George Ttoouli’s Static Exile

George Ttoouli

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

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

Alison Brackenbury’s Bookkeeping

Alison Brackenbury

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

Fiona Robyn’s Blogsplash

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

The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love

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

Sally Potter

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

Jo Hemmant’s The Den

Jo Hemmant

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

Sophie Mayer’s Her Various Scalpels

Sophie Mayer by Lady Vervaine

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

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

Michael Swan

Michael Swan

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

Karin Koller’s Bikes

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

Ruth McIlroy’s Just Idiot Talk

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

Vicki Feaver’s The Handless Maiden reissued

Vicki Feaver

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

Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig

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

Roy Woolley

Roy Woolley

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

Pasiphaë and the Minotaur, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

Semyón Isaåkovich Kirsánov

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

Horizon Review: Issue Three

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

Janet Sutherland’s Hangman’s Acre

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

Janet Sutherland

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

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

Geraldine Green

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

Jocelyn Page’s Pufferfish

Jocelyn Page

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

Adiós, au revoir, arrivederci

 

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

Kim Addonizio on fear of failure

 

Kim Addonizio by Leon Borensztein

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

The South Coast

 

 

 

 

Alice Oswald

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

Julia Copus on writing poems

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

Vona Groarke on writing

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

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

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

Tamsin Kendrick’s Charismatic Megafauna

Tamsin Kendrick

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

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

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

Photograph of Lorrie Moore by Linda Nylind

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

Reading

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

An interview with Tom Chivers

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

Jane Hirshfield on not writing

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

Sarah Hills’ Floral Planet

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

- John Burnside

 

 

 

 

 

 

Siriol Troup’s Beneath the Rime

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

Claire Crowther’s The Clockwork Gift

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

Jacqueline Saphra’s The Dark Art

Jacqueline Saphra

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

Barbara Kingsolver’s Small Wonder

 

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

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

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

A Drakensberg Weekend

 

 

 

Liz Gallagher’s The Wrong Miracle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rob Mackenzie photographed by Gerry Cambridge.

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

The Opposite of Cabbage (Salt Publishing, 2009)

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

Entering the Mind of Poetry

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

Hazel Frankel on Counting Sleeping Beauties

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

C K Williams’s The Singing

 

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

Henry Miller, small stones and the alchemy of awareness

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

Paul Stevens

 

Paul Stevens

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

Wislawa Szymborska on inspiration

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

Valeria Melchioretto’s The End of Limbo

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

Sheenagh Pugh’s Later Selected Poems

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

Jane Hirshfield

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

Sharks, Poets and other Endangered Species

 

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

Tania van Schalkwyk’s Hyphen

 

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

Photograph of Tania van Schalkwyk by Nicholas Percival

Eleanor Rees’s Andraste’s Hair

 

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

Gloria Anzaldúa

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

Barbara Smith’s Kairos

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

Laurie Byro’s The Bird Artists

 

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

Midsummer Nights

 

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

Consorting with Angels

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

Ouroboros Review, Issue Three

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

Seamus Heaney

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

Zimbabwe thunder

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

An Experiment in Criticism

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

Familiar, a poetry postcard

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

Pascale Petit

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

Writing as Ritual

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

Lisa Jarnot and an animated poem

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

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

 

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

Cecilia Woloch

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

Siri Hustvedt

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

Simon Freedman

    

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

Louisa Adjoa Parker’s Salt-sweat & Tears

 

 
If I spin around and jump and shout
Louisa Adjoa Parker

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

Tim Wells’ Rougher Yet

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

Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s Selected Poems

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

A S Byatt

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

Anne Berkeley’s The Men from Praga

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

Charles Péguy

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

Tom Chivers’ How to Build a City

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

Alison Brackenbury

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

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

Joan Metelerkamp’s Burnt Offering

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

Sindiwe Magona’s Please, Take Photographs

 

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

Helen Moffett’s Strange Fruit

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

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

Fiona Zerbst’s Oleander

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

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

Ian Parks

 

 
Shell Island
Ian Parks

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

Peter Scupham

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

Carrie Etter’s The Tethers

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

Geoffrey Philp

 

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

Angela France’s Occupation and a Ledbury Poetry Festival Launch

 

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

Top 100 Poetry Blogs

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

Andrea Porter’s A Season of Small Insanities

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

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

Penelope Shuttle

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

Modjaji Books

 

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

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

Anne Waldman

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

Joe Sent Me

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

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

Charles Mingus

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

Suzanne Frischkorn

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

Ivy Alvarez

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

Thoughts of Craig Arnold

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

Kelly Cherry

 

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

Fiona Robyn’s The Blue Handbag

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

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

Michael Ondaatje

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

Jeanette Winterson on gardening and writing

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

Luke Kennard

 
 
 
The Forms of Despair
Luke Kennard

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

Carol Ann Duffy is named as Poet Laureate

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

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

Poet Craig Arnold is missing in Japan

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

Sweet and savoury poetry

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

The Palestine Festival of Literature

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

Katy Evans-Bush

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

Bob Hicok

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

A Lifetime Affair

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

Pablo Neruda

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

The Opposite of Cabbage

 

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

J G Ballard, 1930 – 2009

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

Blue Rooms, Black Holes, White Lights

 

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

Kelly Cherry

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

Kathleen Jamie

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

Mahmoud Darwish

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

A Fork in the Road: André Brink on Ingrid Jonker

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

Thirteen Ways with Figs

Thirteen Ways with Figs
Michelle McGrane

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

Anne Lamott on writing

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

Susan Richardson in New Horizon

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

Why I Write

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

An interview on Poéfrika

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

An interview with Annie Clarkson

   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gillian Allnutt

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

Acts of faith

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

Mourid Barghouti

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

Jean Sprackland

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

Nicholas Hughes’ death

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

She Comes Swimming

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

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

More Isobel Dixon

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

Isobel Dixon

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