recognition every time I read these words.  This recognition, this resonance, this fleeting identification and connection with a stranger, is one of the reasons I read poetry.

Henry Miller, small stones and the alchemy of awareness

   
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
  
- Henry Miller
   
It’s lovely to have a small stone up at Fiona Robyn’s a handful of stones.
  
Fiona describes a ’small stone’ as “a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. There are no strict rules for what makes a piece of writing a small stone, as there are for forms such as haiku. The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product – searching further will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.”
  
Read more about writing your own small stones here.

Paul Stevens

 

Paul Stevens

  
Paul Stevens was born in Yorkshire, England but lives in Australia.  He has an Honours degree in English, teaches Literature and edits The Flea, The Shit Creek Review and The Chimaera.
  
 
The Paragon of Plants
Paul Stevens
  
Eye to eye we track, grown heliotropic,
And sunlight ripples ticklish on our skin;
Your touch on my touch, phototactic, sticks.
  
We bathe in energy, our element:
Sky trickling liquid down bare branches,
Earth fingering upward through deep roots.
  
Now buds and foliage spring from manic limbs,
Hands metamorphose to the fruit they reach for:
Sense is exactly what sense apprehends,
  
And in this growth engrafts all difference
Of sex and soul, with scion cleaved to stock
And trunk to shaggy trunk. Swaying as one,
  
A paragon of plants, we rollick there,
Breathing light in, gasping out spicy air.
  
  
Previously published in Umbrella.

Wislawa Szymborska on inspiration

  
” … inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally.  There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits.  It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination.  It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions.  Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it.  Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity.  A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”
   
- Wislawa Szymborska, 1996 Nobel Lecture

Valeria Melchioretto’s The End of Limbo

 
  
Papal Blessings
Valeria Melchioretto
 
Airship Italia left Spitzbergen on 23rd of May, 1928
  
Hermetically-sealed matchboxes couldn’t save the holy mission,
sanctioned by Pope Pius XI to bless the very tip of the Pole.
One morning in May, the Zeppelin reached that point
where meridians touch like segments of a forbidden fruit.
The crew threw out a blessed crucifix, some coins and a flag.
It showered the snow below like a Pentecostal sacrament.
They dumped all that was sacred upon the melting desert.
 
On their way south the airship crashed. Mayday signals
came out of the blue, stirred only silence and vanished.
They thought to be prepared for anything but never used
their ice axes. The windproof-overalls were worn by the wind
and the life jackets saved no one’s life. The Finnish shoes
didn’t carry them to Finland. After the virtuous artefacts
fell out of the window they clearly said adieu to salvation.
 
 
from The End of Limbo (Salt Publishing, 2007)
  
Read more about Valeria and The End of Limbo here.
  
Read Angel Dahouk’s Poetry Society interview with Valeria.

Sheenagh Pugh’s Later Selected Poems

 
  
The Bereavement of the Lion-Keeper
Sheenagh Pugh
 
for Sheraq Omar
 
Who stayed, long after his pay stopped,
in the zoo with no visitors,
just keepers and captives, moth-eaten,
growing old together.
 
Who begged for meat in the market-place
as times grew hungrier,
and cut it up small to feed him,
since his teeth were gone.
 
Who could stroke his head, who knew
how it felt to plunge fingers
into rough glowing fur, who has heard
the deepest purr in the world.
 
Who curled close to him, wrapped in his warmth,
his pungent scent, as the bombs fell,
who has seen him asleep so often,
but never like this.
 
Who knew that elderly lions
were not immortal, that it was bound
to happen, that he died peacefully,
in the course of nature,
 
but who knows no way to let go
of love, to walk out of sunlight,
to be an old man in a city
without a lion.
 
 
from Later Selected Poems (Seren, 2009).
  
Read more about Sheenagh’s Later Selected Poems.
  
Visit Sheenagh’s website.

Jane Hirshfield

 
“A good poem takes something you probably already know as a human being and somehow raises your capacity to feel it to a higher degree. It allows you to know your experience more intensely. When you meet your life in a great poem, it becomes expanded, extended, clarified, magnified, deepened in colour, deepened in feeling.”
 
- Jane Hirshfield

Sharks, Poets and other Endangered Species

 

  
On Thursday, 30 July 2009, the Two Oceans Aquarium, in collaboration with the UCT Writers Series, will present DEEP: A Night of Creative Currents featuring Sharks, Poets and other Endangered Species.  The event is in support of the Aquarium’s Adopt-a-School Programme.
  
Tickets cost R40.00 and include entrance to the Two Oceans Aquarium and a free glass of wine on arrival.  Fairview will present cheese and wine and a cash bar will be available. Art, and books from the Book Lounge, will be on sale.  Doors open at 18h30 with performances starting at 19h00.
  
*
  
Writers and poets have been inspired to speak and write in celebration and defence of the oceans.  In today’s rushed world there are fewer and fewer places available for contemplation and creativity, especially in cities.  Just as our creative spaces and practitioners are under threat, so too are our oceans and their creatures.  DEEP is an opportunity to celebrate the oceans and some of South Africa’s most creative artists.
  
Central to DEEP is the launch of Hyphen, a debut collection of poems by Tania van Schalkwyk, which is published by the UCT Writers Series.  Included in this collection are a number of poems inspired by the sea including ‘Siren Song’, ‘Abyss’, ‘Lionfish’ and ‘Water’.  Lindsey Collen, author of The Rape of Sita, Mutiny and Boy, and twice winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, Africa, said, “Tania van Schalkwyk’s poems are warm, sensuous memories that often shock and surprise at the same time … They are not just on inner space, but are poems of place, as they move from islands to the veld, from cities to the desert”.  No stranger to the Aquarium, having assisted with the launch of Shoreline Café, van Schalkwyk also curated DEEP in collaboration with Michelle Matthews of Electric Book Works.
  
The launch of Hyphen will be supported by a collection of three minute sea-inspired flash readings and performances by select poets and writers, including Gus Ferguson, Justin Fox, Sarah Lotz, Helen Moffett, Malika Lueen Ndlovu, Henrietta Rose-Innes and a collaborative piece by Toni Stuart, Michael Mwila Mambwe & James Jamala Safari.  The MC for the evening is the inimitable Suzy Bell; writer, columnist and pop culture aficionado.
  
Ferguson has had seven collections of poems and two books of cartoons published; Fox is deputy editor and senior photographer at Getaway magazine; Lotz is a scriptwriter-cum-krimi author with an insatiable greed for the macabre; Moffett has recently published her first collection of poems; Ndlovu is dedicated to creating indigenous multi-media works in line with her personal motto ” healing through creativity”; Rose-Innes won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2008; Stuart works with young people, using poetry as a means of self-expression; DRC born Mambwe’s has performed on various stages from the Cape Town Book Fair to the Africa Centre’s Badilisha Poetry Exchange and Jamala Safari’s earliest artistic exposure came in the form of theatre at a young age in Bukavu, South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
  
These well-known word-artists have a wealth of performance experience and publications behind their names and will give voice to the ocean’s deepest secrets.
  
Word art by Gabeba Baderoon, Gus Ferguson, Tania van Schalkwyk and others in The Vinyl Collection, will come to life against the backdrop of smaller exhibits in the Aquarium.  Baderoon is the author of three collections of poetry and was the recipient of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry in 2005.
  
The evening will also feature seven short films including three from the City Breath Project – Waitless, The Electrician and Omdat ek die stadsrumoer (Because I chose the city noise).  The writer of the latter film was blinded at age four, but at sixty-nine, still has vivid memories of visiting an aquarium.  A film, alpha, by Kai Lossgott, curator of the City Breath Project, will also be shown.  City Breath is an urban oral history video project which seeks to interrogate the official understandings of South African cities conveyed in television, film and other mass media.
  
Other film pieces include Umbilical Cord by poet/filmmaker Shelley Barry and Sea Orchestra and The Tale of How by the Blackheart Gang.  Barry’s films have been screened at major festivals and events around the world and The Tale of How has won numerous international awards, including “Best Independent Film” at the Bradford Animation Festival in London in 2006.
  
Artists Rebecca Townsend and Colwyn Thomas will show their work which will be available for purchase. Townsend works predominantly with glass and creates sculptural glass vessels that reveal the magic of the ordinary things we live with every day.  ‘Kelp’ by Thomas is a 12-part light-box installation which, according to Thomas, “is a rumination on some of the changes that take place when we grow up.”. Thomas is influenced by traditional and modern Japanese art and his works often show both humans and fish or animals in dreamscapes animated by trailing clouds, plants or jellyfish tendrils.
  
Local band Benguela will take to the stage against the spectacular backdrop of the I&J Predator Exhibit.  The trio, including Ross Campbell, Alex Bozas and Brydon Bolton, has played at many of the festivals around South Africa.  According to James Garner, “Benguela’s sound is an atmospheric, uncompromisingly adventurous fusion of constantly shifting elements…”  The name ‘Benguela’ is taken from the cold current running up the West Coast of southern Africa and reflects both the flowing nature of the music as well as being geographically representative of where the band came together and the climate in which they live.
  
Proceeds from DEEP will go towards the Aquarium’s Adopt-a-School Programme.  This programme provides the opportunity for children from previously disadvantaged schools to visit the Aquarium and to discover the wonders and beauty of the ocean and its inhabitants.  Such an opportunity can be a life-changing experience for these children and instill a deep and long-lasting appreciation for the oceans.
  
Tickets cost R40.00 and include entrance to the Two Oceans Aquarium and a free glass of wine on arrival.  Fairview will present cheese and wine and a cash bar will be available.  Art, and books from the Book Lounge, will be on sale.  Doors open at 18h30 with performances starting at 19h00.  For more information contact:
  
Helen Lockhart
Communications & Sustainability Manager
Two Oceans Aquarium
Tel: 021-418 3823
Email: helen.lockhart@aquarium.co.za
Website: www.aquarium.co.za

Tania van Schalkwyk’s Hyphen

 

  
Our Father
Tania van Schalkwyk
 
When you plunge your arms into the heavens unseen,
red-robed and lean, veins straining
to reach your god with this wafer –
all the women gathered want to fall on their knees
and pleasure you.
  
We clamber to receive Christ’s body from your beautiful hands,
naked and trembling, fingers touching
our lips, we kneel –
all us women tilt our heads back and offer
our belief to you.
  
We confess our sins to your body, hidden in darkness,
attention hovering between your imagined form
and the very real smell of you –
all us women who thirst for your blood, your gaze, forgiveness,
but mostly for the sacred in you.
  
We ask you to marry us,
to another man, another body, another life
and you oblige our wish, bless our union –
all us women get married, have babies, baptise our children
for the love of god in you.
  
We invite you to dinner at our family tables,
drink in your tales of redemption and duty
as you sip our wine, nibble our food, taste our hunger –
all us women watch you eat – and later
dream of being eaten by you.
  
  
Previously published in New Contrast
and included in Hyphen (The UCT Writers Series, 2009).
  
Read about Tania and Hyphen here.
   
For queries regarding Hyphen, please email:
info@electricbookworks.com.
   
Hyphen will be available on Amazon from mid-August 2009.
  

Photograph of Tania van Schalkwyk by Nicholas Percival

Eleanor Rees’s Andraste’s Hair

 

   
Andraste’s Hair
Eleanor Rees
   
- Andraste: Iceni goddess of war and victory.
   
   
In the woods they are burning her hair
                              three of them
they light it with a match
and she lets them
she lets them burn her hair.
   
Watches the ends smoulder.
Watches the ends curl her curls
curl up like leaves.
   
She lets them burn her hair.
There are long dark shadows
                    between trees
                    like corridors
blocked with boulders.
   
- The area is cordoned off. -
   
She let them burn her hair.
   
- The area is cordoned off. -
   
When the sun splits open
   
the gaps between trees
   
and the sun slices into the scene
   
they see:
   
that she let them burn her hair.
    
*
   
The light opens up the morning.
   
A plait lain out on the end of the bed
                                        like a rope
several metres long it hung there
swaying
                    tied with a yellow bow.
   
It belongs to no one now
lopped off at the nape of the neck.
   
The door is closed.
   
*
   
Arms raised to hug the sun
woman
                    eyes like sods
ratchet-nosed, craggy
hatchet arms creak and clank
   
lady
   
sleeping under sunless light
   
another sun gone
   
reaching obedient:  she dreams.
   
*
   
From among the ashes
from what had not burnt
gathered to a mass
of brown turf gathered
her hair
and carried
- a cloud in her arms -
and carried
to the river
her hair
to spread in the warp of water.
   
The light smooth and silting.
The forest behind -
remember
too much                    too much
dark cannot exist?
                    The sun swings to the right.
She went left
to the river
old dirt track
stepping over grass
hair taken down to depth.
   
In the forest they look for her.
   
Now,
   
she walks along the path by the river
her hair in her hands
to deliver
what had been taken
to the river
to the water
the smooth strand that curves its path
over the head of the hill.
Something subsides.
Something has passed.
   
Behind in the forest
in half dark heaving afternoon
they claw at earth
scratch around for a trace
                    and further
in the woods
search through evidence
make lists of explanations
make lists of reasons
for her absence.
   
The sun guides steps,
footfalls
imprint on soil.
    
*
   
It wasn’t about who was listening.
If anyone was listening
                         - to the song not the words -
speaking would mean silence
                         - dead ears dead ears -
but variation
the pull and placing
in a line brimmed to full
     with evocation
was almost love and almost listening.
    
Quiet response to quiet sound.
   
*
   
A song heard in the forest days later
   
burbled
   
made a young boy cry.
   
Wrapped round trees
stayed, not moving,
                                   just hung
a stopping place.
   
We could meet
in the woods by the river
stand eye to eye
in the stopping place
                   and wait
words curdling our bones
                    to stone
         be petrified
                                             in sound
a single drum beat, one long groan.
   
While she walks
a path behind her concertinas
each stride a fragile weight
that
  pushes up the earth,
turf over grass over turf.
   
   
Know how
it is now to be stone now
to know how to finish.
   
Listen, she’ll break you.
   
Will you follow?
   
   
from Andraste’s Hair (Salt Publishing, 2007).
    
Read more about Eleanor and Andraste’s Hair here.
    
Andraste’s Hair was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best
First Collection 2007.
    
Visit Eleanor’s website.
   
Eliza and the Bear, Eleanor’s forthcoming collection from Salt in October 2009, explores wildness and what it means to inhabit a body, what it means to be an animal with a sense of self. The poems circle the tensions between a domestic, communal experience of selfhood and the individual wild feminine of the “I” of the title poem. They explore love, longing and esire with unabashed imagination.

Gloria Anzaldúa

  
“I am a wind-swayed bridge, a crossroads inhabited by whirlwinds … You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web.
      Who, me confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.”
 
- Gloria Anzaldúa, from ‘La Prieta’

Barbara Smith’s Kairos

 
 
  
Roosters
Barbara Smith
 
My Granny used to soak the spuds too
making it easy to peel them later.
Part of morning’s ritual was topping
their pot with water. Later, after
fowl were fed and tae and bread were ate,
she’d peel them slowly, humming all the while
a medley of Moore’s Almanac songs.
  
Steeping my potatoes now, as she did,
brings her Four Green Fields down the years to me.
Scaly and red, these Roosters, instead of
her soft Queens; mine tattle of modern machinery,
long scars that I smooth away with a stainless
peeler. I split them with a long broad knife,
rinse them down and leave them by for dinner.
  
  
from Kairos (Doghouse Books, 2007).
  
Read more about Barbara here.
  
Order Kairos here.
  
Visit Barbara’s blog.

Laurie Byro’s The Bird Artists

 

 
Thanks to Pascale Petit, I’ve been introduced to Laurie Byro’s
The Bird Artists. 
  
  
Jane Eyre’s Daughter
Laurie Byro
  
I kept thinking I was Jane Eyre’s daughter.
I suspected my mother really wanted a son.
 
Fascinated with attics I foraged through chests
with breakable locks filled with baptism gowns,
 
sniffed among moth-balls for matchboxes
from exotic pool halls, hints of adoption papers.
 
I kept thinking I was Jane Eyre’s daughter, trying
to find myself in the travel section of the library
 
searching for a honeymoon in Katmandu.
St John bristled when I wanted our first dance
 
to be to the tune of Sexual Healing. Every one
broke off the engagement before the tickets’
 
non-refundable fee kicked in. I kept thinking
I was Jane Eyre’s daughter. Weddings
 
were unpleasant since I would rush in late,
panting “I object” for the sheer joy of seeing
 
horrified expressions, maids tearfully ringing
hands and not bells. Today as I left another
 
thwarted nuptial, four fine blackbirds watched me
from the wires which connected my rubber ball
 
heart to my deeply anticipated “his”. My mother,
Aunt Reed, dear crazy Bertha, and daddy
 
in his mourning coat: the grim four posed perfectly
still like chessmen while I crossed my bosom
 
which throbbed like the July sun and waited
with little patience for mother to play her next card.
 
 
from The Bird Artists.

Midsummer Nights

 

 
“For me, opera is a place where all the emotions can be fully felt yet safely contained. Certainly this has therapeutic value, but art is not therapy – at least not principally so: it is a profound engagement with life itself, in all its messiness, its glory, its fear, its possibility, its love.”
 
– Jeanette Winterson, Introduction to Midsummer Nights (Quercus Publishing, 2009)
 
In celebration of the Glyndebourne Festival of Opera’s 75th anniversary, British novelist Jeanette Winterson has compiled a collection of opera-inspired stories by contemporary writers. Contributors to Midsummer Nights include Alexander McCall Smith, Ali Smith, Andrew Motion, Andrew O’Hagan, Anne Enright, Colm Tóibín, Jackie Kay, Joanna Trollope, John Mortimer, Julie Myerson, Kate Atkinson, Kate Mosse, Lynne Truss, Marina Warner, Ruth Rendell, Sebastian Barry, Toby Litt and Jeanette Winterson.
 
Read Jeanette’s Midsummer Nights Introduction and story, ‘Goldrush Girl’.
 
Jeanette writes about the Glyndebourne experience for The Independent.
 
Read Lavinia Greenlaw’s review in The Financial Times.
 
Read Catherine Taylor’s review in The Sunday Times.

Consorting with Angels

  
“The woman who confesses is frequently read as testifying only to her anguish and her own “weakness”; she is simply revealing the awfulness of femininity which was known to be there all along, and which, in the most simplistic terms has led to her oppression in the first place. And it is here that we see the exact nature of the problem: for if the woman poet does remain silent, if the awfulness of her confessional truth is such that it will only oppress her further, she is left where she started and cannot speak at all. Alternatively, she can speak a version of self which also confirms a certain kind of femininity – that of beauty, passivity, orderliness and self-control – but which nevertheless fails to “tell it like it is”.” 
 
- Deryn Rees-Jones, Consorting with Angels: Essays on Modern Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 2005)
 
Read more about Deryn Rees-Jones, Consorting with Angels and Modern Women Poets, the companion anthology to Consorting with Angels.

Ouroboros Review, Issue Three

 
 
  
I’m delighted to have an interview with John Siddique and two poems from my forthcoming collection, The Suitable Girl, included in the third issue of poetry and art journal, ouroboros review. If you are interested, do take a look at the magazine here.
  
Contributors include John Siddique, Denise Duhamel, John Walsh, Susan Richardson, Karen Head, Matthew Hittinger, Dustin Brookshire, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Lorna Shaughnessy, Cheryl Snell, Carolee Sherwood and Joyce Ellen Davis, among others.

Seamus Heaney

 
” … Keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle wide, it’s time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo-soundings, searches, probes, allurements,
elver gleams in the dark of the whole sea.”
 
- Seamus Heaney, from ‘Station Island’

Zimbabwe thunder

  
Poet and performer, Jenni Nixon, lives in Sydney. She is a graduate of the Independent Theatre and worked as an actor for many years, touring with the Queensland Theatre Company. ‘Zimbabwe thunder’ is included in her recent performance poetry chapbook, Agenda (Picaro Press, 2009).
  
Zimbabwe thunder
Jenni Nixon
 
boy billionaires in Zimbabwe
can’t buy an egg
twenty-five billion Zim dollars
won’t buy a newspaper
 
King Despot is in his counting palace
counting all the bodies
ninety percent unemployment
amnesty to his henchmen
 
activism in a time of cholera
protest brings arrest
generals give the orders
BOOM BOOM go the guns
 
unpaid teachers cannot feed
or clothe themselves     schools close
distant thunder     river undercurrents
flow around rocks     over mud flats
  
locked away in stinking cells
dispossessed in land invasions
white farmers killed by looting
     ’war veterans’
  
land lies fallow
stagnant sewage and water
smoke rises on burning corpses
enter another medieval age
  
King Despot Mugabe’s birthday bash luxury
long silent queues register to vote
hope in Zimbabwe
change will come
  
Zambezi River
     deafening roar over the Falls
Mosi-oa-Tunya – ’smoke that thunders’
is the people’s voice
  
  
Published in Agenda (Picaro Press, 2009).
  
Read more about Jenni.

An Experiment in Criticism

 
“The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)”
 
- C S Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Familiar, a poetry postcard

  
  
  
Thank you to Alan James for the use of his photograph in our collaboration.

Pascale Petit

  
  
  
Pascale Petit has an interesting interview on her new blog.  Romanian MA student, Oana-Teodora Ionesco, interviews the French/Welsh poet about her latest collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale (Seren, 2008).
   
On her blog, Pascale has also posted photographs and accounts of her trips to Venezuela’s Lost World as well as an article about translating Yang Lian’s ‘The Valley and the End: A Story’.
   
For fans of Frida Kahlo, Pascale’s fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, is to be published in June 2010.
   
Read the interview by Oana-Teodora Ionescu here.
   
Visit Pascale’s blog and website.

Writing as Ritual

 
“An act of will that changed my life from that of a frustrated artist, waiting to have a room of my own and an independent income before getting down to business, to that of a working writer: I decided to get up two hours before my usual time, to set my alarm for 5:00 A.M. … Since that first morning in 1978 when I rose in the dark to find myself in a room of my own –  with two hours belonging only to me ahead of me, two prime hours when my mind was still filtering my dreams – I have not made or accepted too many excuses for not writing. This apparently ordinary choice, to get up early and to work every day, forced me to come to terms with the discipline of art.”
 
– Judith Ortiz Cofer, ‘5.00 A.M.: Writing as Ritual’

Lisa Jarnot and an animated poem

  
Watch the fun animated video of Lisa Jarnot’s ‘Poem Beginning With A Line From Frank Lima’.

Rob A. Mackenzie’s De-Cabbage Yourself! Tour

 

 
On 3 August 2009, peony moon is thrilled to be hosting Rob Mackenzie’s De-Cabbage Yourself! Tour. Rob’s collection, The Opposite of Cabbage, was published this year by Salt Publishing. 
 
Here’s what Bernadine Evaristo has to say about the volume:
  
“Rob A. Mackenzie’s vibrant, kaleidoscopic poetry displays a playful, witty and fertile imagination. But sometimes, just sometimes, it dips into a deep reflection on the frailty of our mortality such as in the exquisite poem, ‘In the Last Few Seconds’, which took my breath away.”
 
Read Barbara Smith’s review of The Opposite of Cabbage here.
   
The tour has already stopped at three destinations, so to catch up with Rob’s interviews take a look at the following blogs:
  
Nic Sebastian: Very Like A Whale
Marion McCready: Poetry in Progress
Ivy Alvarez: Dumbfoundry
  
The next stop on 22 June 2009 will be Nicolette Bethel’s Scavella’s Blogsphere.
  
For full tour details take a look at the De-Cabbage Yourself! Cyclone page and to read more about Rob and The Opposite of Cabbage visit his Salt author page. Do visit Rob’s blog, Surroundings, too.
 
See you on 3 August!
 

Cecilia Woloch

 
“I fall out the door on my way to you with the passionate suitcase that I’ve carried so long flapping its one broken arm in the breeze. It spills all the words in the street like coins. The words for desire and regret. I fall out the door on my way to you. The night slams shut. I don’t look back.”
 
- Cecilia Woloch, from ‘The Passionate Suitcase’
  (Late, BOA Editions, 2003)

Siri Hustvedt

 
“I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it’s better when they speak than when they don’t.”
 
- Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American (Sceptre, 2009)

Simon Freedman

    

Unfolding
Simon Freedman
 
On the empty desk
in the numb light
he shreds an origami bird
  
Walking home
he does his best
to lose his way on kindred streets.
  
Under Waterloo bridge
he fails to picture
the face of an old friend
  
while the crumpled drift recedes
into the squint
of the evening sun.
  
He cups his hands
a makeshift seashell
to sound the absent shore
 
on which he used to dream
priceless
in the vagrant winds. 
  
  
Forthcoming in South Bank Poetry Magazine.
  
Visit Simon’s website.

Louisa Adjoa Parker’s Salt-sweat & Tears

 

 
If I spin around and jump and shout
Louisa Adjoa Parker

for Rosina
 
if i spin around quickly
enough will i catch sight of you,
my ghost-sister, smiling behind me
before you fade like cotton in the sun?
if i jump, keep on jumping,
until my head just peeps
over the top of this world, will i
find myself staring into brown eyes
like mine? if i close my eyes and train
my ears to wring out miniuscule pieces
of forgotten sound from the past,
like splinters of glass, will i hear you
cry? if i shout your name, keep on shouting
will you hear, will you know
                           of my sorrow?
 
 
‘If I spin around and jump and shout’ is included in Salt-sweat & Tears (Cinnamon Press, 2007).
 
Purchase Salt-sweat & Tears from Cinnamon Press.
 
Read flash fiction from Catherine Smith, Hattie Ellis, Ros Barber and Louisa Adjoa Parker here.

Tim Wells’ Rougher Yet

   
  
A Ruffer Version
Tim Wells
 
That time in Efes, when the killer strolled in, I’m sure Mehmet saw it coming ‘cos he blanched, and his eyes moved from the door to the barman, then finally to the man. The gunman walked behind him, as he sat leaning back in his chair, pulled slightly back and popped him in the head.
               I’d thought a skull would burst from a shot, but it was quite the opposite. As Umit said, “There never was much in that head of his.”
               No explosion, no fountain, no split peach. Just a brief spray of blood. I remember the claret splashing the ear of a girl at the next table. Just that effusive spurt and then a dribble. He slowly leant to one side and settled. I’ve slept drunk at that self-same table many a time and looked deader.
               The quiet was disturbing. Everyone’s Thursday night after-hours teetering on a chasm of murder, police and questions, questions, questions.
               The assassin held the gun at his side, gave an embarrassed smile and said, “Sorry. So sorry, everybody.” With that, he calmly walked the length of the bar, around the side of the pool tables, and was gone into the night.
               His calm lingered in the room for a few moments. It was only when a chap knocked over a glass as he fumbled for a drink that the first scream erupted.
 
Anyway, as I told the Old Bill, I was in the toilet when it happened.
 
 
‘A Ruffer Version’ is included in Rougher Yet (Donut Press, 2009).
 
Read more about Tim.
 
Read Heather Taylor’s interview with Tim here.
 
Read Anna Goodall’s interview with Tim in The Guardian.

Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Selected Poems

 
 
  
Song of the Nymphomaniac
Fiona Pitt-Kethley
 
From Baffin Bay down to Tasmania
I’ve preached and practised nymphomania,
Had gentlemen of all complexions,
All with varying erections:
Coalmen, miners, metallurgists,
Gurus, wizards, thaumaturgists,
Aerial artists, roustabouts,
Recidivists and down-and-outs,
Salesmen, agents, wheeler-dealers,
Dieticians, nurses, healers,
Surgeons, coroners and doctors,
Academics, profs and proctors,
Butchers, bakers, candle-makers,
Airmen, soldiers, poodlefakers,
Able seamen, captains, stokers,
Tax-inspectors, traders, brokers,
Preachers, canons, rural deans,
Bandy cowboys fed on beans,
Civil-servants, politicians,
Taxidermists and morticians.
I like them young, I like them old,
I like them hot, I like them cold.
Yet, I’m no tart, no easy lay –
My name is Death. We’ll meet one day.
  
  
‘Song of the Nymphomaniac’ is included in Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Selected Poems (Salt Publishing, 2008).
 
Read more about Fiona and her Selected Poems here.
 
Visit Fiona’s blog.

A S Byatt

 
“Now and then there are readings which make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark …”
 
- A S Byatt, Possession

Anne Berkeley’s The Men from Praga

    
   
Anne writes: 
   
“As well as on recent 50p coins, Britannia used to appear on the old British pennies. The influence of society’s, and the state’s, demands on individual identity is something that has troubled me for many years.”
  
Britannia
Anne Berkeley
  
Careful not to soil her dainty Ferragamos,
the grand piano moves discreetly through the herbaceous border,
a sheaf of cuttings in her handbag:
a cardinal, the Queen’s gynaecologist, a dozen QCs.
  
She has come for the music, of course,
but the atmosphere’s lovely, such elegant lampshades.
There is always some Government in the garden
where the sheep are kept in their rightful place
safely grazing beyond the haha.
  
There are twenty-two minutes before curtain up.
The wind is cold, there’s a whimper of rain
but the picnic must go on and be such fun:
an open window serves coloratura with paté de foie gras.
Everyone has a rug for their knees, and she reminds us
again of her night at the Albert Hall,
the swallowing blue of a million delphiniums.
We can almost believe in her cloak-pin and shield.
  
It’s not what it was, she says: the vulgar new building,
every year the path to the lily pond more overgrown –
a negotiation of unripened blackberries and birtwistle.
Hemlines are rising; already accountants wash up on the lawn.
  
Even today, out at sea with Johnny Foreigner,
I hear her triumphant arpeggios over the waves,
the Broadwood’s fin patrolling round the violins.
  
  
‘Britannia’ is published in The Men from Praga
(Salt Publishing, 2009).
  
Read more about Anne and The Men from Praga here.
 
Visit Anne’s blog here.

Charles Péguy

 
“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”
 
- Charles Péguy

Tom Chivers’ How to Build a City

 
 
  
Your Name Has Been Randomly Selected
Tom Chivers
 
Pennie Rakestraw emailed details of my order;
she claimed it helped performance in the bedroom.
 
Freuden Ginnery agreed and lodged himself between
the hard drive and the fan. He squeaks his sales pitch
 
on reboot. Morace Shakoor was kind enough to send me
excerpts from Victorian novels (he knows my taste),
 
cut up and reassembled as techno-futuristic porno;
all tongue and motor, bonnets upturned in the mud.
 
I let the Trojan in. I’m nice like that. Besides,
I got the note from Hartshorne Settlemire,
 
installed the relevant import hooks and re-subscribed;
ham, bacon and eggs (my account is blocked)
 
converted to plain text by Waynick Quibodeaux,
who knows a thing or two about naming.
   
  
From How to Build a City (Salt Publishing, 2009).
  
Read more about Tom and How to Build a City here.
  
Visit Tom’s blog.
  
Launch
 
How to Build a City (Tom Chivers), Unexpected Weather (Abi Curtis) and The Migraine Hotel (Luke Kennard) will be launched on Saturday, 13 June (8pm), at The Slaughtered Lamb, 34-35 Great Sutton Street, London, EC1V 0DX. Entrance is free. Ross Sutherland will be your compere for the evening. The reading will begin at 8.30pm.

Alison Brackenbury

  
Alison writes:
 
“This poem is loosely based on the life of Francesca Cuzzoni, one of Handel’s most difficult divas, who became a factory worker.”

  
The button factory in Bologna
Alison Brackenbury
 
I throw the final buttons in the tray.
They rattle, bone on bone, the hollow day,
The dusk I drink in. No one knows me here.
I knot my rosy shawl. Strip twenty years:
‘I won’t sing that! It is too plain.’ Then Handel
Flung up the sash, grabbed my waist, let me dangle
Above the rushing street. ‘I am Beelzebub,
You devil!’ Onioned breath. How close to love
Hate runs. How close my singing came to war.
I scratched my rival, drank my crowd’s applause.
  
Yes, I did trust the men would never leave.
But I was choosy with the flowers they gave.
I threw the lilies at them. ‘This room stinks.’
I took no cottage trash, Sweet Williams, pinks.
I wanted roses, with their greedy crowns’
Rich pollen, sharp leaves, petals tumbling down.
I wanted armfuls, scattered on each bed.
But breasts are fat, voice, muscle. Now, instead
Of lovers, I drain drinks. I gave up all
Wine for a week, for my rose-printed shawl.
  
Did thick books tell you, I threw it all away?
I laugh like gulls. This town tonight hangs grey
As your dull ports. Listen. I hear the ice
Crack like my boots. Your tastes will not stay nice
When coasts flood, wires go down. I drank the worth
Of one small voice. You threw away the earth.
  
That is your business. I will carry on,
Hungover, silent in the women’s song.
The shawl waits on its hook. And I would say
Mine are the finest buttons in the tray.
 
 
‘The button factory in Bologna’ was broadcast on
BBC Radio 3’s breakfast programme on May 24th,
in the Poems for Today series.
 
 
Read about Alison and her most recent collection,
Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008), here.
  
Visit Alison’s website.

Joan Metelerkamp’s Burnt Offering

 
 
  
Body of work
Joan Metelerkamp
  
As coming upon
a puff-adder coiled on the carpet
under the desk
  
or a boomslang
slithered off out of its tracks
then its skin and later even
its bones …
  
perhaps they didn’t even know it
was done when it was done,
those alchemists,
  
perhaps it felt too easy –
like waking drugged out of sleep still
sloughing it off –
  
maybe they didn’t even feel better
for a while, if at all
after all
  
they didn’t know what they were doing
when they started
nor how terrible they’d feel
nor for how long –
  
they were dead scared
was it the fear itself or was it the fear
of mercury poisoning or the poisoning itself
  
god’s truth they must have got sick of it –
right arms aching down to the little finger
right side of the head aching
right down the back aching
  
sick of it sick of that vocation that exhaustion that compulsion
to make something of something as nothing
as love making matter what mattered
so little to anyone else if at all –
 
ridicule, poverty, social ostracism
they weren’t worried about those they worried
about their work
not working their fear not resolving
  
what they knew: what they were
working on
their material, their metal, to make
come like the mysterious body
  
they didn’t want to end up with
the same stuff they started with
the residue of the time before
  
all they knew they were
burning thickening melting
into air finding wanting
all they could ever hope for
  
  
From Burnt Offering (Modjaji Books, 2009).
  
Read my interview with Joan on Litnet.
  
To purchase Burnt Offering, contact Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books: cdhiggs@gmail.com.
  
Launch
  
You are cordially invited to Burnt Offering’s launch – Joan will be reading – at the Cape Town Book Fair on 14 June 2009 from 17h30 to 18h30 at the DALRO Stage in the CTICC exhibition halls.

Sindiwe Magona’s Please, Take Photographs

 

  
It takes a village
Sindiwe Magona
 
It takes a village
To raise a child
Mother to tomorrow’s
Village.
  
It takes a village
To heal broken accord
Child to tomorrow’s
War.
  
It takes a village
To plough the widow’s field
So her children will not steal
To live.
  
It takes a village
To sow seeds of life
Cooperation, life-blood
To communal living.
  
It takes a village
To raise a standard,
Kill competition, father
Of greed and unending strife.
  
  
From Please, Take Photographs (Modjaji Books, 2009)
 
To purchase Please, Take Photographs, contact Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books: cdhiggs@gmail.com
  
Launch
 
You are cordially invited to Please, Take Photograph’s launch – Sindiwe will be reading – at the Cape Town Book Fair on 14 June 2009 from 17h30 to 18h30 at the DALRO Stage in the CTICC exhibition halls.

Helen Moffett’s Strange Fruit

 
 
  
Another Country
Helen Moffett
 
In other countries, I become a different person.
In Uganda, I drink beer after Tuskers beer,
and in Barbados, home-made herb rum.
In Alaska, I drive a four-by-four.
In Ireland, I stick out my thumb.
In Greece, I share a room with strangers.
And everywhere, I get up before dawn,
climbing out of windows if I have to,
scrambling to catch first light.
 
On the sacred isle of Iona, adrift in the Hebrides,
I walk along a beach, confessing,
clutching the hand of an impossible man
I have known for all of three days.
And I skydive into love, freefalling,
wind whistling past my ears.
A day later, I kiss him
in the middle of the night,
in the middle of a storm,
spray wet on our faces,
caught in the boom of a kettledrum.
  
At home, I never do any of these things.
I’m a white-wine girl who doesn’t see sunrise.
My car is small and second-hand.
I seldom take risks.
And while I might fall in love,
I no longer jump out of planes,
hurtle into the heart of the wind.
  
But maybe I should. Live in another country.
  
for Sean McDonagh
 

From Strange Fruit (Modjaji Books, 2009)
 
Read my interview with Helen on Litnet.
  
Read four poems from Strange Fruit at Rustum Kozain’s blog,
Groundwork.
  
To purchase Strange Fruit, contact Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books:
cdhiggs@gmail.com.
  
Launch
 
You are cordially invited to Strange Fruit’s launch – Helen will be reading – at the Cape Town Book Fair on 14 June 2009 from 17h30 to 18h30 at the DALRO Stage in the CTICC exhibition halls.

Fiona Zerbst’s Oleander

 
 
  
Legacy – after Frida Kahlo
Fiona Zerbst
  
‘We must sleep with open eyes, we must dream with our hands’
– Octavio Paz

  
I.
This column of air.
These nights of broken stone.
This flesh that speaks.
 
If Mexico is Frida,
It is also
Fig and prickly pear,
 
Water gods, dry ears
Of corn, torn as petticoats.
 
 
II.
Vanilla jar of dead water
Circled by a peacock.
 
This is what is left to those
Who linger in the courtyard.
 
Her legacy of nails in flesh,
Tears of pomegranate:
 
A broken column
Painted as herself.
 
 
III.
Frida dreams in turquoise;
Now vertical, her bed
A crushed infinity.
 
Reflected in her mirror,
This heart that frills the sand’s
Dry life with blood.
 
 
IV.
This column of air,
These nights of broken stone,
This flesh that speaks.
 
If Mexico is Frida,
Then it is also
Paintbrush and suffering,
 
Icon of desire,
spine of jewelled bone.
 
 
V.
As she paints,
She dreams with her hands.
 
As we watch,
A butterfly sticks
 
To coils of her hair.
That flat plate of brow
 
Is a golden canvas
To feast from.
 
 
From Oleander (Modjaji Books, 2009).
  
Read four poems from Oleander at Rustum Kozain’s blog, Groundwork.
  
To purchase Oleander, contact Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books:
cdhiggs@gmail.com
  
Launch
  
You are cordially invited to Oleander’s launch – Fiona will be reading – at the Cape Town Book Fair on 14 June 2009 from 17h30 to 18h30 at the DALRO Stage in the CTICC exhibition halls.
  
Visit Fiona’s blog.

Ian Parks

 

 
Shell Island
Ian Parks

The girl is tall
and never thinks of food
unless he brings her
oysters from the bay
arranged with lemon
on an oval plate.
 
It is their only
luxury. At night
an oil-lamp swings
above the bed;
a tarnished mirror glints
across the hall;
 
their furniture is sanded
to a cool, transparent sheen.
Incomers, they begin
to feel at home.
Their new republic
is a state of mind
 
in which the world
of commerce lays no claim.
It has its laws,
its languages – a grove
of olives where
the freed bird sings.
 
The shells of all
the oceans gather here:
a cache of pink
exotic coils banked up
against the winter tide.
I ask if it’s still possible,
 
this pool of dreams
and solitudes
in which the driftwood
floats at rest
and lives retract,
becoming simplified.
 
Across the bay
the new refinery
lights up their hemisphere;
a still white centre
pulses and dilates.
Complex, entire,
 
it holds their studied
gaze: as alien, cold
and insecure
as the force it draws
its power from,
the city it anticipates.
 
 
From Shell Island (Waywiser Press, 2006).
 
Read more about Ian and Shell Island here.

Peter Scupham

 
“I would like my poems to be windows, not mirrors. A window frames a scene which has its own strong and independent life; the personality of the poet both shapes that scene and is subordinate to it. The frame, however, is important. A window cuts a shape, and I am fascinated by structure, harmony, balance – all those qualities which give definition to the view which the window elects to show.”
 
- Peter Scupham

Carrie Etter’s The Tethers

 
 
  
Cult of the Eye
Carrie Etter
 
Then I glanced over the treetops, the miles of pasture
the window shows me again and again,
and soon I began to believe the window –
I became a votary in the cult of the eye and the cult
of transparency, because after we spoke
I used a form of to be as an equal sign: you were transparent.
I gleefully forbore the scepticism of seemed.
  
Admittedly, I nearly said you appeared transparent,
but I put my ear to the window’s mantra
and asseverated your sincerity without reserve.
If this is a love poem, that’s because I’m ready to love everybody.
I’ll gaze on the miles of pasture as the sun descends
and never think I must kneel in the dampening grass –
and you’ll refrain, just for now, from remarking on my naiveté.
  
 
First published in Poetry Review and included in The Tethers
(Seren, 2009).
 
Read more about Carrie and The Tethers here.
  
Visit Carrie’s blog.
  
Purchase The Tethers at The Book Depository.

Geoffrey Philp

 

  
Erzulie’s Daughter
Geoffrey Philp
  
It began with the usual insults
about her nose and hips,
and the belief that her true-true mother
lived on a coral island protected
by sunken galleys and man-o-wars.
 
These fantasies,
her therapists said, were drawing her
toward a different future
than her parents had wished for
when they punished her
for not reading the books they’d studied,
and sent her away on Easter egg hunts
dressed in starched, pink dresses, white bonnets,
and blue bows in each braid of her stubborn hair.
 
And when she began cutting her wrists,
arms, legs, and belly, her parents
agreed with the psychiatrists
to the prescriptions of pills, potions,
and poisons to keep her grounded in this life.
 
But then, the scabs became scars became scales,
her hair grew wild and untamed,
and a garden of yellows, blues, and reds sprouted
on her arms, legs, and back –
her ears and lips studded with gold –
and almost overnight she changed into something
she had always resembled in her own dreams,
in the mirror of her mother –
something beautiful and fearsome.
 
 
Geoffrey Philp is the author of a children’s book, Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories; a novel, Benjamin, My Son; a collection of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien, and five poetry collections, including Exodus and Other Poems, Florida Bound, hurricane center, xango music, and Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas. Who’s Your Daddy?: And Other Stories was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2009. Geoffrey lives in Miami, Florida.
  
Read Rethabile Masilo’s interview with Geoffrey at Poéfrika.
  
Visit Geoffrey’s blog.

Angela France’s Occupation and a Ledbury Poetry Festival Launch

 

 
The Florist Explains Mimesis
Angela France
 
It begins with the cut. Not secateurs,
never scissors – only a blade can slice
a good angle through the stem.
See how my knife fits my hand:
its heel snugs into my palm, shows
me where to snip, where to cleave.
Its stubby sharpness has perfect balance,
guides my selection of leaf and bud,
knows which will be coaxed forward
or held back.
 
Picky brides and blind lovers
only care about shape and colour.
They don’t know what brings blooms
to such integrity nor do they see
how their choices measure depths
and futures. Mourners think
they can make flowers speak forcing
them into wire frames to spell names.
Deaf to the petals’ curve,
the eloquence of sweeping vine,
they never notice, nor ask why,
I leave a single thorn to nestle
under the calyx of the rose
they drop into the grave.
 
 
From Occupation (Ragged Raven Press, 2009).
  
Occupation is available for pre-publication order.
  
The beautiful cover is the work of Patricia Wallace Jones.
 
Angela’s collection will be launched at the Ledbury Poetry Festival on Friday, 10 July 2009, at 11h00. Take a look at the 2009 Festival Programme.

Top 100 Poetry Blogs

 
I’ve received an unexpected email from Suzane Smith of the Online University Reviews website.  Peony Moon has been included in their list of Top 100 Poetry Blogs. 
 
I don’t know how the list was compiled or what criteria were applied, but do take a look at the links.  You’re bound to spot a few familiar names and discover some interesting new blogs.
 
Now seems like a good time to thank the poets who have kindly allowed me to post their work on this blog and to thank Peony Moon’s readers for their time and support.
 
Thank you.

Andrea Porter’s A Season of Small Insanities

   
  
Yield
Andrea Porter
 
The drivers on New York arteries are blooded
by the necessity of cut and thrust, but holding
our ground is something we know how to do.
We rant in unison at those that fail to read
the signs. You shun your horn, unlike some,
who play the two-tone shuffle through the toll.
We get the lone finger, the mimed arse-hole
from New Jersey plates, he reads windscreens,
faces, he sees our future in a muscle twitch.
Don’t they understand what bloody yield means?
No answer is required but it settles on the car
with the puddle dirt, the billboard shadows.
I keep trying to master the art of the verb,
how to read it, the road behind us and ahead.
 
 
Andrea writes:
 
“I specifically chose ‘Yield’ to bridge the first 41 poems in A Season of Small Insanities and the final 17 poems which form the ‘Marrying Richard Harris’ sequence about the fatal accident caused by a drunk driver I was involved in that led to the death of my partner and the subsequent premature birth and death of my twin sons.
 
‘Yield’ grew out of a road trip I took on the East coast of America with a very old friend. It was triggered by an incident at a toll to get into New York over the river. This poem for me resonates with the final poem in the collection, ‘Crossing’, which is also a sonnet. I find the sonnet in all its forms a wonderful small casket in which to place heightened emotion of any kind as it drives you to exercise a tight discipline, just fourteen lines to say what you want to say. ‘Crossing’ refers to a bridge, a passing over and through something, grief and loss, and ‘Yield’ takes a side long look at what you need to give in to and what you feel cannot be yielded.”
  
 
‘Yield’ is published in A Season of Small Insanities (Salt Publishing, 2009).
 
Read about Andrea and A Season of Small Insanities here.
  
Read more poems from Andrea’s collection here.
  
Visit Andrea’s blog, We Liked It but not Quite Enough.
 

Launch details:
 
You are invited to the launch of A Season of Small Insanities on
4 June 2009 at The Maypole Pub, Portugal Place, Cambridge, from19h30 to 22h00. The Maypole Pub is next to the Park Street multi storey car park behind the Round Church in central Cambridge.
 
Help Andrea celebrate, listen to her and other great poets read and generally enjoy yourself.

Penelope Shuttle

 
“Poetry is an antidote to the poison level at which we often consent to live. We are, many of us, amnesiacs. We forget the amazing things that happen to us. Poetry remembers them. Also, what is given shared articulation can never hurt so much as whatever remains unuttered.”
 
- Penelope Shuttle

Modjaji Books

 

 
Four wonderful new Modjaji poetry collections go to the printer this week.  The volumes are available at the special offer of R100 each if you buy one this week.  They will sell for R120 plus in the shops when they are out.  The books are:
 
Please, take photographs by Sindiwe Magona;
 
Burnt Offering by Joan Metelerkamp;
 
Oleander by Fiona Zerbst;
 
Strange Fruit by Helen Moffett.
 
All four collections are available for R300, if you buy them this week.
 
If you’re interested, contact Colleen Higgs at Modjaji Books:  cdhiggs@gmail.com.
 
 
About Modjaji Books

Modjaji Books was started in 2007 by Colleen Higgs.  Modjaji is a new independent press that publishes the work of South African women.  “Modjaji – which means rain queen – is a press that will make rain and generate spaces for new voices to be heard that otherwise may not find a platform.”

Anne Waldman

 
“One is always writing the “first poem”".
 
- Anne Waldman
 
 
“I remember an early (second?) reading at the St. Marks Church in-the-Bowery parish hall circa 1966/1967.  I was nervous.  I was seated at a wooden table.  I wore a yellow and blue striped dress and my head was bent over my “works”, hair probably in my face.  I remember hearing my young woman – more like a girl – voice and thinking “This isn’t the real voice”.  The real voice was deep inside in my hara – and it was a deeper, more seasoned and musical voice – an ageless voice.  I realized I would eventually have to find the words to match it – the words would have to grow up to the voice and the wisdom of that voice.  This is maybe my life’s work.  It’s not that I have to “find my voice” – it’s already there waiting for me.”
 
- Anne Waldman

Joe Sent Me

 
 
 
“For me, music is a response to the world, and the voice imbues the words with life and gives them breath.  I’m especially interested in the idea of recording as an act of preservation of experience.  To be a recording artist is – quite literally – to make a record of sounds, voices, words, and breaths.  Every record I create, I plunge into the depths of life in all aspects of experience:  sound, images, dreams.  Music is a time capsule, capturing, distilling and preserving the essence of what it means to be alive.  The role of poetry, of words and language, is to remind us.”
 
- Vanessa Daou
  
 

 
Hurricanes
Vanessa Daou
 
Soon life’s knowing will come, it will dust the mind
like talcum. Meanwhile, everyone will dream at least
once of times they tried to run but their legs got stuck
in the ambivalence of love’s mud, in the imagination’s
straining. Our days are drenched by hurricanes
entering sideways in our minds with no warning.
It’s gray where the thinking thinks, where the
radar blinks. It’s the surge of you that burns me
crimson. I am asleep, asleep all day, blood running,
an accident of treason. ((My mother was the one
who laughed from other rooms while I cried,
the division between us multiplied a thousand times))
You say (and I quote) “Don’t do the math” (end of quote),
italics mine. (Quote again) “just come here” (end quote).
So what if I do? I go nowhere with you, and everywhere.
I am subsonic, plutonic, woebegone, forlorn, language
forgotten, towel shared. I am scared, scarred, scarlet
letter ‘A’, hermit, Hamlet, tragic, victorious. I am soldier,
souvenir, medal of honor attached to your pocket. I am
intrinsic, entropic, order, chaotic, limited to this word
I have just finished, conception of the infinite. Masculine,
feminine, everything is division; days, dollars, mortgage
rates, bequeathed estates. Leave me with nothing more
than your essence. Invisible lover, indivisible number,
only then will I remember, remember with my lack of logic.
With you I am myth maker, glass breaker, soul taker,
hip shaker. I am techtonic, ironic, sardonic. With you
I am purified, pornographic, protean, prolific; for you
I am problematic, acrobatic.
Yes, like I said, every crevice that cracks in me I spread
for you since that first night in my bed when the flash
of my life turned your blue eyes red. And so the story
always goes, ending before the author knows. Our days
are drenched by hurricanes entering sideways
in our minds with no warning.
 
 
From Vanessa’s album, Joe Sent Me.
  
Joe Sent Me is available here.
 

Charles Mingus

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
 
- Charles Mingus

Suzanne Frischkorn

 
 
  
Ocean
Suzanne Frischkorn
 
What’s there to tell? Accept I will not share
erotic lines meant for a husband and know
desire is torpid after a lifetime
withholding. I carry myself away
and you too. The sailor navigates
an undiscovered shore, palms scattered
its edge. I’ll give you this –
there was salt and something of the way it dries on skin.
 
 
Published in Lit Windowpane (Main Street Rag Publishing, 2008).
  
Visit Suzanne’s website.

Ivy Alvarez

 
 
  
fish hooks
Ivy Alvarez
  
door crack look
my mother’s open mouth
the smell of ink
 
seaweed crush
between my toes
her side wound is a gill
 
weeping
for lost oxygen
and the time
 
before it got caught
 
 
Published in Mortal (Red Morning Press, 2006).
  
Visit Ivy’s website.

Thoughts of Craig Arnold

  
Rebecca Lindenberg, Craig’s partner, has posted a letter on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog.  It is believed Craig injured his leg, fell from a cliff and could not have survived the fall.
  
Poet Annie Finch has written a post for Craig here.
 
My love and thoughts are with Craig’s son, Rebecca, Chris and Craig’s family and friends.

Kelly Cherry

 

  
The Rose
Kelly Cherry
 
                  A botanical lecture
 
It’s the cup of blood,
the dark drink lovers sip,
the secret food
  
It’s the pulse and elation
of girls on their birthdays,
it’s good-byes at the railroad station
  
It’s the murmur of rain,
the blink of daylight
in a still garden, the clink
of crystal; later, the train
  
pulling out, the white cloth,
apples, pears, and champagne –
good-bye! good-bye!
We’ll weep petals, and dry
our tears with thorns
  
A steep country springs up beyond
the window, with a sky like a pond,
  
a flood.  It’s a rush
of bright horror, a burning bush,
night’s heart,
the living side of the holy rood
  
It’s the whisper of grace in the martyrs’ wood
  
  
From Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems
(Louisiana State University Press, 2007)

Fiona Robyn’s The Blue Handbag

 
I stayed up until 2 o’clock on Sunday morning reading The Blue Handbag (Snowbooks, August 2009), Fiona Robyn’s second novel.  Fiona is an accomplished writer with a deep understanding of human nature.  Her evocative descriptions of the natural world and English flora are among the best I’ve read – and she says I can adopt Pickles (Leonard’s dog).

Fiona has started a blog, 100 Readers, which will feature interviews with 100 readers of The Blue Handbag.  If you check in at 100 Readers, you’ll be able to follow her novel as it makes its way in the world.  I’m privileged to be the first reader Fiona interviews.
 
 

Michael Ondaatje

  
“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.  I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead.  I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings.  We are communal histories, communal bodies.  We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.”
  
- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Jeanette Winterson on gardening and writing

 
“I learned to garden the way I learned to write – out of necessity.  We needed vegetables and flowers, and I needed to tell myself a long story about life – I am still telling it – a kind of beanstalk that grows and grows, and I can climb it, both to escape the possibility of life at the bottom, and to find another world where giants and castles and harp-playing hens are still to be found.
 
Gardening, like story-telling, is a continuing narrative.  One thing leads to another.  Like stories, there is always something going on in the garden long after the gardener has gone to bed.  The thing grows, unfolds, changes, develops a maddening life of its own.  For me, as a writer, I go to sleep with an idea in my head, and it takes hold during the night.  I open the back door in the morning, and the tulips that refused to look at me the night before, have opened in the sun.”
 
- Jeanette Winterson
 
Read the article here.

Luke Kennard

 
 
 
The Forms of Despair
Luke Kennard

We returned from the war happier, arms around our shadows –
Who claimed to be older than us. They told great jokes
  
And lay around barefoot, hair precisely
Unkempt, cigarettes hissing and glowing like christmas lights.
  
Only our fiancées were tired and bothersome,
Having forgotten how to love, or vice versa.
  
Some had moved to factories in other cities,
Others, when pressed, said, ‘No-one’s forcing you to put up with me.’
  
We went skating with our shadows,
Huddled under fir trees drinking sausage tea.
  
Inquisitive sheep collected around our camp;
It was good to be among the ice storm and the believers.
  
We described the funny pages to Simon – who had lost both his eyes
But the jokes didn’t work so well in description.
  
  
First published in The Migraine Hotel (Salt Publishing, 2009).
 
Read about Luke and The Migraine Hotel here.

Carol Ann Duffy is named as Poet Laureate

  
The award-winning poet Carol Ann Duffy has just been named as the United Kingdom’s twentieth Poet Laureate, succeeding Andrew Motion after his ten years in the post.

Carol Ann Duffy gives her first interview as Poet Laureate.
  
Read more on the BBC News website and in The Guardian.
 
Carol Rumens’ Guardian blog post: 
Carol Ann Duffy’s talent is more important than her gender.

Poet Craig Arnold is missing in Japan

  
“Poet Craig Arnold has gone missing on a small volcanic island in Japan while on a creative exchange fellowship.  Craig, an experienced explorer of volcanoes, never returned to his inn after leaving alone to research the island’s active volcano for the afternoon.  The authorities are on the third day of searching for Craig, and are scouring the small island (of only 160 inhabitants) with dogs and helicopters.  If he is not found by the end of the day, the authorities will call off the search.
  
We need your help to insure that the search will continue.  The island and areas surrounding the volcano are small enough that an extended search will surely lead to Craig’s discovery.  We need people to contact their local congresspeople and senators to pressure the Japanese State Department to continue the search.  We also need help sparking media attention for this story, which we also hope might increase pressure on Japanese authorities to find Craig.
   
If any of you have ideas or know people who might be able to help, we’d appreciate hearing from you.  Please, though, take a minute to contact your senator and congressperson via telephone or even email to explain this problem and insist on their help.”
 
To find out how you can help, read Don Share’s full post on the Poetry Foundation’s blog.
 
News release from the University of Wyoming.

Sweet and savoury poetry

 
‘Thirteen Ways with Figs‘ is included in a list of poem links on foodie blog, Hugging the Coast: A Daily Updated Celebration of Coastal Food.  If you’re into sweet and savoury poetry, you’ll find nourishing lines here by Charles Simic, Joy Harjo, Myesha Jenkins, Miroslav Holub, Kim Addonizio, Lucille Clifton, Margaret Atwood, Ted Kooser, Howard Nemerov, C D Wright, Cesare Pavese and Carol Muske-Dukes, among others.

The Palestine Festival of Literature

 
From the Press Release:
    
The second Palestine Festival of Literature is taking place from
23 to 28 May 2009.
  
Because of the difficulties Palestinians face under military occupation in travelling around their own country, the Festival group of 17 international writers will travel to its audiences in the West Bank.  It will tour to Ramallah, to Jenin, to al-Khalil/Hebron and to Bethlehem.  To mark Jerusalem’s status as Cultural Capital of the Arab World for 2009, the festival will begin and end in Jerusalem.
   
Michael Palin will be taking part in the festival this year together with:  Suad Amiry, Victoria Brittain, Carmen Callil, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Suheir Hammad, Nathalie Handal, Jeremy Harding, Rachel Holmes, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Brigid Keenan, Jamal Mahjoub, Henning Mankell (accompanied by his wife, Eva Bergman), Deborah Moggach, Claire Messud, Alexandra Pringle, Pru Rowlandson, Raja Shehadeh, Ahdaf Soueif and M G Vassanji.
  
For the full programme of events please visit the website.

Katy Evans-Bush

  
When asked what advice she would give a young poet, Katy said:
  
“I’d say, with Henry James:  “try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”
  
Read Katy’s post, ‘advice to a young poet, reprised’, at her blog, Baroque in Hackney.

Bob Hicok

  
“I don’t think about “my” audience … I don’t know how anyone could write with a group of people in mind.  It’s difficult enough to rummage around in my own head, let alone estimate how my words will enter another life.  Writers should be good at sensing where readers will be more or less confused, angry, emotionally or intellectually involved, in evaluating the content of their writing in general terms.  But to think about readers while writing is to invite the hypothetical into the process in a way that stops me from being open to the actual, to myself.”
  
- Bob Hicok

A Lifetime Affair

   
It all began innocently enough with Nancy Drew, Bess Marvin and George Fayne in River Heights …
    
 
Frank and Joe Hardy in Bayport …
    
   
As the years progressed, my habit escalated to include Hercule Poirot (he of the egg-shaped head and well-groomed moustache) at Whitehaven Mansions in London and Miss Marple (she of the intrusive nose and china-blue eyes) in St. Mary Mead …
  
  
Today, it continues to run unchecked with Commander Adam Dalgliesh in his flat above the Thames at Queenhithe …
  
  
And Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks in Eastvale …
 
 
 
A lifetime affair with a cabal of crime fiction characters …

Pablo Neruda

 
“It is well, at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest.  Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coalbins, barrels and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest.  From them flow the contacts of man with the earth … The used surface of things, the wear that the hands give to things, the air, tragic at times, pathetic at others, of such things – all lend a curious attractiveness to the reality of the world that should not be underprized.”
 
- Pablo Neruda

The Opposite of Cabbage

 

  
The Listeners
Rob A. Mackenzie
  
The thrill of the fair is not in the glamorous machinery
and its spin, or in the clamour of infants longing
to be heard, but in the hour when music stops
and lights blink out, when a man threads a dark path
among greyer darknesses of once-bright carousels,
and becomes, with them, a bearer of absence,
night’s counterpart, impossible to bring to focus.
 
The stars have plucked their eyes from the world,
which has become a mirror of blindness, blind
also to itself. Only the man’s uncertain steps alert
his listeners to its presence. So when they screw
open a cheap Cabernet and lose track halfway
through his walk from Waltzer to Big Wheel
and dawn spills out like an over-familiar friend,
they feel grief that the night is unrepeatable
as its secrets, as footsteps that leave no echo.
  
  
First published in Magma magazine and included
in The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt Publishing, 2009).
  
Read more about Rob and The Opposite of Cabbage here.
  
Visit Rob’s blog, Surroundings.

J G Ballard, 1930 – 2009

 
“J G Ballard, the author who has died aged 78, was best known for his two fictionalised autobiographies, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women; the former, which told of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp outside Shanghai, became an international best-seller and was later made into a film by Steven Spielberg.”
 
Read J G Ballard’s obituary in The Telegraph.

Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights

 

Blue Room
Belinda Subraman
 
Wildlife flickers above the fan.
A hummingbird approaches.
A plane lands on the wall.
A lace wedding cake flutters in the breeze.
 
Buddha appears with light and stone.
Ashes surround the pagoda.
A book and father lie waiting.
The fame of love is framed
above a door’s encryption.
A camel prances with a prince and a woman.
Flowers are mistaken.
A change of season brings armies and storms.
 
A tall thin bookcase holds
a Moroccan rug down.
An Italian bed holds up the dog and pillows.
The TV is blind without birds.
Tiny life takes over.
A thousand calls of night paint the moon.
 
Thin caskets of words and sound
slide into frames.
Neon sculptures dip down from the ceiling.
A hum of blades disturb the throat.
Hands tilt upwards.
Nothing can be said that is news.
 
A corner is filled with mosaic nakedness.
Santa sits near a fairy and a beer
above a steeple in a bookshelf of dreams.
A folding angel hovers over flowers
and a sweet but angry man.
Kleenex unfolds and catches.
The pink column of myth and wood
supports air and possibilities.
A tree lamp grows under mirrors.
A woman meditates, floating.
Her breast wears hats from many lands.
Her crotch is laid with red tile.
 
Moths thump the beaded sameness
of a hat-framed lamp.
A purple dragon across the room
shines with amethyst eyes.
Bugs and the dog fade as soon
as light turns inward.
 
A change of season brings armies and storms.
A thousand calls of night paint the mood.
Nothing can be said that is news.
  
  
From Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights
by Belinda Subraman (Unlikely Books, 2009)
 
Visual art by César Ivan.

Kelly Cherry

 
“Read, write, know tools and techniques, and make good friends who share your passion and will stick by you.”
 
- Kelly Cherry

Kathleen Jamie

 
“A poem is an approach towards a truth.  But poems can be funny, witty, quirky and sly.  They can be mischievous, tricksterish.  Their truths don’t sound like the truths of the courtroom or the inquest.  Does this, then, show us something about the nature of truth?  Can we say there are many truths, or, rather, many aspects of Truth?  That truth itself is a shape-shifter?”
 
- Kathleen Jamie

Mahmoud Darwish

    
“I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home.”
 
- Mahmoud Darwish, from ‘I Belong There’
  (Translated by Carolyn Forché and Munir Akash)

A Fork in the Road: André Brink on Ingrid Jonker

  
“Until recently, I have chosen not to be drawn into discussions or evocations of her life, notably in documentary films, some unforgivably bad,” he writes.  “But precisely because of these I have begun to believe that perhaps I owe it to her at last to unfold, without drama or melodrama, some of the things I have kept to myself.  Not the icon but the person. The woman I loved.  And who nearly drove me mad.”
  
Read Andrew Donaldson’s article in The Times.
 
Read more about South African poet, Ingrid Jonker, on the Poetry International Web.

Thirteen Ways with Figs

Figs at the market

    
    
Thirteen Ways with Figs
Michelle McGrane

   
1.
   
Silence the village gossip with nutty figs
rolled in crushed peppercorns.
Layer the fiery fruit in a jar between bay leaves.
Store in a dark place for three days.
Leave your offering on her doorstep.
   
2.
   
Sweeten your mother-in-law,
a small crepey woman in a black dress
smelling of mothballs,
with stuffed quails roasted in thick balsamic sauce,
followed by ricotta rose cheesecake and marzipan filled figs.
Spill velvet pink petals over her plate.
   
3.
   
Soothe inflamed ulcers and lesions
with a steamed fig, slippery elm, flaxseed poultice.
Wrap around the weeping skin in a muslin cloth.
   
4.
   
Pick a ribbed fig from the tree at twilight.
Split the dark cocoon in two.
Rub the gnarled wart with amber pulp and seeds.
Tie the halves together again.
Bury them in the flinty earth
under the waning moon.
   
5.
   
Cure fatigue, insomnia or nightmares by boiling milk
poured in a pail
with sun-baked figs and turmeric.
Add lavender honey to taste. Drink slowly.
   
6.
   
Bind three white Cilento figs
with a crimson ribbon for dreams of love.
Place the fruit under your pillow.
In the morning,
loop the ribbon around your waist.
If your heart is in your mouth,
sear it, eat it with figs.
   
7.
   
Beguile your partner with fig-leaf absolute
dabbed along the curve of your neck.
Wear almond blossoms in your hair.
Dance on a terrace with a view of the harbour,
to the flashing grin of an accordionist
who smells of sulphur and plays like the devil.
Clap your hands. This is no time to tiptoe.
   
8.
   
On a balmy midsummer evening, wrap up your al fresco meal
at the warped wooden table under the plane tree
with blistered grilled figs, spoonfuls of soft mascarpone
drizzled with orange blossom and rose water.
Smell the mimosa.
Don’t wipe the sugary smudge from your chin.
Carry the sated silence to bed.
   
9.
  
Arouse your lover with plump purple figs in a cool bowl of water.
Break the thin moist skin with your fingers.
Close your eyes. Listen to your breathing.
  
10.
   
On a windy day welcome your new neighbours across the pasture.
Make them feel at home with capocollo,
a sausage of figs, almonds, pistachios and cinnamon.
Fold in leaves
left in a basket on the porch. Follow the dung
trail home, a wasp
hovering at your shoulder.
   
11.
   
In autumn, line your pantry shelves with jars of fig jam
scented with cardamom pods. Seal in the sunshine
with smooth wax discs and screw-top lids.
   
12.
   
Feed a hungry family
with slow-cooked pork loin and Adriatic fig stuffing.
Serve with golden polenta. Garnish with watercress.
Open bottles of the full bodied local wine.
Taste the olive-wood smoke,
the measure of November’s indulgences.
   
13.
   
When the sky pops and hisses with stars,
celebrate the year’s trailing tail.
Prepare fig fillets stuffed with amaretti biscotti
and smoky chocolate slivers.
Serve with steaming espressos before midnight.
Va bene.

Anne Lamott on writing

 
“Day by day, you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects.  If you give freely, there will always be more.”
 
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Susan Richardson in New Horizon

  
The second issue of Salt Publishing magazine, Horizon Review, edited by Jane Holland, is online.
  
Published alongside Fiona Sampson, Daljit Nagra, Jane Draycott and other wonderful poets, Susan Richardson has not one, two, three, but four exquisite poems in the issue here.  You won’t regret taking the time to read them.  Susan, I love them.
  
Jane, congratulations on a fabulous issue.

Why I Write

 
Poet and activist, Dustin Brookshire, invited me to contribute to his Why Do I Write series.
 
Why do I write?  Author, naturalist and environmental activist, Terry Tempest Williams, covers it all in one of my favourite writing quotes.  It’s from her prose piece entitled “Why I Write” in Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard (Writer’s Digest Books, 2001).
 
This year’s contributors to the Why Do I Write series are Mary Jo Bang, Robert Pinsky, Ellen Steinbaum, Paul Lisicky, Virgil Suárez, D A Powell and Didi Menendez.  Last year’s line up included Charles Jensen, Erin Murphy, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Hittinger, Christopher Hennessy, Paul Hostovsky, Courtney Queeney, Julianna Baggott, Ellen Bass, Sandra Beasley, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Kurt Brown, Cecilia Woloch, Denise Duhamel and Dara Wier.
 
I think there’s something for everyone.

An interview on Poéfrika

 
  
I have an interview on Rethabile Masilo’s Poéfrika, an interesting and informative site for Africa-inspired writing. 
 
Rethabile, a Lesotho national living in France, asked me some challenging questions and I’ve contributed a line to an ongoing poem here.
   
This is the first in a series of poet interviews on Poéfrika, so stay connected to the site.

An interview with Annie Clarkson

   

   
Annie Clarkson is a poet, fiction writer and social worker who was born in Kendal in 1973, grew up in an East Lancashire mill town, and now lives in Manchester with her cat.  Her first chapbook of poems, Winter Hands, was published in 2007 by Shadowtrain Books.  She has short stories and prose poems published in Brace (Comma Press), Unsaid Undone (Flax Books) and in various magazines and online journals:  Dreamcatcher, Pygmy Giant, Mslexia, Succour, Transmission and Tears in the Fence.  She is currently working on a collection of ’short shorts’.  Annie blogs at forgetting the time.
   
Annie, tell me something of your family origins and what you were like as a child.  will you describe growing up in an East Lancashire mill town?
  
My family is from North West England.  I lived in Cumbria until the early 80s.  It was a strange mix of experiences:  beautiful mountains in the Lake District, an affluent town, spending time with mum’s hippy friends, hanging out in my grandparents’ guest house, digging vegetables in the garden, and then all the lodgers that were taken in by the family:  old blokes who were alcoholics, on probation or homeless, and one young lodger who was a drug addict.
   
When we moved to Lancashire, it was a big change.  More working class:  rows of red brick terraces, cotton mills in the valley (one of them still working, the others abandoned), a CND camp of travellers on the hillside, working men’s clubs, cobbled streets.  There were more social problems, and even at age eleven I noticed the vast difference in the way people lived their lives.  I spent most of my time either out of the house, walking in the river, hanging around the mill yards, playgrounds, wasteland, fields on the edge of town, or in my room hiding away with books and writing stories.
   
Would you talk about your career as a social worker?  Does your work inform your writing?
  
I’m drawn to certain issues in my work and in my writing:  difficult relationships, dysfunction, violence, mental ill-health, loss, abuse.  I never write directly about my work.  My characters are imagined.  Their situations are imagined.  But, I’ve been exposed in my work to a lot of situations that hopefully help me to write in a more emotionally authentic way.
 

  
Have you considered creative writing tutoring and running writing workshops?
 
I hope to branch out into running workshops and classes later this year.  I have hundreds of ideas of how to prompt and inspire good writing, for beginners and more experienced writers.
 
I’m working on an idea with an artist friend of mine to run a regular workshop in Manchester incorporating art and poetry, so creative-minded people can work on developing handmade books, posters, and other things that combine image and text.  It’s in the early stages of development.  I hope it might lead to work as a tutor or perhaps more workshops.

 
Will you describe your creative space?
  
I write anywhere.  I often write in bed in one of many notebooks.  I write on the settee in my pyjamas.  I write at the table while I eat dinner.  Sometimes I write straight onto my laptop.  Other times I scrawl on a random piece of paper, an envelope, the back of a cinema ticket, a napkin.
  
I often write in cafes, or in a gallery, or on a bench in the park, in my car in a lay-by, or at writing workshops.  Writing is a creative place where I can disappear and enter into another life or lives for a short time.
  

  
In 2007, Shadowtrain Books published Winter Hands.  Tell me about the book’s themes and how you settled on the title.
 
Winter Hands is a short little book.  It’s a glimpse; a starting point for me as a poet.  The poems in the chapbook are trying to make sense of certain things:  relationships, dysfunctions, breakdowns, illness, the small nuances of life that are not easy to understand.  These are my first explorations into the spaces between prose and poetry, the boundaries, the grey areas.
  
I played with a number of titles.  Winter Hands seemed the most apt to me at the time.  There is something that connects in these poems between the sensuality of touch and the cruelty and barrenness of winter.
 

  
What feeling would you like readers to experience after reading your collection?
 
Hmm, that’s a difficult question.  If a reader experiences any kind of feeling after reading these poems, then wow.  It is difficult for me as a writer to imagine how a reader might respond.  I hope readers might find at least one poem that they can relate to on a personal level.
 
To be honest, I’ve been overawed by the few comments people have made.  One reviewer wrote:  “Her writing makes you ache long after you have closed the book”.  I had to pinch myself that someone had written that about my writing.
  
Would you talk about the ’short shorts’ or micro-fiction collection on which you are working?
 
Ooh, yes.  I’m working on a collection of short shorts (short fiction of less than 1,500 words, but mostly less than 300 words).

When I say working on a collection, I mean I’m busy writing short shorts hoping that at some point later this year they might be gathered into a collection that is loosely concerned with loneliness.  It is a theme that has started emerging in my writing.  Actually, perhaps it has been in my writing for a long time.  It’s definitely present in Winter Hands.
  
My short shorts tend to be glimpses into the lives of different characters.  Many of these characters could be described as lonely, or disconnected, or experiencing moments in which they are utterly alone (in an existential sense) – and I don’t mean this is a dark, painful, isolated way.  I think being lonely can also be humorous or comforting for instance.
  
What do you enjoy and find challenging about working within different genres?
 
That’s an interesting question.  I write short fiction (in the widely understood meaning of the term), and I write free verse that most people would agree is poetry.  But mainly I inhabit the space in between these two genres by writing what has been described as prose poetry, flash fiction, micro-fiction, sudden fiction, versets, vignettes, short shorts.
  
I think people mistakenly use of these terms interchangeably.  I see flash fiction as being quite different to prose poetry.  (I use the term short shorts for both.)
  
I write some pieces that are condensed narrative fictions that follow (or subvert) generally accepted rules about storytelling (flash fiction, micro-fiction).  I also write prose poems, which seem to confuse people even though there is a long tradition of poets writing prose poems.
  
There are some wonderful definitions of prose poetry, which I have started collecting on my blog.  Have I answered your question?  Hmm, not really.  I guess my answer is that I love working between genres rather than within them.
 

  
Which writers have inspired you?
 
Many writers have inspired me.  Ones that immediately spring to mind are:  Raymond Carver, Charles Simic, Ian McEwan, Michael Ondaatjie, Pascale Petit, Anne Donovan, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Anais Nin, Angela Carter and Tove Jansson.
  
Would you name a few of your favourite books?  Why are they important to you?
  
I have a dog-eared copy of Wuthering Heights, which is falling to pieces.  I first read it as a teenager.  It’s important to me because it was one of the first books I read that explores the taboos of human passion and emotion, and it is set in a very familiar landscape.
  
I have Pablo Neruda’s The Collected Odes.  I visit these poems often as I love the sense of wonder and awe he creates around ordinary objects such as socks, a tomato, or a bicycle.
  
I have a copy of L’Etranger by Albert Camus with all my A-Level notes in it.  It was the first book I read in French, and it captures an existential loneliness similar to that which I’m now exploring in my own writing.
  
What are you reading at the moment?
 
I’m reading a gorgeous collection of very short fiction called East of Here, Close to Water by an Australian writer called Josephine Rowe.  I mostly read short fiction.  It is one of my loves.

 
* All photographs except for the covers of Winter Hands and Josephine Rowe’s East of Here, Close to Water per kind favour of the talented Ms. Clarkson.

Gillian Allnutt

 
“All my life I’ve been so grateful when I’ve found a writer who has been there before me, who has made me feel not alone.  I feel I will have achieved what I set out to do if I am able to help even one person in this way – to walk with them, to accompany them in their solitude.”
 
- Gillian Allnutt

Acts of faith

  
“Both reading and writing are, then, acts of supreme faith.  They are both, in essence, a call to grace, a belief in the miraculous – that we might come to see through stories what we had not previously seen, that we might come to understand what had, before that moment, remained uncertain, undefined.  The mask of fiction, of writing and reading stories, does not, in the end, disguise our faces but instead reveals who we really are.  In the end, I think, stories acknowledge life’s difficulty and sadness but insist that we go on anyway, that we always hold to our faith, to our belief in grace.”
 
- John Gregory Brown

Mourid Barghouti

  
“Writing is a displacement, a displacement from the normal social contract.  A displacement from the habitual, the pattern, and the ready form.  A displacement from the common roads of love and the common roads of enmity.  A displacement from the believing nature of the political party.  A displacement from the idea of unconditional support.  The poet strives to escape from the dominant, used language, to a language that speaks itself for the first time.  He strives to escape from the chains of a tribe, from its approvals and taboos.  If he suceeds in escaping and becomes free, he becomes a stranger at the same time.  It is as though the poet is a stranger in the same degree as he is free.”
 
- Mourid Barghouti

Jean Sprackland

 
“There is no law of nature that you cannot break in a poem; you can address the dead, speak in the voice of inanimate objects, reverse time, explore other worlds.  You can also, of course, write from the simplest, most familiar or domestic experience.”
 
- Jean Sprackland
 
Read more about Jean Sprackland and her poetry here.

Nicholas Hughes’ death

  
“The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.
  
Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.”
   
Read Ben Hoyle’s article in The Times.
 
Dermot Cole’s thoughtful post about Nicholas Hughes is worth reading.
   
Read Edward Byrne’s post at One Poet’s Notes.

She Comes Swimming

  
She Comes Swimming
Isobel Dixon
 
She comes swimming to you, following
da Gama’s wake. The twisting Nile
won’t take her halfway far enough.
 
No, don’t imagine sirens – mermaid
beauty is too delicate and quick.
Nor does she have that radiance,
 
Botticelli’s Venus glow. No golden
goddess, she’s a southern
selkie-sister, dusky otter-girl
 
who breasts the cold Benguela, rides
the rough Atlantic swell, its chilly
tides, for leagues and leagues.
 
Her pelt is salty, soaked. Worn out,
she floats, a dark Ophelia, thinking
what it feels like just to sink
 
caressed by seaweed, nibbled by
a school of jewel-plated fish.
But with her chin tipped skyward
 
she can’t miss the Southern Cross
which now looks newly down on her,
a buttress for the roof of her familiar
 
hemisphere. She’s nearly there.
With wrinkled fingertips, she strokes
her rosary of ivory, bone and horn
 
and some black seed or stone
she can’t recall the name of,
only knows its rubbed-down feel.
 
And then she thanks her stars,
the ones she’s always known,
and flips herself, to find her rhythm
 
and her course again. On, southwards,
yes, much further south than this.
This time she’ll pay attention
 
to the names – not just the English,
Portuguese and Dutch, the splicings
and accretions of the years. She’ll search
 
for first names in that Urworld, find
her heart-land’s mother tongue.
Perhaps there’s no such language,
 
only touch – but that’s at least a dialect
still spoken there. She knows when she
arrives she’ll have to learn again,
 
so much forgotten, lost. And when
they put her to the test she fears
she’ll be found wanting, out of step.

But now what she must do is swim,
stay focused for each stroke,
until she feels the landshelf
 
far beneath her rise, a gentle slope
up to the rock, the Cape,
the Fairest Cape, Her Mother City
 
and its mountain, waiting, wrapped
in veils of cloud and smoke.
Then she must concentrate, dodge
 
nets and wrack, a plastic bag afloat –
a flaccid, shrunk albino ray –
until she’s close enough to touch
 
down on the seabed, stumble
to the beach – the glistening sand
as great a treasure as her Milky Way –
 
fall on her knees and plant a kiss
and her old string of beads,
her own explorer’s cross
 
into the cruel, fruitful earth at last.
She’s at your feet. Her heart
is beating fast. Her limbs are weak.
 
Make her look up. Tell her she’s home.
Don’t send her on her way again.

More Isobel Dixon

 
Positano
Isobel Dixon
 
The villa’s whitewash clotted
scarlet with geraniums,
the bougainvillea’s purple
bruise smeared inbetween –
I sit here, mottled,
in the shadow of the vine.
The sea is welded
to the sky, a beaten
shield, enamelled, glittering
and everything is molten,
rich, beneath this sun,
such grandiose munificence,
the alchemy transforming
even me – slowly, in thrall,
from milk to gold. After
a day among the ruins
of Pompeii, dust still clings,
a pale reminder, to my shoes,
but now I watch the yachts
below and ring the ice against
the bottom of my glass,
an answer to the winking sea,
the tinkling of the masts.
Remember Ripley, wish
I didn’t wish for all of this
and more. This lustrous,
postcard life. Hear
how my darkened hallway’s
silence shudders at the falling
to the mat, implacable,
of crisp, clear-windowed
envelopes, that smother
my bright rectangle,
its foreign stamp,
the lines I sent back
to my dull domestic self:
Wish you were dead,
and I was always whole
and golden, always here.
 
From A Fold in the Map (Salt Publishing, 2007).

Isobel Dixon

  
Gemini
Isobel Dixon
  
Below my heart hang two pale women,
ghostly, gelid, sea-horse girls.
Without my telling you would never
see them, tiny tapioca clumps suspended
in the silt between my bones.
  
So nearly motionless, they are both breathing,
dreaming their amoebic dreams,
and I swear when I wake before dawn, try
vainly to return to mine, I hear them, faintly,
murmuring. But my ribs make a shallow hull
  
and one of them must go. Duck, bail out,
flushed into the sewage and the wider sea.
I can’t endure them both, adrift
among my vital parts, sizing each other up
with tadpole eyes. I must decide
  
and feed the lucky one. Let the other shrink,
dissolve back to this body’s salty soup.
Look closely at them: soulmates, secret
sharers, not-quite-siamese. Who stays,
who goes, which one of them is history?
  
She kicks up an almighty storm, makes
waves, enormous, tidal; while her sister’s
calm, pacific, dull. Our oil-on-troubled-water-
pourer, keeper of the peace. You choose –
mark one who should be squeezed out
  
of this narrow vessel; voided, spilled,
to lighten, buoy me, make some space.
Plain sailing then, I’ll forge ahead, forget
her spectral presence, and a lifetime’s
sly, subversive whispering. Learn
  
single-mindedness at last. But when it’s well
and truly done, how will I know? Will I feel
relief, release, how the balance shifts
and settles; then walk straight, unpuzzled,
sure – or limp and stumble, still
obscurely troubled, phantom-limbed?
   
From A Fold in the Map (Salt Publishing, 2007)
   
Read more about Isobel and A Fold in the Map here.
   
Visit Isobel’s website here.

The Poetry Life

“Feeling your way into the poem is like opening the door of a shadowy room and groping.  You’re not even sure about the floor underneath you – it’s likely not to be level – nor are you sure when you start to touch some objects – which represent feelings because every image is expressive – what they are.  But it’s your room, that’s the main thing, and you come to learn your way around it even though it always remains dark except for that splendor that lives in laying out the words.  Though a poem often is a little thing, twenty lines or even less, a good one is sturdy and knit together like bone, ligament, and muscle.  The poets themselves are often not so sturdy.”
 
- Baron Wormser, The Poetry Life: ten stories (CavanKerry Press, 2008)

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

  
“We enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments.  More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us.  It is a spell the soul casts on itself …. In Greece, myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle.  Ritual is tied to gesture, and gestures are limited:  what else can you do once you’ve burned your offerings, poured your libations, bowed, greased yourself, competed in races, eaten, copulated?  But if the stories start to become independent, to develop names and relationships, then one day you realise that they have taken on a life of their own.”
  
- Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

David Whyte on poetry

  
“Poetry is a break for freedom.”
  
- David Whyte

Italo Calvino

  
“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had:  the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
  
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Myesha Jenkins

   
Born in 1948, Myesha Jenkins spent most of her life in California.  She graduated from the University of California, Riverside, with a BA degree in Black Studies.  She moved to South Africa from the San Francisco Bay Area where she was active in progressive politics, the women’s movement and the anti-apartheid struggle.  Her collection, Breaking the surface, was published by Timbila Poetry Project in 2005.
  
Food
Myesha Jenkins
 
My experience of life
is through food
entwined and embedded
in my memories
 
Home is ham hocks and pinto beans
brownies and corn pudding
reflecting the origins
of my south mama
my root
 
Cuba will always be
strong black coffee
and seven kinds of pork
at the Palacio Nacional
waiting to meet Fidel
 
Sourdough bread across the bridges
to the jeweled city of my discovery
of carnitas tacos and burritos
pad thai, mushu pork and pupusas
walking away crab cocktails
searching for myself
 
Years of planning and assessing
my little corner of the revolution
in Miriam’s Kitchen
or Manila Beach
through jasmin tea, jung and kimchee
or the occasional delivery of
coconut bread and codfish cakes
from Linda’s last visit to Brooklyn
 
The beginning of my end to drinking
Flor de Cana in Nicaragua
and it’s deadly equivalent in Hawaii
staggering to the beach
running from my dreams
 
My first shaky month in a new life
buying dinner “R2 a plate, mama”
from the bus stop to home
finding umngqushu and phutu,
koeksisters and all the kinds of curries
 
When I go to Cape Town
the trip is useless
without the Mexican, Thai, Japanese food
I crave as much
as the magic sea mountain
 
There is more.
 
Love will always be litchis
Summer is pineapple and mangoes
Indulgence is brie and a ton of seafood
or a Magnum chocolate bar
 
I wonder how much more of this life
I could live
without the food
swallowing all of my energy
to grow.

House Clearance

  
House Clearance
Gaia Holmes
 
Slowly she’s started clearing things out
starting with the useless items:
chipped china cups,
trust shot-through with hairline cracks,
orphaned plugs and fuse wire,
cupboards full of arguments,
the broken stereos
he’d planned to resurrect.
 
And then there are the things
she’d like to keep
but knows she’ll never use:
those bright, rich nights
that no longer fit,
the creaking songs
of the bed frame
now dull and flat
and out of key,
the sugared lovers’ lingo
that has settled like cobwebs
in the corners of the room.

And love, what’s left of it,
she boils up the bones,
flavours the vapid broth
with stock and spice,
sets up a soup shack
on the ragged edge of town
and serves it to the homeless,
the hungry, the loveless creatures
of the night.

When he comes

  
When he comes
Gaia Holmes
  
So this is it.
This is the night.
Downstairs the sofa
doesn’t know me anymore,
my occasional china
is cracking with boredom,
the front door
is guarded by foxgloves
and throttled
with toad-flax
and this is it.
This is me;
mad woman in the attic
sifting the air for gold-dust,
a circle of crushed moths
patterning the carpet
around my feet,
cold coffee at my elbow,
logic in a hip-flask
and I’m drinking wine
that tastes of hay
and Salamanca in July
and we’re all waiting
for the storm, an answer,
a fag-burn in the sky,
words etched into
the slick streets,
the soft porn
of rain
on the skylight window.
We’re all waiting
for our dead dogs
to rattle up the stairs.
We’re all waiting
for our grandmothers
to polish our eyes
with spit
on the corner
of a vest.
We’re all waiting
for someone to say our name
with meaning.
We’re all waiting,
ears angled cat-like,
waiting,
for a car to pull up,
waiting,
for inspiration
to open the door
and enter
smelling of life,
of blood,
of little deaths,
of unspeakable notions
and say I’m yours.
Take me now.

Roddy Lumsden interview: Poetry, Kate and me

 
“Of all the things one might expect to discuss over coffee with a Scottish (male) poet, couture dresses are not among them.  But then not many Scottish (male) poets have spent time on a fashion shoot with Kate Moss.
  
Roddy Lumsden, however, was asked by top photographer Nick Knight to be a kind of poet-in-residence while he shot Moss in statement couture dresses for New York’s V Magazine.  London-based Lumsden was to write several poems for Knight’s website, picking up on the theme of the shoot – wild flowers.  One of them, “Bloom”, would be read by Moss herself.”
 
Read Susan Mansfield’s interview with Roddy Lumsden in The Scotsman here.

Burnished wood, paper, glue, ink

“Back in the 1950s in El Salvador, there was only one library in the capital:  la Biblioteca Nacional, an imposing wooden structure that took up an entire downtown block.  When stepping through the huge double doors, you were enveloped by a distinctive smell:  burnished wood, paper, glue, ink – the redolence of stories.  Stories shelved high and low along narrow aisles that creaked when you walked along them.
 
In la Biblioteca Nacional, I’d slip between the stacks for a visit with the characters living between the covers of Las mil y una noches.  The book was thick, gold-edged, and richly illuminated.  I can still see its magnificent illustrations, all protected by vellum as delicate as dragonfly wings.  I had to stand on tiptoe to pull the book off the shelf.  I’d plop down, right in the aisle, although the light there was dim.  Caught in the spell of stories, I would turn the pages slowly.  I never checked the book out.  I believed its proper home was the library.”

- Sandra Benitez, from ‘Fire, Wax, Smoke’

Julie Checkoway

I believe that a writer’s duty as a writer is first to him- or herself.  That point in inarguable.  A writer has to make a hard-nosed commitment to writing, or the writing won’t happen at all.  A writer has to seek out time to write and then guard that time like a pit bull.  I got married a few years ago, and committing to writing feels like getting married.  Saying yes to the whole enterprise day after day takes a willing and stubborn soul.

But a writer’s first duty as a writer and as a human being, I have also come to believe, is to nurture other writers.  A writer must be midwife at the births of other writers’ voices.  A writer must share the wisdom she or he has learned in her writer’s solitude and give that wisdom away, with kindness and generosity and gentleness.
 
It is, I am certain, the giving of an heirloom, an absolutely necessary behest.”
 
- Julie Checkoway

Ouroboros Review, Issue Two: An interview and poems

 
 
The second issue of poetry and art journal, ouroboros review, is now online and includes an interview with me and a few poems. 
 
Here’s a brief extract from the interview:
   
“It’s hard to say how living in South Africa has influenced my writing.  I find it difficult to think of ”influences”; so many things combine to create voice and writing style.  If anything, I’d say direct influences have been contemporary Northern hemisphere poets:  American, Canadian and English.  In my early twenties, I fell in love with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton’s work, and I adored Erica Jong’s chutzpah.
  
I admire the poetry of Louise Glück, Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Pascale Petit, Vicki Feaver, Mary Oliver, Ted Hughes, T S Eliot, Mark Doty, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, Derek Walcott, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, Billy Collins and many more.  There are some wonderful South African poets:  Isobel Dixon, Rustum Kozain, Kelwyn Sole, Karen Press, Finuala Dowling, Joan Metelerkamp, Fiona Zerbst and Gabeba Baderoon, among others.“
  
Issue two also contains Collin Kelley’s interview with Vanessa Daou, poetry by Iain Britton, Allan Peterson, Rebecca Gethin, Robin Reagler, Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, Paul Stevens, Dustin Brookshire, Carolee Sherwood, Deb Scott, Jill Crammond Wickham - and that’s just the beginning.  The eye-catching cover art of the full moon over Atlanta is the work of talented photographer, Meg Pearlstein.
 
Indefatigable editors, Jo Hemmant and Christine Swint, have once again done a sterling job.  The journal is beautifully laid out and produced. 
 
Read it here.

Jesus Feet

 
Jesus Feet
Gaia Holmes
 
I’ve wept on them, wished on them,
prayed on them so many times
but nothing’s come of these little acts of faith
and I’m giving up.
I’m putting your skinny Jesus feet
in the top drawer of the freezer,
squeezing them in between the oven chips
and the frozen garden peas.
   
Elsewhere you are someone else’s salvation
and you are working miracles.
You are driving her to important meetings.
You are baking stylish golden loaves of bread.
You are turning her bathwater into good red wine.
You are putting up shelves.
You are curing her worries.
You are saying her name with meaning.
You are coaxing the tensions out of her spine.
 
I’d be happy with half a miracle,
something close to a blessing,
a tender visitation
but I’m tired
of all these late night vigils
with the kettle ready to be boiled
and the tea bag ready in your cup
and our bed laundered, scented
and ready to be filled
so I’m replacing my hope
with a lack of expectation.
I’m replacing
the technicolor image of your face
with the faded, dog-eared poster
of an unimportant saint.

Blessed

 
Blessed
Gaia Holmes
 
Your grandmother
had tins full of prayer tags
and soft Garibaldi biscuits.
She kept gossip like hymn sheets
folded into the back
of her breeze-block bible,
kept a row of icons
above her fireplace
with garish hearts
like rotting plums,
reserved the best bone china
for priests, saints
and other visitations.
 
If you were lucky, upon leaving
you’d be blessed with a dry kiss
pressed upon the brow,
otherwise you’d leave
drenched in a frenzy of spit,
Hail Mary’s and Holy water.
 
You said I’d done quite well,
made a good impression
but I could tell by the way
she edged her way
around my name
and how damp I was
when we said goodbye
that she thought
I’d burn in Hell.

Sloth

 
Sloth
Gaia Holmes
 
And it comes to me
as we drive through moors
clotted with burnt, black heather,
where the air smells of sulphur and honey.
Inland, away from you
the sky is a finger painting:
stale streaks of dark clouds daubed
above the slated roof tops.
You have to learn to register these things:
the sweet and the sour
moments of life,
each dead pheasant you pass
fluttering like a ballgown
in the motorway breeze,
each blurred wasp you see
pulped against the windscreen:
the frail mortality of colour.
Remember – this is the way you breathe,
like a symphony of echo
trapped inside a shell.
On days like this
there are certain things that you recall:
the clinging breeze loaded with salt,
dead fish rotting on the tide line,
the way that the edges of the land
blurred and spread
and sunk into the sea.
Remember that day when we woke
because the sun beams nudged us
out of our sticky nest of sloth.
Our ambition became sobriety.
We binned empty wine bottles
and sour milk,
scoured lust off the dishes,
sat out in the garden,
and waited for our hearts to dry.

Charm

 
Charm
Gaia Holmes
 
He could charm the poison out of fox gloves
and used his skills to quicken my heart.
I wondered what he fed on: frayed liturgies
and the secret dreams of women,
toxic spores translated into messages
of lust, slivers of the dank March sky
rolled up like pickled herring.
I never knew. He always skimmed me,
left me hooked on some potent pollen,
some sacrificial line,
some cold gap between sentiments.
His fingers were like cathedrals,
too big to untie my delicate knots
yet he knew me inside out like he knew
the names of flowers and bats and clouds,
like he knew how to throw daggers
without skewering the soul.
He could sniff out creeping wolf-men
and crack their backbones with a lazy wink,
worked my fingers to his throat
like a snake charmer,
made me slide and arch with his singing breath.
After we’d loved and I was doped up on glow
he laid wet silver on my eyelids
believing it would bring him luck.

More Gaia Holmes

 
All I can do for you is dream …
Gaia Holmes
 
I know you’ll be awake now.
You’ll be out in the garden shed
as far away as you can get
from the house and its damp wreaths,
its stink of grief and lilies.
You’ll be sitting amongst
plant pots, pegs and windfall apples
smoking cigarettes.
 
Here the street is sleeping.
I skulk around the kitchen
in the dull fridge light, avert my eyes
and tiptoe past the pink Sloe gin.
 
I could drink now.
I could drink for me, for you,
for the whole of the island.
I could drink for remembrance,
knock back a teacup for all the dead souls
searching for that bright crack back into life.
I could drink now but it’s 4am
and I’ve got an empty bed to fill
and dreams to dream for both of us.

Gaia Holmes

 
The Banshees
Gaia Holmes

He heard the Banshees singing
weeks before she died.
Each night their cold blue keening
stained his dreams, or in the day time
one of their discordant notes
would find him, get lodged in his body
like a trapped wasp, somewhere
between his heart and his brain.

I tried to diffuse their mournful racket,
trained myself to coo like a wood pigeon,
breathe, like yeast expanding in proving dough,
whisper, like the soft crackle of crocus shoots
pushing through the crust of a bulb.
I asked the wind to sing something gentle,
told the moon to hum as it nosed its way
through the dark, worked hard to raise
the volume of our bodies as we loved:
our hearts thumping, our blood roaring,
our bones colliding.

But on that day I had no song strong enough
to hold them back. They came wailing,
whey-faced, raw-eyed, stood at the end of the bed
and sung him the long, demented opera
of her death.

Breathing in Colour

 
Last week, Christine Swint wrote about her friend Clare Jay’s new blog and recently published novel, Breathing in Colour (Piatkus, 2009).  Do take a look at Clare’s website, it’s a treasure trove.
 
Thank you, Christine.

Recital: A launch invitation and two poems

   
You are invited to the launch of
 
Recital – An Almanac
by John Siddique
  
2nd April 2009 – 7pm
The National Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London
WC2H OHE
Special Guest – Xanthe Gresham
  
and/or
  
9th April – 6.30pm
Manchester Central Library
St Peter’s Square
Manchester
M2 5PD
Special Guest – Mark Illis
  
www.johnsiddique.co.uk
www.saltpublishing.com
 
 
*
  
 
Other people’s children
 
He is eight and good at football. His mind
flits blacker and whiter than a magpie
from playstation to plastic sword, chocolate,
internet, to nothing to do, to slamming the ball.
He has a will of iron. Can bend his mother’s
and my love for him like plasticine;
when he wears his stick-on tattoos
in the same place on his shoulders as I have mine,
when he calls me ‘old chappy,’ as we scream
through the air as human aeroplanes.
I want so much to show him the world
I know, make it right for him.
Their Dad shows up every now and then,
it blows this family sideways, the guy ropes
twang off their pegs, until morning comes
and the wind dies down, and he goes off again.
I begin planting and parenting. Applying constancy
at the thin end of myself. But here is the boy
on a Saturday morning, next to me in bed,
hugging his mother and I together,
blowing at my chest hair.
  
  
Inside # 2 “There is no more time”
  
9.47, the peak of the morning rush is
beginning to subside, though the tube is
closed so he’s taking the bus to work.
A woman at the front of the bus is
on her way to her course. There is
a girl on her way to the dentist, and
a cleaner on her way home. A bus full
of people like this and more.
  
Then there is no more time, just a flash.
No time for fear. Here then gone, or
unconscious, or at the edge, or screaming.
All fixed in their own heads a moment ago,
busy being late for things, tired, looking forward
to a cup of tea, or just getting there
to get out of this traffic.
  
9.47 lasts forever and ticks on for the rest of us.
Before and after the application of words. Divide
the hour, divide the minute, sub-divide the second,
keep on dividing and time ceases to exist.
  
  
Both poems published in Recital – An Almanac (Salt Publishing, 2009).

Laurie Smith

“Poetry crystallises people’s feelings about themselves and the world, and if it can show people how to feel in new ways in response to unprecedented changes in the world, it will help us to survive.”
 
- Laurie Smith, ‘The New Imagination’

Frieda Hughes on reading her father’s poetry

  
“I was sitting on a train on the Northern Line some years ago, when I looked up and saw my name where usually there were adverts: Full Moon and Little Frieda.  The poem had been selected as one of the Poems on the Underground.  I looked away in disbelief; it must be some other Frieda.  But when I looked again it was the poem my father had written about me when I was a child.  My face was scarlet with self-consciousness; I had to remind myself that there were no gigantic arrows pointing down at me saying “this is the Frieda the poem is about”.
  
I wanted to share the moment with someone; I turned to the man sitting beside me and wondered how he would react if I grabbed him by the arm, shook him into consciousness and pointed, saying: “Look, look what my daddy wrote for me!”
  
Instead, I wrapped the idea of the poem around me like a coat, keeping my secret.”
  
Read The Times article by Frieda Hughes here.

Judith Ortiz Cofer

 
“It takes a fierce devotion to defend your artistic space, and eternal vigilance over it, because the needs of others will grow like vines in your little plot and claim it back for the jungle.”
 
- Judith Ortiz Cofer

Terry Tempest Williams

“I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.”

- Terry Tempest Williams

Shaindel Beers: “On the hood of a Cutlass Supreme” Tour

   
Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.  She is currently a professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon, in Eastern Oregon’s high desert and also serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary.  A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009) is her first poetry collection.  She is working on her second collection, The Children’s War.
  
Shaindel, tell me something of your family origins and what you were like as a child.
  
I’m not sure what a “normal” upbringing is in America, given our melting pot reputation, but I always felt I had it a bit odd.  My father’s background is Russian-Jewish, and he’s from Brooklyn, and my mother’s heritage is from nearly all of the countries of the British Isles, and she’s from a farming family.  So, I grew up in a very rural, farm town of fewer than two thousand people with a father who wasn’t like any of the other fathers I knew (not a farmer or a factory worker), and my siblings and I (with the exception of my sister Adria) all had traditional Jewish names – Shaindel, Aaron, and Avram.
 
I’m pretty sure like a lot of writers, I was a “weird kid”.  I was always making up stories and either writing them down or acting them out.  I had an imaginary world I would go to in the backyard, and the way to get there was to swing in the chair swing on my swing set and sing a magical song.  I won’t give the lyrics away, but I will tell you that the plant-life was blue and the sky was magenta.  I was also addicted to reading because it was another easy way to escape real life.  When the local library had the summer book club, I would check out a stack of books I couldn’t see over each time we went to the library, and the library was a popular summer destination because it was a free public place with air conditioning.
 
Will you describe the Argos of your childhood?  What were the main social, political and cultural influences of your youth?
 
The Argos of my childhood was probably much stranger than I realised at the time.  From the outside, and for a time, it was quite idyllic.  I would play at the park across the street from my house, where my mom could see me from the kitchen window, or my father and I would practice batting, catching, and throwing in the backyard.  If I was at my grandparents’ farm, I would ride my bike all day or I would go horseback riding with my friends who lived near my grandparents.
 
In 1984 and 1986, there were two murders that have still gone unsolved to this day, and they had a great influence on my childhood.  My mother became very protective, especially because the 1986 murder was of an eleven year old girl who was staying home from school with the flu.  I write about this in an essay which will be published in the spring issue of Contrary.  It’s an essay on what it was like to read a “true crime” novel, when I had known the victim.  Basically, my childhood went from being very idyllic to extremely repressive.
 
I think most of the influences of my youth were things that helped me rebel against the narrow scope of a rural town that was overwhelmingly Republican and oppressively religious, at least back then.  I listened to whatever music my friends listened to (and whatever was in at the time).  Some of these bands will date me and be really embarrassing, but a lot of time was spent listening to The Smiths, The Cure, and then a lot of Guns ‘N Roses and those sorts of “hair bands”.  I vividly remember reading Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla one day in in-school suspension, and that seemed pivotal.  I mean, what’s more rebellious than a lesbian vampire novella from 1872 (or reading it in in-school suspension)?
 
But regardless of how I tried to rebel, there was always something oddly Indiana about everything.  For instance, one of my high school boyfriend’s grandparents were Amish, and when he and I were together in our world, we were high schoolers getting into trouble (I think we actually met in detention) and listening to angst-ridden teenage music, and then when we visited his grandparents, we unloaded hay at an auction yard and visited their gigantic Belgian plow horse and looked at quilt patterns with his grandma.

   
When did your passion for words develop?
  
I’m sure very early, but I don’t know how early.  I know that before I could write by myself I would tell my mom stories and make her write them down.  When I was sorting some things years ago, I came across a slip of paper with something about a cat and a rat written in crayon on it, and I asked my mom what it was, and she told me I would make her write stories like that all the time.
 
We also didn’t have a lot of money – so little, in fact, that how my family lived is still a little bit of a mystery to me, but I’ve never asked my parents about it – but when we got those Scholastic Book Club order forms at school, my mom let me buy whatever books I wanted.  Other students would always laugh at how many books I got.
 
My mother wrote a local history book (one of those sold in county historical museums) when I was about seven, and I used to research with her by going to graveyards and copying down names and birthdates and death dates and “proofreading” pages of the book.  I doubt I was actually proofreading, but she let me pretend I was.  She also completed her Master’s degree sometime around this point, so I remember her always researching and typing (on an electric typewriter) and showing me how things worked – like changing the ribbon or using correction tape.  Thank G-d for computers!
 
My father always had some massive book from the library with him wherever he went, so I guess this was what I grew up thinking adults did.  My parents, despite whatever other flaws they had, were probably the best intellectual role models I could have had in the time and place I grew up.
 
Which writers have inspired and influenced you?

Wow.  This is a hard question.  I had the great fortune of studying with Richard (Rick) Jackson at Vermont College, and his views on associative poetry changed the way I write immensely.  He told me to read everything I was interested in, especially nonfiction, and to include all of that in my poetry – landscape, philosophy, physics etc.  I’m afraid I’m sort of a fickle reader; nearly any book I like that I’ve just read is my “favourite”.  But some books and writers that stand out are If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino, which changed the way I think about writing.  One of my friends told me it would, and I thought he was exaggerating, but it really did.  It made me not take linearity so seriously.  Why tell things in order?  I was so blown away when things wrapped up in the end, that I actually hugged the book.  I didn’t want to let it get away.  Cosmicomics, also by Calvino, taught me to think outside of the boundaries, too.  In that story collection, there are characters that are molecules, nebular dust, all types of possibilities.

Anne Carson’s poetry does something that I want to accomplish, but I can’t even put into words what that is.  “The Glass Essay” in Glass, Irony and God, in which she interweaves Emily Bronte’s life with the speaker’s (I’m assuming her own) is amazing.  There is something about the economy of emotion which is almost like an out of body experience.  I think that Louise Gluck does something similar in a lot of her work.  There is some sort of elegance in talking about such emotionally-charged events in a detached way that it almost becomes more emotional for the reader because of the absence of emotion in the writer.  It is almost as if the reader’s emotion does the work because the writer leaves out a piece of the puzzle.
 
Anne Sexton has always seemed brave to me.  Just writing a poem entitled, “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife”, is brave, let alone what it says in the poem.  And she’s always surprising with images, especially in that poem, “I have been momentary. / A luxury. A bright red sloop in the harbor” and that heartbreaking ending, “As for me, I am a watercolor. / I wash off.”  I think any woman, regardless of her romantic history, feels that ending.

 
Would you name a few of your favourite books?  Why are they important to you?

I’ve already named several, but let’s see …  When someone asks about favourite books, I generally think of prose.  For some reason, it’s hard to come up with favourite poetry collections, but I have favourite poems and poets.  As far as favourite books, it’s been a long time since I read it, but Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter sticks with me.  I think it’s because each character is so beautifully tragic because they are so fully human.  Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America is a gorgeous short story collection.  The one time I can remember simultaneously laughing and crying while reading was the story “People Like That Are the Only People Here”.  And I love what Lorrie Moore does with alternate stories and characterisation in Anagrams.
 
Another thing I like that writers do is when they rework previous works – like retellings of myth, fairy tale, or Shakespeare’s plays.  I recently read David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle which is a retelling of Hamlet in mid-twentieth century rural Wisconsin and found that really interesting.  I really enjoyed Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands, in which she uses the figures of Odysseus and Penelope to explore the breakdown of (presumably) her own marriage.  I guess in the same vein, we could add Kate Daniels’ The Niobe Poems, where she takes the grieving mythological mother and transforms her into a farm wife whose son drowned in a river; Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, where she takes the myth of Herakles and Geryon and turns it into a teenage same-sex love story, and, of course, Anne Sexton’s Transformations.  I think these stand out to me because there is a plot that holds the collection together, and the story holds up rather than individual poems or images staying in my memory.

I guess that was a roundabout way of answering, but I got to it.
 
Shaindel’s next virtual tour stop is Brandon Wallace’s blog, Julius Speaks, on 11 March.  Don’t miss it.
  
All “On the hood of a Cutlass Supreme” tour dates are here.
  
Order A Brief History of Time here.

More Annie Clarkson

 
These Things Happened
Annie Clarkson
  
walked like a woman with broken heels across pavements
bags trailing with open zips, hair splitting with braids
scuff-eyed and frozen with bruises rich as honey
with hands grazed along knuckles from punching drunk
on the backs of garages when you weren’t watching
when you were busy with your lips on a cold neck
a shoulder, a face almost pinned to your collar
my skin scraped blue and without thought or reason
to confront you I became the colour of rain
 
stole leaves from sycamore trees
ripped them from branches and rubbed them like balm
into my cuts, into the dark nettle of these sores
until they stung like wasps and scarred my bones
they were friends these bandage and ointment days
they were winter lovers I held against my skin
under horsehair blankets, under mohair,
under wool nights I became a green song
 
later, washed in the ice and mud of puddles
scrubbed elbow to toe with pumice
and stones picked from disused quarries
leaving myself nine times at the edge
when you weren’t watching
when you were sleeping
I became hard as gravel
 
 
First published in Winter Hands (Shadow Train Books, 2007).

Frida

 
Frida
Annie Clarkson
 
She lies on a bed of stones, bruised by feathers, worn by the turning of clock hands. Her forehead is creased with troubled sleep, her mouth twitching the beginning of words. She’s dreaming. Maybe of crumbling buildings or white rooms with no doors, or beds without pillows. She never remembers the details, wakes with tension in her neck, a crowded head.
 
She drinks tequila for breakfast in tiny shot glasses, wipes sweat from her face, and waits for her husband to bring home beads for her neck, a poem, a blood orange. He is gone a long time. She unwraps ornaments from newspaper, curls her hair in rags, pinches her cheeks to give them colour. She wishes she could split one half of her from the other – sit in out-of-town bars, soak her skin in alcohol, lie with men who have coarse stubble and rough hands. She would wrap herself in their sweat, see if her husband noticed.
  
Instead she rubs her skin with lychees, lets her curls tumble onto her shoulders and waits barefoot. He comes home tired, but drawn to her. He kisses her cheek then pulls back, with questions on his lips. He tells her she tastes of lost summers and a trip to the beach once when they were first lovers.
  
  
First published in Winter Hands (Shadow Train Books, 2007).
  
Visit Annie’s blog, forgetting the time.

Gloria Anzaldua

“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with my ashes, to fashion my own gods from my entrails.”

- Gloria Anzaldua

Susan Richardson

 
 
Waiting at the Breathing Hole
Susan Richardson
 
The white of this screen burns
my eyes. Its unswerving glare
might well make me snow-blind. 
  
There was a time when words would fly
across the screen, like a dog-team speeding,
each at its peak and pulling
equally and all I’d have to do was leap
aboard the sledge, guide it
in the right direction, then
relish the ride.

But suddenly,
                    we hit uneven ice.
          Bumped over ridges.
I fell from the sledge.          The dogs fled.
The instructions I yelled
                    had no meaning.
 
So now, with tender eyes,
I must hunt for a hole in the white
 
and wait
 
patient
 
at the rim
for the whiskered nose of inspiration,
for a flippered urge to surge to the surface.
 
And when it comes, I won’t shoot it,
harpoon it     skin it     rip its liver out and eat it raw
leave banners of blood on the snow.
 
No. I’ll feed it all the saffron cod and shrimp it needs,
teach it to move with the ease it knows beneath
the ice
 
but first, I’ll take a few steps back
and just let it
 
breathe
 
 
First published in Creatures of the Intertidal Zone
(Cinnamon Press, 2007).
 
Visit Susan’s website and blog.

Simon Barraclough

  
   
The Open Road
Simon Barraclough
 
What if colour film came first
and all these searing sunsets, curly copper mops,
pink-fringed parasols and gaudy frocks
were so much blah to an eye that thirsts
  
to watch an ashen rose unfurl,
see the charcoal sheen of a peacock’s tail,
a seascape rolling in drab grayscale,
dun smudges on the cheeks of girls;
  
dancing flames of heatless brume,
rockets spraying asterisks of chalk,
greybells blooming on pallid stalks,
the world’s flags starred and striped with gloom?
  
We wouldn’t dress our hearts in motley threads
and fix the world in greens and reds,
projecting all the loves we said
we’d never leave but left for dead,
  
and might not glimpse the widening seam
between the separating reds and greens
of everything we’d thought we’d seen
on our memory’s monitor or silver screen.
  
  
First published in Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt Publishing, 2008).
  
Read about The Open Road, the 1926 British colour travelogue that inspired Simon’s poem, here.
  
Visit Simon’s Salt Publishing author page and read more about
Los Alamos Mon Amour here.
  
Check out Simon’s website.

Writing objects to the lie that life is small

 
“Writing objects to the lie that life is small.  Writing is a cell of energy.  Writing defines itself.  Writing draws its viewer in for longer than an instant.  Writing exhibits boldness.  Writing restores power to exalt, unnerve, shock, and transform us.  Writing does not imitate life, it anticipates life.”
 
- Jeanette Winterson

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

The Meaning of Birds

 
” … it is not news that we live in a world
where beauty is unexplainable
and suddenly ruined
and has its own routines. We are often far
from home in a dark town, and our griefs
are difficult to translate into a language
understood by others. We sense the downswing of time
and learn, having come of age, that the reluctant
concessions made in youth
are not sufficient to heat the cold drawn breath
of age. Perhaps temperance
was not enough, foresight or even wisdom
fallacious, not only in conception
but in the thin acts
themselves. So our lives are difficult,
and perhaps unpardonable, and the fey gauds
of youth have, as the old men told us they would,
faded. But still, it is morning again, this day.
In the flowering trees
the birds take up their indifferent, elegant cries.
Look around. Perhaps it isn’t too late
to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn’t too late
to flap your arms and cry out, to give
one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.“
  
- Charlie Smith, from “The Meaning of Birds”
  (Indistinguishable from the Darkness)

Education of the Poet

“Most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea … It is a life dignified, I think, by yearning, not made serene by sensations of achievement.”

- Louise Glück, from “Education of the Poet” (Proofs & Theories)

Selima Hill

 
“The very things I used to be told off for – daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being reckless – for these, suddenly, I am being praised.”
 
- Selima Hill

Desires

 
Desires
Gaia Holmes
 
We keep our desires
in small cast-iron boxes
with impenetrable locks,
carry them with us
wherever we go
and they weigh us down,
make our hearts feel
like toothache.
 
Sometimes sounds creep
through the metal:
bird song, slow ferns uncurling,
rain on greenhouse glass.
Sometimes
when we’re not concentrating
scents slip out
of the miniscule cracks:
crushed orange peel,
fevers and hot summer skin.
 
Sometimes our desires
are beyond our control,
they make whirlwinds
in their prisons,
rock their boxes,
scream for honey
and fingertips.
We try to ignore them,
blush and fidget,
smother them with our coats
and talk about maths.
 
Sometimes we’re cruel,
we fill the bath
and hold them under water
until they stop babbling,
deprive them of our dreams.
 
 
from Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (Comma Press, 2006)

Night

Night
Gaia Holmes
 
The bedroom window is open.
The coldness of the coming storm
masks the thick scent
of last night’s love.
The moon is low
and I am thin as tracing paper,
nothing left but my outline.
My head is full of voodoo,
my frail breath
like brittle oranges,
and you lie on the bed
in your crucifixion pose.
My task is to keep you alive
with the voltage
of my yew-tipped fingers,
to make you cry like a new born.
The dome of the mosque
glints at me across the rooftops
like a fat and mystic eye.
Outside, children crazy on the electric
dance in a trance,
heels thumping, hair streaming,
plastic sandals flapping on warm tarmac.
Tonight the world is full of sprites.
 
 
from Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (Comma Press, 2006)

Desert Island Discs

 
Desert Island Discs
Gaia Holmes
 
Downing coffee like whisky at a funeral wake,
me, the dog and Desert Island Discs.
I’m marooned at this sixteen-acre table
eating toast that fills my mouth
with the whole of the Sahara,
remembering the legend of breakfast in bed.
 
Passion is a bright parrot you occasionally pull out,
me – I’m a slave to the cause,
a constellation thief,
throat ripped to fuck from swallowing stars,
dying to shine like Venus, like Pluto, like Mars,
like the big bright planet that I’m not.
 
I want a light show every morning,
a gala in the yard,
fat cherubs blessing each corner of our bed,
a rain of petals blushing on the skylight.
I want your commitments sculpted out of cumulus
and written in the sky.
I want a sonnet of your devotions
tattooed onto my spine in gold leaf.
 
Maybe I’m asking too much.
  
 
from Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (Comma Press, 2006)

Wallace Stevens

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”

- Wallace Stevens, from ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’

Carne

  
Carne
Gaia Holmes
 
The wheels screech a death rattle
on the Spanish road.
There are gaudy billboards
wedged into the mountains:
matadors hold red flags
like open wounds,
the corporeal sunset
drips over the crusty horizon
and poppies are scabs
on the dry hard shoulder.
  
Remember this without blood.
Forget the ice packed vows,
the nun-lipped silence,
the long prison sentence
of the tongue,
the captivity of lips
and fingertips,
the deep-frozen laughter.
  
In the back seat my head hums
with the drone of petrol.
A bag full of meat
reeks and squelches at my feet
and I slip into a rhythmic nightmare
where the sharp eyed waitress
points to her ribs
and says, “Carne, carne!!”
where the swarthy men
eye my thighs for a stew,
where you find bones
in my suitcase.
 
 
from Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (Comma Press, 2006)

Gaia Holmes

  
Postcard
Gaia Holmes
  
I will tell you
of the long, pale nights
and the lullaby of Curlews,
the sweet and salty winds
of Hoy and Papa Stronsay.
  
I will tell you
of the lime and peacock light
of the Aurora Borealis,
the early whispers of tide
tickling the gravel.
  
I will tell you
of the soft floss of Sea-thrift
blushing in the shingle
and the Rosa Rugosa
that frames the road.
  
I will not tell you
of the rotting seals that reek
in the first breeze of dawn,
the sour gales that pucker
the skin of the Isle.
  
I will not tell you
of the grey deadpan days
when the Redshanks
shriek their warning
and black magic
licks the shoreline.
  
I will not tell you
of my fear of stirring the tea
the wrong way,
my fear as I lay awake
feeling the rank mill dam
creep closer and closer.
  
I will not tell you
that I miss you.
I want to come home
and this North Sea brine
is rusting my heart.
  
  
from Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (Comma Press, 2006)

Read more about Gaia and her collection, Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed, here.

Hazel Frankel

Happy Birthday, Hazel!
 

  
 
Revelations
Hazel Frankel
  
In the beginning we created
bone, blood, skin, breath,
as we surged, rose, touched, kissed,
and it was morning
and it was evening,
our first days,
and together we saw that it was good.
  
In the beginning were our words,
and they were yes, now, tomorrow, joy,
and it was green and golden,
it was wind and fire,
it was man and woman,
and together we thought we would last forever,
for we knew that it was good.
  
In the beginning
we were sand and ocean and heaven on earth.
Our light carved out the darkness
with the stars’ brightness
and the moon shone forever
as we were born over and over,
and the sun in your eyes told me it was good.
  
But as our love filled the darkness of our deep,
the waters of the firmament filled with our tears.
In the beginning we feared no end.
In the beginning
was our end.
  
  
from Drawing from Memory (Cinnamon Press, 2007)

Copies of Drawing from Memory may be purchased through the Cinnamon Press website, Amazon (UK) or directly from Hazel (franks@iafrica.com).
 
Drawing from Memory’s cover artwork is Hazel Frankel’s Red Painting.

Jane Holland

  
Day Tripping
Jane Holland
 
Wasted again, I’m slumped
over a fold-up table
in a battered charabanc
by a Stygian river
       listening to nothing.
  
Slumped on both elbows
in whiskeyed vestments,
hair lank with the addict’s
unwashed sheen:
       three months now
unable to pray, or pay rent
or put pen to paper.
  
Slumped, unseen
behind the stained blind
       of a flyscreen
I listen to the wind-shear song
       of nothing
the thin translucent whine
       of nothing
until my bones begin to smoke
my eyeballs roll up white
       and sing.
 
 
First published in Camper Van Blues (Salt Publishing, 2008).

Read more about Camper Van Blues here.
 
Visit Jane’s blog, Raw Light.

“On the hood of a Cutlass Supreme” Tour

  
I am very happy to be hosting Salt author, Shaindel Beers, on the first leg of her virtual book tour, “On the hood of a Cutlass Supreme”.
 
On Wednesday, 4 March, I’ll be chatting to Shaindel about her family origins, growing up in a farming town in rural America, writing influences and favourite books.  We would love you to join us on the road for a scenic drive under the Midwestern sky.
 
Shaindel’s tour stops include a wonderfully eclectic range of blogs:
 
Julius Speaks (Brandon Wallace)
 
me~tronome (Larry Sawyer)
 
Michael Kimball
 
Blogalicious (Diane Lockward)
 
gravity and light (Chella Courington)
 
The Man with the Blue Guitar (Vince Gotera)
 
What to Wear During an Orange Alert? (Jason Behrends)
 
Blue Moon Northeast (Meg Harris)
 
The Tao, Ow and Wow of Jesus Crisis (John Burroughs)
 
Holy Land (Rauan Klassnik)
 
Zinta Aistars Prose and Poetry
 
Being and Writing (Kate Evans)
 
 
For tour dates, please revert to Shaindel’s Cyclone tour page here.
 
We look forward to seeing you on 4 March to kick off the Cutlass Supreme Queen’s road trip!

Shaindel Beers

 

  
Would you know me
 
if you had met me in my natural environs
wearing the uniform
of the hardworking rural poor -
straight-legged jeans, plaid flannel,
ponytail pulled through the back
of a John Deere cap,
a nondescript girl with hair as dun as after-harvest fields,
eyes the color of a Midwestern sky
that doesn’t
even make it
to blue
nine months of the year,
a bleak heart to match the landscape
of that land where winter never ends -
 
there’s a chance you would have stopped
in August
at the roadside stand
where I used to sell the extra produce
my family could never use by season’s end -
sweet corn, twelve ears for a dollar,
tomatoes, still warm from the sun -
you would have named your price and maybe wondered
 
about that quiet girl
who deftly filled your bags,
her small hands,
fingers flat and broad from honest work,
but you never would have thought
of all that she had done for your
dollar ninety-five -
hefting hay to feed the calves
and shoveling mounds of warm
manure to fertilize the soil months before
those tomatoes and corn
were pushed into the earth,
dropping fat green tomato bugs into coffee cans
of gasoline, pulling weeds in ninety-degree
sun so the ears would grow full
and yellow and ripe
 
so you could take them away
and forget me
until you meet me years later
in my favorite disguise – sophisticated city-dweller
where I am cast under silver lunar streams
in a platinum glow, no longer
grey and dun,
a new creature,
and you could proclaim it destiny.
 
 
Read more about Shaindel and order your copy of her striking collection, A Brief History of Time (Salt Publishing, 2009), here.
  
More tomorrow on Shaindel’s “On the hood of a Cutlass Supreme” Tour. 

Good News

I am excited to be the first poet invited on board at Pindrop Press, a new independent poetry publisher with one foot in the United Kingdom and the other in the United States.

Established by the editors of ouroboros review, Jo Hemmant and Christine Swint, Pindrop Press will publish pamphlets (chapbooks) and full-length collections by new, emerging and established poets.

The publication of my third collection – and my first volume overseas – is planned for 2010, with a London launch.

Mary Oliver

” [...] Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.”

- Mary Oliver, from “Messenger” (Thirst)

Marge Piercy

“A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by the graces
More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.
More commonly it wheezes and tips over.”

- Marge Piercy, from “Rough Times”

Serious writers and solemn writers

“A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer.  A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

- Ernest Hemingway

Books, books, glorious books

  
“Selected by the Guardian’s Review team and a panel of expert judges, this list includes only novels – no memoirs, no short stories, no long poems – from any decade and in any language.  Originally published in thematic supplements – love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel – they appear here for the first time in a single list. “
 
Looking for recommendations?  The Guardian’s “1000 novels everyone must read” might help.

Postcard from Hotel California

 

 
Postcard from Hotel California
Angela Readman

A picture of a greyhound on the side of a bus
I imagine will always make me smile.
The old man smells of pomade,
the daisies in his hand are lightning rod straight.
A woman leaves her good lips on an egg sandwich
and my sister hurls into a Playboy
someone tucked into the seat.
 
My head is full of Hotel California.
I picture myself with Malibu skin at a dresser,
combing my hair with fingers of sun.
My life will be palm trees,
a crowd scene on a beach. Somewhere
on the postcard is a pinpoint of colour,
you can’t quite make out: she is me.
 

from Strip (Salt, 2007)
 
Strip is now available in softcover here.

Christopher Hope reviews André Brink’s A Fork in the Road in The Guardian

  
“The real kick in this book comes last.  After supporting all his life the vision of a better way for all in South Africa, Brink is appalled by what change has brought and he is not afraid to say so.  He tears into a governing elite who resemble nothing so much as the brigands they suceeded – who substitute for the vox populi of the ballot box the vox dei of the ruling party; preside over a “tsunami” of crime and violence that terrorises everyone in the country; prefer quackery to antiretroviral drugs in the fight against Aids; and unapologetically back tyrannies from Burma to Sudan and Zimbabwe.”

To read Christopher Hope’s full review of A Fork in the Road (Harvill Secker) click on the above link.

The Chimaera, Issue Five

The Chimaera, edited by Paul Stevens and Peter Bloxom, is now out.  Issue Five includes a feature on Australian poet, Stephen Edgar, with an interview and contributions from Clive James, Vivian Smith, Geoff Page and Judith Beveridge.  The light verse section is guest-edited by John Whitworth.

And there’s more.  Much more.  HERE.

Check it out.

Stevie Smith

“The human creature is alone in his carapace.  Poetry is a strong way out.  The passage out that she blasts is often in splinters, covered with blood …”

- Stevie Smith

An interview with Padrika Tarrant in The New Review

My interview with the inimitable Padrika Tarrant is in The New Review, Issue 20 (Winter/Spring 2009) on Scottish author Laura Hird’s website here.

Padrika’s novel, The Knife Drawer, is to be published later this year by Salt.

Another Roadside Attraction

“I am a gypsy in spirit … I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, up stairs, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heroes:  perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.”

- Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

Sheenagh Pugh

  
Golden  Boy
Sheenagh Pugh
 
25 November 2005
 
 
A white day
to go: November slipping
away underfoot,
 
rusting
or jaundiced, brittle with frost.
Your face,
 
fine-boned
even now, not drowned in flesh,
but turned to gold,
 
skin beaten out
to the thinnest leaf,
a god’s mask,
 
if gods could die
or come to grief. That sheen,
as if death
 
refined you,
burned off the slag, left only
the right metal,
 
unalloyed,
the flash of talent, the joy
speeding and weaving
 
to its goal,
baffling all challenge, laughing
at its gift.
 
We grow up:
put away childish things, stop
hoping for fame
 
or genius,
same as the rest. But just
now and then,
 
a man rises
above everyday, a man
like us,
 
and we fly
a little way on his uplift.
What if
 
he comes down
in the end to ruin?
It is the brief
 
instant aloft,
the leaving earth, that lives,
as when a boy,
 
falling,
still glowed from having once
touched the sun.
 
  
This poem was first published in PN Review.  It appears in Sheenagh Pugh’s current collection, Long-Haul Travellers (Seren, 2008).
  
Order your copy of Long-Haul Travellers here or here.
 
Visit Sheenagh’s website.

Marilyn Hacker

“Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise – nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.”

- Marilyn Hacker

Louise Glück

 
“It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.”
 
- Louise Glück, from “October”
  Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006)

John Updike (1932 – 2009)

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.”

“Writers take words seriously – perhaps the last professional class that does – and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

“The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.”

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.”

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing.  To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process.  To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”

On Borders

“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men
By strangers with a calm, judicial pen,
And when the borders bleed we watch with dread
The lines of ink across the map turn red.”

- Marya Mannes,
  Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times (George Braziller, 1959)

Annie Dillard

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along.  I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.  I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them …”

- Annie Dillard

Mark Strand

“A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be.  It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living.  Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”

- Mark Strand

I remember this

 
Jo Hemmant has a perfectly formed small stone on Fiona Robyn’s site, a handful of stones, here.

The Moon is Always Female

” …
when I work I am pure as an angel
tiger and clear is my eye and hot
my brain and silent all the whining
grunting piglets of the appetites.”

- Marge Piercy, from “The Moon is Always Female”

Marge Piercy

 
“Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.”
 
- Marge Piercy, from “The art of blessing the day”

Joan Miró

“Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it’s an exchange of blood, a total embrace – without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.”

- Joan Miró

After they had explored all the suns in the universe

“After they had explored all the suns in the universe, and all the planets of all the suns, they realised that there was no other life in the universe, and that they were alone.  And they were very happy, because then they knew it was up to them to become all the things they had imagined they would find.”

- Lanford Wilson, Fifth of July

Antonio Machado

“Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.”

- Antonio Machado

It’s not what you write about but how you write about it

 
Last night, I read Philip Larkin’s interview in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 2 (Picador, 2007).  Larkin wasn’t the most amenable interviewee (he was downright cranky at times), but his answers make for interesting reading.
 
The interviewer, Robert Phillips, said:  “Davison also sees your favourite subjects as failure and weakness”, referring to Peter Davison, an American “poet-critic”.
 
Larkin replied:
 
“I think a poet should be judged by what he does with his subjects, not by what his subjects are.  Otherwise you’re getting near the totalitarian attitude of wanting poems about steel production figures rather than “Mais où  sont les neiges d’antan?”  Poetry isn’t a kind of paint spray you use to cover selected objects with.  A good poem about failure is a success.”

Similarly, I’ve read reviews in which poets are berated for being “too personal”, for writing about menstruation, menopause, infertility or masturbation.  These topics make some people uncomfortable, but surely nothing should be taboo.  What is poetry, if not personal?  Who are the final arbiters of what is and isn’t acceptable?  It’s subjective, a matter of personal taste.  A poem should be judged on merit, on whether it is well written, not on its subject matter.   How boring it would be if all poetry toed the line.  Vive la différence.

Rumi

“Be helpless, dumbfounded,
Unable to say yes or no.
Then a stretcher will come from grace
     to gather us up.”

- Rumi, from “Zero Circle”  (Version by Coleman Barks)

Philip Larkin

“I think a young poet, or an old poet for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he’s written it but a couple of weeks later.  Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.  But if it doesn’t, he shouldn’t be discouraged.  I mean, in the seventeenth century every educated man could turn a verse and play the lute.  Supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make Wimbledon?  First and foremost, writing poems should be a pleasure.  So should reading them, by God.”

- Philip Larkin

Elizabeth Alexander: “What if the mightiest word is love …”

Poet Collin Kelley has posted the text to Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day”, on his blog, Collin Kelley: Modern Confessional.

Thanks, Collin.

Dana Guthrie Martin in conversation with David Biespiel

“The thing about so many people writing poetry, is that it’s always been like that.  As much as poetry is a plaything for elitists, it’s a guild art, a craft art, an art for amateurs.  Anyone who uses a language believes he can write a poem in that language.  And anyone who wants to say something with a heightened sense of meaning will write a poem.  Poetry is not insulated or detached from anything.  Well, I should say that “this poem” or “that poem” isn’t insulated or detached; the Art of Poetry might be.  But so what?  It’s not a popular art form.  It’s not mass entertainment.  So what?  It remains essential to human culture and human existence anyway.”

- David Biespiel

Read Dana Guthrie Martin’s conversation with poet and Poetry Northwest editor, David Biespiel, here.

Katy Evans-Bush, a book and a poem

 
Dream: the Twelve Dancing Princesses
Katy Evans-Bush
 
There are several options.
                                         One: the woods
are dark. The mist rolls round the trunks of trees.
You can’t see any stars. Through leaves, the sky
is black in tiny patches. You can’t see
the babies hidden in their tiny baskets.
Wolf-food.
                Two: the lake is black and deep,
cold as obsidian, with ripples like breaks. Night
has fallen but the murky light’s unreal,
and the lake might be a swimming pool
for all the nature there. You are surrounded
by high blank walls. Everywhere babies wail.
No; they don’t make a sound. They are suspended
on the water like lily pads. You must save them.
A girl with plaits rows by in a rickety boat,
blue, with oars like matchsticks. Out to sea.
It’s hard to be everywhere at once.
                                                     Three: 
 
 
from Me and the Dead (Salt Publishing, 2008).

*

More about Me and the Dead here.
 
Follow Katy’s Cyclone book tour, A Conversation About Dreams, here.

Read Katy’s blog, Baroque in Hackney.

Jeanette Winterson writes about her father’s death

“When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

- Jeanette Winterson

Read Jeanette Winterson’s January column on the death of her father here.

William Faulkner

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself.  An artist is a creature driven by demons.  He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why … The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.”

- William Faulkner

Iris Murdoch

“A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”

- Iris Murdoch (quoted in The Times, 6 July 1989)

Tom & Viv

 
Tom & Viv (1994) (Directed by Brian Gilbert,
screenplay by Michael Hastings and Adrian Hodge,
from the original play by Michael Hastings.)

*
 
“I don’t keep a line that Viv hasn’t approved.  I rely on her completely.  She’s my first audience.”

- Willem Dafoe as TS (Tom) Eliot
 
 
“I gave Tom the title to The Waste Land.  We worked together side by side for years.  I am threaded through every line of poetry he has ever written.  And he has my undying love.  He will have it until the last breath leaves my body.  And he knows it.  And nobody can ever take that away.”

- Miranda Richardson as Vivienne Eliot
 
 
“Vivie was, of course, the strong one.  She made cowards of us all.  Well, me, certainly.  Terrible, really.  Can’t forget it.  It never mattered to Vivie what the world might think.  She’s a very honest person, you see.  She stuck by her beliefs.  She believed in Tom and his genius.  She loved him and she stuck by him.  Never left him.  Never ever left him.”

- Tim Dutton as Maurice Haigh-Wood (Vivienne’s brother)

*
   
“And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.”

- TS Eliot, from “Little Gidding” (Four Quartets)

Bob Dylan

“The highest purpose of art is to inspire.  What else can you do?  What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”

- Bob Dylan

Sex, Drugs and Modern Art

 
“Everybody wants to get on the van Gogh boat.  There’s no trip so horrible that someone won’t take it.  The idea of the unrecognised genius slaving away in a garret is a deliciously foolish one.  We must credit the life of Vincent van Gogh for really sending this myth into orbit.  I mean how many pictures did he sell?  One?  He couldn’t give them away.  We are so ashamed of his life that the rest of art history will be retribution for van Gogh’s neglect. 

In this town, one is at the mercy of the recognition factor.  One’s public appearance is absolute.   Part of the artist’s job is to get the work where I will see it.  I consider myself a metaphor of the public.  I am a public eye, a witness, a critic.  When you first see a new picture, you don’t want to miss the boat.  You have to be very careful because you may be staring at van Gogh’s ear.”

- art critic and poet, Rene Ricard, in Basquiat (1996)
  (written and directed by Julian Schnabel. 
  Based on a story by Lech J Majewski.)

Wendell Berry

“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

- Wendell Berry
  from “To Know the Dark”, Farming: A Handbook
  (Harcourt Brace, 1970)

Roger Housden

“Great poetry can alter the way we see ourselves.  It can change the way we see the world.  You may never have read a poem in your life, and yet you can pick up a volume, open it to any page, and suddenly see your own original face there; suddenly find yourself blown into a world full of awe, dread, wonder, marvel, deep sorrow, and joy.  Poetry at its best calls forth our deep Being, bids us live by its promptings; it dares us to break free from the safe strategies of the cautious mind; it calls to us, like the wild geese, from an open sky.”

- Roger Housden

Theodore Roethke

“Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”

- Theodore Roethke

Gabriel García Márquez

“One of the first things you learn as a writer is that you write what you can, not what you want.”

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Elizabeth Bishop

“I’ve never written the things I’d like to write that I’ve admired all my life.  Maybe one never does.”

- Elizabeth Bishop, The Paris Review Interviews, I (Canongate, 2007)

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W D Snodgrass dies

“These trees stand very tall under the heavens.
While they stand, if I walk, all stars traverse
This steep celestial gulf their branches chart.
Though lovers stand at sixes and at sevens
While civilizations come down with the curse,
Snodgrass is walking through the universe.”

- W D Snodgrass, from “These Trees Stand …”
  (Heart’s Needle, 1959)

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, William De Witt Snodgrass, died this morning after a four-month battle with inoperable lung cancer.

Read more about W D Snodgrass here.

Read “Heart’s Needle” here.

Read Ms Baroque’s wonderful post about W D Snodgrass here.

Alison Brackenbury, a book and a poem

Alison Brackenbury’s seventh poetry collection, Singing in the Dark (Carcanet), has one of the loveliest covers I’ve seen.

A few days ago, Alison sent me a short poem from Singing in the Dark.  In her words, heartsease is “a tiny pansy which grows at the edge of cornfields … delicately streaked with palest yellow and violet.  But it combines beauty with the toughness of a weed.”

After
Alison Brackenbury
 
You know we are not lost. Nothing is lost.
The smallest crinkled petal of heartsease
Crumbles to ground. The wind that sweeps each face
Brings, wild with sun, your mother as a girl,
His vanished brothers, holds an endless place
For dogs, cats, ponies, robins that she fed.
Speak, as you must, of every fault and flight.
But never say of me that I am dead.
 
from Singing in the Dark (Carcanet)
 
Alison Brackenbury talks to Paul Stevens in The Chimaera (Issue 3) here.
 
Read nine poems in The Chimaera here.

Four of Alison’s poems in Horizon Review here.

Read more of Alison’s poetry on her website.

Alison’s author page on the Carcanet website.

Charles Bainbridge’s review of Singing in the Dark in The Guardian here.

Order your copy of Singing in the Dark here.

Jen Hadfield wins TS Eliot prize for poetry

“A relative newcomer to poetry who has been widely praised for her passion and awareness of the natural world has tonight won one of the genre’s grandest awards – the TS Eliot prize for poetry.”

Click on the above link to read The Guardian article.

Read more about Jen on the Poetry International Web here.

Jen Hadfield’s author page on the Bloodaxe website here.

Order your copy of Nigh-No-Place (Bloodaxe) here.

Congratulations, Jen.

Poet Mick Imlah dies

 

“The poet Mick Imlah, whose volume of poetry, The Lost Leader (Faber), won the 2008 Forward prize for best collection and is shortlisted for tonight’s TS Eliot prize, has died, aged 52.“

Click on the above link to read today’s article in The Guardian.

Read Peter McDonald’s review of The Lost Leader in The Guardian here.

Order your copy of The Lost Leader (Faber) here.

Postcards from a Conquistador

Dave Bonta is working on a series of poetry postcards, Postcards from a Conquistador.

They’ve caught my imagination. 

Hanging around
Off the map
Waste land
Ignorance
The birds
Prima materia
Knight
Legend
Misfit
Horseman, pass by
Introspectre
Like water for ice

Adrienne Rich

“The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.”

“The moment of change is the only poem.”

“I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.”

“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”

Faiz Ahmed Faiz

“The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.”

- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

David Whyte

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

- David Whyte, “Sweet Darkness”
   from The House of Belonging (Many Rivers Press, 1997)

Fiona Zerbst

Fiona Zerbst was born in Cape Town in 1969.  She has lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town and spent six months in Ukraine and Russia in 1995.  She published two books of poetry, Parting Shots (Carrefour Press) in 1991 and The Small Zone (Snailpress) in 1995.  “Soliloquy” and “Calendar” are from Fiona’s third collection, Time and again (UCT Younger Poets Series in association with Snailpress, 2002).

Soliloquy
Fiona Zerbst

I listen. Everything that used to be
invades my room and silence in the air
that nurtures me, contains the sullen care
I feed on, sucks the future out of me.
In all this time, a memory would be
too sad; an inappropriate goodbye
might slip from me, or silence, with a sigh,
become some dubious poetry.

Protect me from the wordlessness of lips.
Come back and be the talk that can sustain
my breath, and be the one thing to remain
intact in every solitude that grips
my mind.  The darkness forming on the stair
could be my last, my greatest, love affair.

Calendar
Fiona Zerbst

Tonight you’re struck
by miniature things.

A prickle of light,
a shadow of wings:

the shimmer a moth
gives off as it flutters

over the grass
away from the gutter

covered with leaves.
By saying his name,

you, too, fly dumbly
into a flame.

You’ve heard him leave.
The hunger within

dies down a while,
forgets its own din.

You look at the clock:
it mirrors your face

and all alterations
made in this place -

your social agenda
tacked to the wall,

the calendar picture
silent and small

beside the black numbers,
lovingly penned.

That picture: distraction.
Those numbers:  the end

Allen Ginsberg

“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”

- Allen Ginsberg

An interview with Christopher Hope

Born in 1944 in Johannesburg, Christopher Hope was educated at Wits University and the University of Natal. He worked as a journalist in South Africa before moving to Paris and then London in 1975.

Hope has published four poetry collections: Whitewashes (1971), Cape Drives (1974), In the Country of the Black Pig (1981) and English Men (1985). He has also written nine works of fiction. His first novel, A Separate Development (1980), was banned in South Africa, but won Britain’s David Higham Prize for Best First Novel. Kruger’s Alp (1984) won the Whitbread Novel Award; Serenity House (1992) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has published four volumes of non-fiction: the autobiographical White Boy Running (1988), Moscow! Moscow! (1990), Signs of the Heart: Love and Death in Languedoc (1999) and Brothers Under the Skin: Travels in Tyranny (2003).

A playwright, broadcaster and journalist, Hope has travelled widely in Russia, Yugoslavia and Southeast Asia. He has written for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Independent, The New Yorker and Le Monde. He lives in France and visits South Africa regularly.

Read my interview with Christopher here.

Jeffrey Skinner

“I thought poetry was better than heroin.  I still do.  In fact, it’s too bad poetry’s not illegal, because if it were everyone would want to try it, and people would find out how good it is.”

- Jeffrey Skinner

Canopic Jar #22

I am pleased to have two poems (“The Art of Awakening” and
“The Blue Door Opens”) included in Canopic Jar #22.

This issue features:

Poetry by
Arlene Ang, Corey Mesler, Gabeba Baderoon, Isobel Dixon, John McCullough, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Lee Ann Pickrell, Lee Stern, Matthew Gillis, Michelle McGrane, Myesha Jenkins, Patrick Sullivan, Phillippa Yaa De Villiers, Rethabile Masilo, Rose Dewy Knickers, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal and Santiago De Dardano Turann.

Prose by
Amanda Lawrence Auverigne, Ash Hibbert, Bill Green, Liam Leddy, Polly Tuckett, Rick Nes Smith, Tom Sheehan and William Alexander.

Visual artwork by
Didi Menendez and Sarah Hasty Williams.

Are fairy tales bad for children?

“Are stories like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, and Rapunzel harmful to children? [...]  A poll of 3,000 British parents showed that a quarter of mothers today reject some classic fairy tales.”

Read Marjorie Kehe’s blogpost in The Christian Science Monitor by clicking on the above link.

I’d love to hear what you think.

Billy Collins

Live every day like your hair was on fire

“Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”
And Ezra Pound and T S Eliot
Fighting in the captain’s tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers …”
- Bob Dylan

“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.”
- Eskimo proverb

“There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which one of them is death.”
- Kenneth Patchen

“From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”
- Edvard Munch

“I want a priest, a rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman.  I want to hedge my bets.”
- Wilson Mizner

“I meant, said Ipslore bitterly, what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile? 
Death thought about it, Cats, he said eventually, Cats are nice.”
- Terry Pratchett

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice; there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”
- Frank Zappa

“I hope the leaving is joyful; and I hope never to return.”
- Frida Kahlo

“Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven’s claws.”
- Jim Morrison

“For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean.  As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it.  That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge.  When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water.  We call this the moment of death.  That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.”
- Bill Viola

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. “
- Crowfoot

“If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.”
- Meister Eckhart

“… and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.”
- William Shakespeare

“O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting …”
- Walt Whitman

“He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.”
- William Shakespeare

“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
- Leonard Cohen

“Live every day like your hair was on fire.”
- Zen proverb

The Year of White Roses

Dear Dale, I can’t think of a greater honour than this.

Thank you.  And love.

The Year of White Roses
Dale Favier

for Michelle

It is the year of white roses, whose common theme

is death of fathers. I can’t be clever today. No sleep comes.
Oh, give me your hand. Walk away with me to someplace

cold and simple. I am heavy with kisses, pregnant with love,
wanting to give what I know only time gives,

wanting to take what can’t be mine. Forgive me. It is still
love, as I know it, and the only thing I know.

Listen to the meltwater, old snow dripping from the eaves.
July is under January: in Joburg you can tell

because the layers are reversed, and the light
is hot on thin cotton. Today is perihelion,

our closest approach to the sun: but plainly
what matters is not how close we are but how

we are inclined. Death came to hold our hands awhile
but he is saying goodbye, and we must let him go.

Ice hesitates here in the shadows
of northern walls, but the snowmelt is already

on its way, by cloud, to Africa.

Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Li-Young Lee, William Stafford and Eavan Boland

“The Peace of Wild Things”
by Wendell Berry

“Gravel”
by Mary Oliver

“Little Father”
by Li-Young Lee

“Spirit of Place: Great Blue Heron”
by William Stafford

“Amber”
by Eavan Boland

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field

White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Mary Oliver

Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings – five feet apart -

Read more …

When Great Trees Fall

When Great Trees Fall
Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be.  Be and be
better.  For they existed.

George Szirtes

Today, a new poem from George Szirtes.
 
The Death of Woolworths
George Szirtes
 
I feel like a vulture here, she said. The store
was half sealed-off in the infinite melancholy
of small pickings. Wrapping paper, a score
of remnant CDs, barely enough to load a trolley.
Garden fitments, stationery… all the grand spaces
of the humble, vacated. There stood the childhoods:
the sweet counter, the scribbling pad, the lost faces
of the faintly bored dispensing their gentle goods.
 
Worlds swell, explode, shed light, draw darkness in.
A match blows out in the draught. Nothing will keep.
A plastic pencil case abandoned in the bin
lifts a helpless lid but makes no unnecessary fuss.
Fire, firelighters, matchboxes, ashtrays… Cheap
vanishings. Vultures. We’ll be the death of us.
 
 
*

Read more about George on his website here.

Treat yourself to a copy of George’s New and Collected Poems (Bloodaxe) here.

Stop all the clocks

This morning, my beloved, dignified, honourable father passed away.  I am who I am because of the unconditional love he gave me from the moment I was born.

Today, I post this poem because he was “my North, my South, my East and West”.

But, Dad, I celebrate who you were – and your life.

Thank you for everything.

I love you.
 

Stop all the clocks
W H Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Coming Alive

There is a wonderfully eclectic collection of quotes on Carolee’s blog, i am maureen, like this one:

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive.  And then go do that.  Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

- Dr. Howard Thurman

Check it out. It’s a quotation candy store.

Moving In

I am honoured to have been invited to join The Poetry Collaborative family with Rethabile Masilo.  I’m unpacking my hubbly-bubbly, cocktail shaker, dancing shoes and daisy chains in between sentences …

Here’s the low-down on the Collaborative.

Meet my funky family members here.

Everyone can see we’re together / As we walk on by / And (Fly) and we fly just like birds of a feather / I won’t tell no lie / (All) all of the people around us they say / Can they be that close / Just let me state for the record / We’re giving love in a family dose.

- “We Are Family”, Sister Sledge

Pass the smelling salts.

*swoon*

A New Year and a life less ordinary

“Now let us welcome the New Year,
Full of things that have never been.”

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Happy New Year from South Africa.

May your year ahead be filled with creativity, love and extraordinary adventures.

August Kleinzahler

“I’ve always felt that there’s a very thin membrane between madness, alcoholism, and/or destitution and being an OK American guy in a comfortable heated apartment with meatballs and a decent Sauvignon Blanc in the fridge.”

- August Kleinzahler

Time does not bring relief

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,–so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

- Edna St Vincent Millay

Mary Oliver’s ‘The Uses of Sorrow’

“Someone I loved gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

- Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”

Anton Chekov

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

- Anton Chekov

Turner’s Paintbox

“This is how it happens, then.  This is how our lives unfold.  A shout in the street.  A cry and a whisper.  Two people turn their faces from each other.  Forget the nightly news, the special bulletin from our New York correspondent.  Life happens by accumulation, one moment falling softly on another.  A snowflake lands upon a leaf of grass high on a mountainside.  One by gentle one they fall, and when spring comes there is the creak and roar of an avalanche and a whole village is swept away.  For us too each moment drops unnoticed, the molecules of time falling and nestling against each other, until the inevitable occurs.”

- Paul Morgan, Turner’s Paintbox (Penguin Viking, 2007)