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

Susan Culver

 

 
From Comfort Street: A Collection of Poems & Stories,
available at Lulu.com.
 
Visit Susan’s blog, Poetry Friends.

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.

Love Comes First, Erica Jong

 

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.

Vanessa Daou’s Zipless, Songs from the works of Erica Jong

 
My Love Is Too Much
 

 
Erica Jong’s poem, ‘My Love Is Too Much’.
 
*
 
Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit

 
Erica Jong’s poem, ‘Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit’.
 
*
 
 Smoke
 

 
*
 
Autumn Perspective

 
Erica Jong’s poem, ‘Autumn Perspective’.
  
*
  
Dear Anne Sexton
 

 
Erica Jong’s poem, ‘Dear Anne Sexton II’.
 
*
  
Near the Black Forest

 
Erica Jong’s poem, ‘Near the Black Forest’.
 
* 
  
Take a look at Vanessa’s website.

Eating Beauty

 

 
This animation by JJ Webb is based on a portrait by Janet Snell of Cheryl Snell.
 
 
Eating Beauty
Cheryl L Snell
 
I’m at the edge of the garden
in a white nightgown embroidered with lilies.
This keeps happening without my permission;
a sleepwalk, a run-away.
 
The scent of my best perfume
kneels beside me here. I sift through the soil
where I have noticed green –
perhaps this is a metaphor for the flesh—
on the White Hellebore. It smudges my thumb
in the wanton sap-start of spring.
 
Since there is no one here to forbid it,
I gather the fists of petal to my face.
Since there is no one, I kiss them open
as if I’ve already flown away,
flown from blood-rivers and cages of bone
beyond the shudder of petals on the rich loam floor.
 
Tigerlily, Calla, Stargazer. A cardinal trailing stars.
 
 
First published in Stirring, ‘Eating Beauty’ is included in Cheryl Snell’s most recent collection, Prisoner’s Dilemma.

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

Leonard Cohen Live in London

 

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

  
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.
 
*
 
Sweeten your choleric mother-in-law,
a small crepey woman in a black dress
smelling of mothballs and rectitude,
with stuffed quails roasted in thick balsamic sauce,
followed by ricotta rose cheesecake and marzipan filled figs.
Spill velvet pink petals over her plate.
 
*
 
Soothe inflamed ulcers and decaying lesions
with a steamed fig, slippery elm, flaxseed poultice.
Wrap around the weeping skin in a muslin cloth.
Apply fresh poultices and invocations as needed.
 
*
 
Pick a ribbed fig from the tree at twilight.
Stand your boots outside the kitchen door.
Split the dark cocoon in two.
Rub the gnarled wart with amber pulp and crunchy seeds.
Tie the halves together again.
Bury them in the flinty earth
under the waning moon.
 
*
 
Cure fatigue, insomnia or nightmares by boiling milk
poured in a creamy swish from the pail
with sun-baked figs and turmeric.
Add lavender honey to taste.
Drink slowly from a deep yellow bowl.
 
*
 
Bind three white Cilento figs
with a crimson ribbon for dreams of love.
Before extinguishing the candle flame,
place the fruit under your pillow.
In the morning, rise yawning,
loop the ribbon around your waist.
If your heart is in your mouth,
marinate it, sear it,
eat it with figs.
 
*
 
Beguile your partner with fig-leaf absolute
dabbed along the pale curve of your neck.
Wear almond blossoms in your hair. Sip Prosecco.
Dance on a terracotta tiled 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.
 
*
 
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.
Dust with confectioners’ sugar. Smell the mimosa.
Don’t wipe the sugary smudge from your chin.
Carry the sated silence to bed.
 
*
 
Arouse your lover with plump purple figs in a cool bowl of water.
Break the thin moist skin with your fingers.
Bruised with desire, close your eyes. Listen to your breathing,
the sound as the tide washes in.
 
*
 
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 your late summer gift in leaves
left in a basket on the porch. Follow the dung
and wild mushroom trail home, a wasp
hovering at your shoulder.
 
*
 
In autumn, line your pantry shelves with jars of glistening fig jam
scented with green cardamom pods. Seal in the sunshine
with smooth wax discs and tight screw-top lids,
while your tortoiseshell tom licks himself with a rasping tongue,
dreaming of sparrows.
 
*
 
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 flavour of olive-wood smoke, the lit fire,
the mass and measure of November’s indulgences.
 
*
 
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

The Terrors by Tom Chivers

 

  
Tom Chivers’ chilling special edition pamphlet, The Terrors, is now available from Nine Arches Press here.
 
Read more about The Terrors here.

‘Dark London history, dredged and interrogated, spits and fizzes with corrosive wit.  Language-receipts sustain the necessary illusion.  IT MATTERS.  It matters: the weight and pace of delivery, the balance of breath.  Tom Chivers understands the risks he risks, the play in a taught rope.  ‘I’ll ghost-write, if you ask.’
 
- Iain Sinclair

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.

Poets reading: Selima Hill, Maura Dooley, Jane Hirshfield, Helen Dunmore and Fleur Adcock

 
From In Person: 30 Poets filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce, DVD-book edited by Neil Astley Bloodaxe Books, 2008).

 
Selima Hill reads ‘Being a Wife’, Maura Dooley reads “What Every Woman Should Carry’, Jane Hirshfield reads ‘The Poet’, Helen Dunmore reads ‘Glad of These Times’ and Fleur Adcock reads ‘Weathering’.

Kate Moss reads Roddy Lumsden’s ‘Bloom’

 

 
‘Bloom’ is from Roddy Lumsden’s Third Wish Wasted
(Bloodaxe Books, 2009).

My Father’s Piano

In The Guardian, poet Sarah Maguire and photographer Martin Argles create an evocative audio slideshow around Sarah’s poem, ‘My Father’s Piano’, here.

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

Where the Wild Things Are

 
The adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book,
Where the Wild Things Are.
 

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

‘Claustrophobia’, a film by Charlotte Caetano, based on a poem by Gaia Holmes

David Whyte

“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

‘Desires’, a film directed by Kate Jessop, based on a poem by Gaia Holmes

 

 
More of Kate’s films here.

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.  In the meantime, here’s Breathing in Colour’s gorgeous cover. 
 
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.