Being here, on Tuesday's Poem

It has to be a thin world surely if you ask for
an emblem at every turn...

Read Vincent's 'Being here' on Tuesday's Poem, and his discussion with Helen McKinlay as they cover sincerity, the first person, freedom, and more.

Poetry by Emma Neale

There is something so celebratory about Emma Neale’s poetry, about its eager, informed, needle-eyed engagement with the contemporary world, that it seems the very thing for this final Poet Laureate blog of the year, for what we still, with our perverse and saving optimism, call ‘the festive season’. Thanks to Emma for these unpublished poems, for their kitchen-familiar and cosmic-wide attentions, for running the hot thread of such linguistic flare and precision through whatever occasion she takes up. These seem to me the kind of poems that begin with readers but end with partners, in their take on how things are, and how we talk of them. This is poetry in that ancient tradition of ‘speaking for us all’, of making scenes and events that we find are about ourselves all the time, even when they may at first move so confidently in that Rilkean dimension of ‘beauty and terror’. Good poems to end one year, and to begin another.

Photo by Graham Warman.

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It Beggars Belief

The small change we slip into the beggar’s hand
press there as if it’s a close cousin of love
is like the coin we would drop into the well
at a garden of remembrance:
may this small kindness be the penance
that takes care of the world’s poundings
an offering to the skittish, feral gods of hope
that still crouch somewhere inside
the electric lights and night store heaters,
the fridge’s motor, the stitches in the children’s blankets,
beside the pantry’s packets of red lentils and raw sugar,
under the thin-worn patch of carpet in the hall,
lares et penates,
please bar the terrorwolf, terrorcrow, terrorsun
terrornomics and terrorment
from our doors.

Marshalling the Facts

(After reading Manjit Kumar’s review of The Reason Why: The Miracle of Life on Earth by John Gribbin)

Once upon five billion years ago
our solar system was being formed
and lo there was a minute part
of the unimaginably colossal universe
that was like existential porridge:
just right. For this zone
held riches of metal elements
which could forge an orb like Earth,
and Jupiter was there: right place, right size,
to hurl water bombs (asteroids and icy comets)
in this direction, pretty early on.
The newborn Earth once hurtled into
another planet, Theia; part of the fallout
was the moon, which really is a kind of mother now:
for it protects us from Jupiter’s gravity
and collisions with cosmic rubble.
After that smash up with Theia,
Earth was thin-skinned, and has been shaky ever since:
which can be terrifying, cataclysmic,
but in turn helps create optimum conditions
for the miracle of liquid water.

Which is as good an explanation as any for questions such as why
the thought of the way you carefully pinched
a sweet square between thumb and index finger
to tap off the extra icing sugar
as you searched perhaps
for the least hurtful words,
or the way you wore your shirts
until the collars had a nibbled look
although your ties still shone with the sleek gloss
that said somebody else, somewhere, loved you;
or the sight of a man pushing a supermarket trolley
filled with budget cans all the way to his damp, dark flat;
or the glimpse of another drinking super-strength beer
on a street bench at sun-up; or the battered plastic
baby gear on sale for next to nothing
at the Salvation Army store;
or the crass trash along the banks of the Leith;
or a son’s small fists pummeling my ribs;
or the fact of foreign superpowers arming factions
that split and re-split along blood, tribe, regional or religious
but note, never gender lines; or the headlines
that say 30% of preventable perinatal maternal deaths
are suicides; or the article that details the rape of a young girl
by god-fearing men that led to their lynching
by other-god-fearing men,
which triggered violence and disorder nationwide;
or the last recorded song of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow;
or the sensation of my hands plunged into soap suds
while outside someone’s voice lifts querulous
at rainy Friday twilight,
time bleeding from us all
like fossil fuels from broken well-heads,
should bring such waves
of strong, dark, pent,
unnamed sorrows
that will not crest,
that rise and rise.

Caller Unknown

He knows she can’t reply.
The cell phone in his hand
fits like an amulet, a locket
that could show a rare old photo
of the dead: delicate gold hinges only
turned open when he’s alone.

He keys in her name, a phrase,
deletes.
He’s under a kowhai whose yellow flowers hang down
as if a woman tents him in her sleepy hair.
Six tui tilt and tip in black arabesques
fold the air with a crêpe paper rustle.

He closes his eyes against vertigo,
presses the bark
that runs rough as unhealed grazes;
imagines a room maple-coloured
like a ship’s cabin and another man
who hears her breath
as if she is a child crouched in a wardrobe
waiting for the dark’s hard sounds
to resolve into words.

He enters her name again.
His thumb tingles as if the keypad
were a cool metal zip
lifted from the hollow in a neck,
wooden toggles slipped from their soft cotton locks.
He imagines the back of her head,
the stitches of her collar,
the fibres that sundust an earlobe.

Ridiculous human thing,
he types in another line of evidence,
again deletes it.
Buttons his coat right up to his throat
as if to head somewhere colder:
the wharf, say; oil-scummed water;
salt-sting squall; a place to gather a fist of gravel
as if everything launched and left to sink
is simple boyish sport.

The tuis’ coal-smoke ballet
ignites to black shimmer:
banks, plummets, surges higher.

He slips the phone back into his pocket
where he holds it
like a smaller hand he must warm,
holds it
fingers tipped on its skin
as if to a mouth:
Let’s not say anything more, now.

Breach

Rain in a fine mist tilted the afternoon
into underwater dark
as the bus pulled up to the lights
in late winter London traffic
where barrier tape, road cones and fluoro safety vests
snagged the eye like candles in the gloam
or delayed, milling carnival floats.

Every passenger turned to look:
books, phones, papers down, even ear-buds out
for the man next to me
whose head had danced hip-hop
every stop since Leicester Square.

A vivid fragment from the street event
had scudded up a high-rise’s face —
a balloon, I thought; or maybe festival celebrants
would dot every tower balcony from here,
waving banners, belting out songs
for a team win, or in the name of International Day
of Something I’d Clean Forgotten.

You’ll have guessed already — being either older,
less naïve, or skintight with optimism
than I was then—
about the man on the window ledge
his face a pale indistinct circle
his thin body in a dark blue suit
and the cop in the yellow emergency vest
trying to coax him gently back
into whatever life had led him there.

The compulsive thing then
in the cold, crushed silence of the bus
was to think and think
what could push a man so far

but understanding a little more, now,
of how many succumb,
how many ways they’re driven there
what I find this poem listens
and listens for over time
is what words came
as if the years were trees,
low, amber sounds in his mouth
welling like sepals or serum,
what did he know, what did he know
to say, that lone officer
beside the agonised man,
his own legs dangled alongside his
into the breach, the cannoning cataracts of air?

Poetry by Michael Jackson

Local poet

Several decades ago, Howard McNaughton described Michael Jackson’s Latitudes of Exile as 'recording the development of one of the most meticulous poets' in New Zealand writing. Jackson has written another thirty books of widely different kinds since then, and among them several that carry his particular style of essay, personal and learned and fearlessly direct. These, along with his collections of poetry, make him, to my mind, the most challenging and interesting of any New Zealander I think of as more or less my contemporary. Last year Martin Edmond wrote of his 'audacious intuition', reading him as 'one of our most astute, humane, idiosyncratic, neglected and perdurable writers.' What that claims for his prose, I would go along with for his poetry as well.

Photo by Brady Wagoner

Michael Jackson has spent most of his life as a professional anthropologist, and currently holds a distinguished Chair at Harvard. The curious and local penalty that he pays for this, and for a lifetime living and working in different cultures in a number of countries, is the judgment of one eminent New Zealand publisher that somehow this is at the cost of Jackson's being a New Zealander. What exemplary insular wank. I can't think of any New Zealand writer who strikes me as being more one of our own, or who has quarried so long and attentively at what it actually means to come from a particular place, to define its borders and its convictions, or to speak the mind it has shaped. When I wrote a note for the selection of his poems recorded for the UK Poetry Archive, what first struck me was how 'the notion of 'home', with its stir of resonances, is at the core of all he writes... It is what experience impresses and myth confirms.'

The poems you can now read here are from those most recently written, as his Selected Poems is soon to go to press. What I wrote about his earlier poems could as well for these:

Without ever submitting either to bland fashion or to clique, Jackson for almost fifty years has written poetry which is that of a man confronting 'the things happening' in his time, poems probing at that recurrent query, where does one take one’s place in 'the terrible parades of history'? What you hear in Jackson is a modest, confident, international voice. It is the conversing of a man who, as ever, takes one road to find another. I can't think of a more interesting thing for a writer to do, or more usefully to do as a New Zealander.

– Vincent O'Sullivan

The Patagonia Hare

All forms of hunting are forbidden
at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Claude Lanzmann sits by a barbed wire fence near Birkenau
as a man called Rudolf Vrba, who escaped the death camp,
talks to him.

As Vrba speaks, a hare, the color of the earth
burrows under the fence, then stops and sniffs the air
seeming to sense the menace of being there.

Later, Lanzmann says, ‘No one keeps count of them,
though they are many, and I have come to think of them
as the revenants of those who were murdered here.’

Now that the hares at Auschwitz are protected,
do they see us as their last best chance of an afterlife,
and return to this fence that marks the old perimeter
as we in turn imagine the dead returned to life in them
in this quiet field
where the summer breeze
barely disturbs the unmown grass
and a cortege of cloud moves slowly overhead
without casting a shadow?

Phoenix Palm

This morning I was thinking of that Phoenix palm
that kept the morning sun from our living room;

its inedible fruit snagged the motor mower blades;
it sucked the moisture from our lawn. I could have paid

to have it felled rather than become accustomed
to the gloom, but cut and lugged its dead fronds

to the dump, my arms spiked by its quills. We grew
used to it, like the clay soil in which you tried

and failed to grow a garden. Only now
does it occur to me how much we took on trust –

that country town in which we did not choose to live,
the kids you taught, my own professional loneliness,

but most of all each other, as if the days would not
draw in, and we would travel that moonlit valley road

and always find the river, strip, plunge in
to the tepid water, the flush of love on our bare skin

or light a fire in winter, brew a billy of black tea,
drink from chipped enamel mugs, and climb together

above the leatherwood and come upon a solitary
deer nuzzling the snow-smothered tussock.

Stories Happen

How many stories begin like this: 'At 5.30
he set off from home to the corner store
saying he would be back by 6.00...'?

You know immediately
that he never reached his destination
did not come back,
and that, between the poles
of home and world,
in a wilderness or city block
a story will be told and we will say, 'If only'
or 'Can you believe his luck?'

Yet everyone gets sidetracked
or overtaken, or disappears. There’s
always a traumatic or miraculous
encounter, waylaid by God
on a desert road or by someone
with whom you feel such kinship
you cannot tear yourself away.

When we recount the episode
we will say our life was changed
forever, that this was the worst
or best thing that ever happened to us,
as if we can divine
the difference between profit and loss,
can add up the interest, the dividend
that accrued from taking one road instead of another,
our arbitrary decision now deemed fortuitous
as we with the wisdom of hindsight congratulate ourselves
for seeing our way clear, for not allowing
distractions to interfere
with our well-laid plans, authors
of our own destinies, who carefully plot
the life of our own character
as if one of the dramatis personae
that a playwright might bring together or force
to go their separate ways, knowing
what’s good for them or best for us
who like to guess what unfolded between x and y
or was on our hero’s mind
when he turned at Lincoln instead of Dunne
answered a stranger’s request for directions,
or crossed the street against the lights.

(from Three Key West Poems)
2: The Idea of Wallace Stevens at Key West

I am walking beside the sea that fluttered its
empty sleeves and whose dark voice spoke
to one who made it an image of inconstancy.

On a coral key you cannot dig a grave,
therefore these whitewashed, stacked
sarcophagi. A tour bus passes as I try to read

the names through black iron railings, urns
with artificial flowers, decaying foliage;
a breath of wind in the bedraggled palms

like incessant rumor-mongering. Most
are Cuban names, names of those who
never made it back, but sat on wooden porches

in Olivia Street as roosters crowed,
chickens scratched, and the click and clack of dominoes
presaged their sepulchers,

bookending birth and death with a woman's name –
Mary Louise Baez ("the sunshine of our home")
or Angelina P Oropeza ("No greater mother ever lived"),

sentiments echoing in my head when I stop
at the Dollar Store on Truman Street for water,
glimpse the strip club opposite

called Bare Assets, and push on
to Reynolds Street where Wallace Stevens
wintered.

Only the sea remains the same,
its answering yet unavailing constancy
at the end of a nondescript suburban street,

no hint of money as "a kind of poetry,"
and the Casa Marina across from the tennis courts
like a prison for white collar criminals.

The same black wrought iron railing
that surrounds the cemetery encloses a white sand
private beach, but there's no Pale Ramon,

accompanying a business man in a Panama,
finding order in the ocean's ambiguity,
only a freshening wind

and a shrimp boat on the Gulf
as full throttle, jet skis buck the broken waves
and thunderclouds like anvils

build toward evening when they may
or may not break, and the man in espadrilles
and his ghostly companion pad back to their hotel

with an image in mind that will
in another generation overwhelm
a poet in the antipodes

inhaling the smell of kelp
and facing the same reality
of which direct knowledge is impossible.

Fieldwork

Even now they file at first light
through the elephant grass, along
the red path to their farms, leaving
me behind. I used to follow them
and ask if I could hoe or weed,
stack unburned branches beyond
the outer fence. They would
laugh outright, though some said I
could try my hand, knowing it would
provide for more amusement later
when I tried to keep in line.
At last I gave up going. I passed
the day learning new words from
women. At dusk the men returned
and granted me an hour or two of
conversation. 'Ask what you want
and we will tell you what we know,'
they said. And so I queried them
on this and that, and learned about
their farms that way, and what they did
among the trees along the ridge
at harvesting (a sacrifice to keep
the spirits off), and for a year
my work went well. But then I found
myself describing them with words
they would not use, and could not tell
the way the drummers held the line
that moved, hoeing and chanting,
down the further slope, or how
the pitch of women's voices flowed
across the valley as they closed
the earth. These gestures are
like rain. The crops will grow
out of these acts. There is no
book in it, no facts, no line
that leads to some result;
but it holds good like any truth
and I have learned to write as
they might sow, scything the grain
against the downhill wind. We
do not make it grow, we point the way.
In this I go along with them.

Notes from the Front and Requiem for the Fallen

On August 28, Vincent and his collaborator Ross Harris will premiere their song cycle Notes from the Front.

The piece is based on the life of Alexander Aitken, brilliant mathematician, amateur musician, and soldier with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, and includes music by Butterworth and Britten.

Detail of New Zealand troops in the support line at the Western Front, 1918. Ref: 1/2-013126-G.

Book through Eventfinda or buy your ticket at the door. Tickets are expected to go fast!

Requiem for the Fallen

Ross and Vincent's last First World War-related collaboration is now available to view online.

The work interweaves text from the Requiem Mass with poetry, taonga pūoro and string quartet. With its atmospheric resonance, Wellington Cathedral of St Paul provides an evocative setting for this passionate plea against the horror of war.

Requiem for the Fallen was performed as part of the New Zealand Festival in February 2014.

Three Latin American poets

We hope you enjoyed the series of poems by Rogelio Guedea we posted recently – if you missed it, go back and have a listen to Rogelio and Roger Hickin reading them in Spanish and English.

Rogelio now shares a few selections of Latin American poetry, old and new.

Los amorosos / Jaime Sabines, Mexico

Masa / César Vallejo, Peru

      The battle over,
the fighter dead; a man came up to him
and said: “Don’t die, I love you so much!”
But the corpse, alas! kept on dying.

      Two more approached and insisted:
“Don’t leave us! Be brave! Return to life!”
But the corpse, alas! kept on dying.

      Twenty, a hundred, a thousand, five hundred thousand turned up,
crying out: “So much love and so helpless in the face of death!”
But the corpse, alas! kept on dying.

      Individuals by the million gathered round him,
all implored him: “Stay with us brother!”
But the corpse, alas! kept on dying.

      Then all the people on earth
gathered round him; the corpse, overwhelmed, looked at them sadly;
raised himself slowly,
embraced the first man; began to walk...

Algún día encontraré una palabra… / Robert Juarroz, Argentina

One day I’ll find a word
that will reach into your belly and make it fruitful,
a word that will linger on your breast
like a hand at once open and clenched.

I’ll discover a word
that will grasp your body and make it spin
that will contain your body
and open your eyes like unclouded gods
and wear your saliva
and spread your legs wide.
Perhaps you won’t hear it
or understand it.
There’s no need for that.
It will go through your insides like a wheel
traversing you at last
from head to toe,
you who are mine and not mine,
and won’t stop, even if you die.

Translations by Roger Hickin, reproduced with permission.

This is just to say (Rogelio Guedea)

Until a few months ago, all I knew of Mexican poetry was from a few international names like Octavio Paz, a selection of translations by Samuel Beckett, and a number of fine poets from anthologies. Then my discovery that in fact Spanish American poetry was being written a few kilometres from where I live. Rogelio Guedea has been in Dunedin for almost a decade. He teaches at the university, an intellectual who contributes regular political columns to papers in Mexico, a former legal prosecutor, a writer of crime novels, and a prolific poet. El crimen de los Tepames, the final volume of a fiction trilogy, last year was a best seller in Mexico, and his poetry has won Spain’s Premio Adonais. The enterprising Roger Hickin, whose Cold Hub Press is the only New Zealand imprint that brings out collections in foreign languages, is about to publish Si no te hubieras ido/If only you hadn’t gone, with his own finely pitched translations. The set of thirty four poems was written while the writer’s wife and family was temporarily back in Mexico. As I’ve noted in an Introduction to the volume,

‘Ordinary,’ I expect, is the first word that may come to you, should you ask, what kind of world is this, that these poems are part of? For that is the ultimate grace, you might say, that the poet’s wife bestows on a house and a suburb while she is there, and that seems so distant, so unlikely, when she is not. Just as in the Adam myth it is the correct naming of things that brings orderliness to whatever exists, it is her physical presence that gives coherence to objects, and pattern to routines. This is not ‘domestic poetry’ of the kind that sometimes seems to me a mere cataloguing of trivia. This is poetry that addresses love and purpose and emotional reach, and where everything within their range, whether cakes of soap or bathplugs or plastic rubbish bags, bask in their sheer quiddity, as philosophers used to say, because finally it is love that sanctions whatever point they have. This is the poetry of love timed to the minute by mundane clocks, yet proposing so much more as it spells out with casual, anecdotal, wryly good-humoured largesse, that right here, and only here, life and its values take shape.’

Rogelio Guedea

If you’re inclined to trace out lines of descent, you might follow the thread from William Carlos Williams’ note in ‘This is just to say,’ when he took plums from an icebox, and wrote the sort of poem that several of my contemporaries fancied was where modern personal poetry really began, to the note on the fridge door in a Dunedin suburb, in the first lines of If only you hadn’t gone. At least it places these new poems in a tradition of unshowy, unsentimental love poems, whose strength is their needing neither flourish nor elaboration to strike home. And as I very much liked having the chance to say as I wrote about Guedea, ‘I don’t know any other poetry written in New Zealand that does quite what these poems do, with their imperative of rapidly jotted notes, and yet that overarching confidence of sustaining form. I don’t believe we can any longer talk about our contemporary poetry at large, without Rogelio Guedea now being a voice in that conversation.’

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Si no te hubieras ido

I (28-10-2013)

vi la nota que me dejaste adentro
del refrigerador, sobre el queso italiano,
todavía empaquetado:
son las mismas notas que me has dejado
siempre cuando te vas, puedo reconocer
tu pulso, verte escribiéndola, incluso,
de espaldas a mí, con tu mano
precipitada/ es, sin embargo, como
si fuera la primera nota que me dejas
cuando te vas, siempre que la leo
me encuentro contigo por primera vez,
la leo e inmediatamente te miro subiendo al avión,
disolviéndote entre el tumulto de gente/
nunca quito las notas del lugar donde
las dejaste, me gusta volver a ellas
de vez en vez, durante el día, principalmente
antes de entrar en la cama:
sólo entonces tengo la certeza
de que no te has ido.

I saw the note you left
in the fridge, on top of the Italian cheese,
still in its wrapper:
the sort of note you always leave me
when you go, I can tell
your firm hand, can even see you writing it,
hurriedly, with your back to me/ but it’s
as if it’s the first time you’re leaving
me a note when you go, every time I read it
I’m right back there with you,
I read it and straight away I see you boarding the plane,
disappearing in a horde of people/
I never shift the notes from where
you leave them, I like to come back to them
now and then, throughout the day, mostly
just before I go to bed:
only then can I convince myself
you haven’t gone.

VII (3-11-2013)

duermo en el lugar vacío que dejaste
al otro lado de la cama:
me mudé la siguiente noche que te fuiste/
tuve la impresión de que se hundía la cama sin ti
y de algún modo tenía yo que llenar ese hueco
que se abría con las horas/
ahora leo con la luz de tu lamparita, apoyo la cabeza
en tu almohada, siento la suavidad de la sábana
y, de vez en cuando, como haces tú, volteo hacia un lado
para ver el espacio que suelo ocupar cuando estás,
lo veo vacío, como un agujero que se alargara
hacia el sótano de la casa, oscuro, infranqueable:
podría extender la mano para salvarlo,
traerme de nuevo a mi sitio,
pero me dejo así, vacío y oscuro,
solo y, ya lo sabes,
cayendo.

I sleep in the empty space you left
on the other side of the bed:
I moved the night after you left/
the bed seemed to sag without you
and somehow I had to fill the hollow
that was growing by the hour/
now I read by the light of your lamp, resting my head
on your pillow, feeling the softness of the sheet
and now and then, as you do, I turn on my side
so I can see the space I usually occupy when you’re here,
it’s empty, like a hole that stretches
down towards the basement, dark and untraversable:
I could reach my hand out to save it,
draw myself back to my own spot,
but I’m still here, dark and empty,
alone and, as you’re well aware by now,
falling.

X (6-11-2013)

estoy escuchando a marco antonio solís
quien canta:
“el frío de mi cuerpo pregunta por ti y no sé dónde estás
si no te hubieras ido sería tan feliz”/
ya lo sabes
la hemos escuchado muchas veces
pero nunca supe muy bien lo que decía marco antonio solís
hasta ahora que lo escucho y tú no estás
porque no es lo mismo escucharla cuando estás que cuando
te has ido,
así que la he escuchado una vez más
dos o tres
más
porque hay canciones de marco antonio solís que son así
uno las escucha muchas veces pero no las entiende hasta
que tú no estás:
hasta qué tú no estás.

I’m listening to marco antonio solís
who is singing:
“my cold body asks for you and I don’t know where you are
if only you hadn’t gone I’d be so happy”/
you remember
we listened to it over and over
but I never really knew what marco antonio solís meant
until listening to him now without you
because it’s not the same song when you’re here
as when you’ve gone,
and so once more I’ve listened to it
two or three times
more
because marco antonio solís’s songs can be like that
one can listen many times and not understand them until
you’re not here:
until you’re not here.

XIII (9-11-2013)

no te lo había dicho pero
por primera vez en nueve años que
tengo viviendo en esta isla no me
siento solo:
tengo debajo de los pies una red que me sostiene,
amigos queridos —sebas, andrea, juan, fernanda, vero, mario, mariana, carlos, isoli—
que traigo siempre deambulando en la cabeza,
piando como los pajarillos del amanecer, tú sabes lo lindo
que cantan en la mañanas/
pensarlos es ir acompañado, recordarlos es levantar
un muro o contrafuerte: no que me inviten a comer,
no que me llamen por teléfono —yo nunca creí que alguien me llamaría algún día
por teléfono para preguntarme cómo estoy—,
la amistad no está ahí sino en su reverso:
no está en que te piensen sino en pensarlos,
no está en que te recuerden sino en recordarlos/
para un solitario como yo
(que rehúye, ya lo sabes, a todos y a todo), estos pensamientos
y recuerdos de los amigos queridos es algo nuevo,
una isla nueva,
un cielo azul despejado nuevo,
lindo como el canto del pajarillo que me abre la ventana
todas las mañanas para invitarme a caminar otro día,
otra niebla,
arder sobre otra zarza/
ya sé que mientras esto escribo tú duermes, allá, del otro lado del mundo,
y por eso lo hago, sólo para ver si nos encontramos en alguna esquina
de alguno de tus sueños: again.

I haven’t told you this but
for the first time in the nine years
I’ve been living on this island
I don’t feel alone:
I’m supported by a network of dear friends
—sebas, andrea, juan, fernanda, vero, mario, mariana, carlos, isoli–—
they’re always wandering through my mind,
chirping like birds at daybreak, you know the loveliness
of their morning songs/
to think of them means company, to recall them is to raise
a wall or buttress: it’s not that they invite me to dinner,
nor that they ring me up to check on how I am,
—I wasn’t expecting that would ever happen,—
the friendship doesn’t work that way but in reverse:
not that they think of you but rather that you think of them,
not that they remember you but you remember them/
for someone on his own like me
(who, as you know, shies away from everyone and everything),
these thoughts and memories of dear friends are something new,
a new island,
a new blue cloudless sky,
lovely as the song of the little bird that every morning
summons me to throw the window open and face another day,
another fog,
another journey through another gorse bush/
I know you’re asleep while I’m writing this,
there on the other side of the world,
that’s why I do it, just to see if we might bump into each other
in some corner of your dreams: otra vez.

XXV (21-11-2013)

¿has escuchado "mi casa nueva"?
la cantan los invasores de nuevo león,
ayer la escuché en la noche antes de dormir,
puse la radio en mi celular
y la estaban cantando los invasores:
¿la has escuchado?
dice:
“a veces lloro muy cerca de las botellas/
especialmente cuando me acuerdo de ti”
y luego, más adelante, dice:
“si amanece no se miran las estrellas/
y oscurece y nunca brillan para mí”
seguro la has escuchado, empieza
así:
“te escribí una carta y no me contestaste”/
me llegó me llegó cuando lo escuché,
son los invasores, dije, por eso no cambié de estación,
la estuve escuchando antes de dormir
en la radio de mi celular, con los audífonos y
la luz apagada,
lo mejor fue esa parte que rasga cualquier vestidura,
mira, te la transcribo:
“una radiola y dos amigas me acompañan/
mi casa nueva muy distinta a las demás/
tiene un letrero de color en la vidriera/
y una cualquiera es la que ocupa tu lugar”
ya sé que eso de “una cualquiera es la que ocupa
tu lugar” te va a molestar,
pero tú sabes que yo creo en las consejas populares,
y la mía dice: un perdido a todas va.

have you heard “my new house”
by the invaders of nuevo león?
last night I listened to it before I went to sleep,
I turned my cellphone radio on
and the invaders were singing it:
have you heard it?
it goes:
“sometimes when I remember you/
I weep among the bottles”
then, further on:
“at dawn the stars are nowhere to be seen/
at dusk they don’t come out for me”/
you must have heard it, it starts
like this:
“I wrote you a letter and you didn’t reply”/
it touched me touched me when I heard it,
that’s the invaders I said, and didn’t change the station,
I was listening to it before I went to sleep
on my cellphone radio headphones
with the light off,
best of all was where it sounds like clothing’s being torn,
here, I’ll write it down for you:
“two lady friends and a jukebox keep me company/
my new house is nothing like the others/
with a bright sign in the window/
and a certain woman in your place”
I know that “certain woman
in your place” will bother you,
but you know how I believe in popular sayings,
and one of mine goes: a desperate man grabs what he can.

XXIII (19-11-2013)

te estropeé la toallita que usamos
para secarnos las manos/ como se me cayó
un poco de agua en el suelo y otro poco de salsa,
limpié con la toallita amarilla —la que compramos
en el Just Two Dollars—, pero intenté exprimirla y seguía húmeda,
así que se me ocurrió coger la toallita
del secamanos —la que tú misma bordaste allá en México—,
pero con la salsa se estropeó toda/
en la tienda de los chinos vi una igualita a la tuya
que me costó tres dólares.
el chino me aseguró que es más original que las que borda
la gente a mano, allá en México:
verás que no notarás la diferencia

I’ve ruined the little towel we use
to dry our hands/ when I spilled
water then salsa on the floor
I wiped them up with the yellow cloth —the one we bought
at the Just Two Dollars—, but it wouldn’t squeeze out properly,
and when I grabbed the hand towel
—the one you embroidered back in Mexico—,
the salsa ruined it/
at the Chinese shop I saw one much the same
which cost three dollars.
the Chinese guy swore it was more authentic
than the hand-embroidered Mexican ones:
you’ll see, you’ll never know the difference.

XXVIII (24-11-2013)

los arbolitos de durazno y mandarina
los he traído a la habitación nuestra/
pensé que no los plantaste a propósito
y que te gustaría que los tuviera en mi habitación,
junto al espejo que habríamos querido que fuera de luna/
se ven hermosas sus ramas invadiendo la habitación,
ya han tapado media pantalla del televisor
y ahora me cuesta ver el box los martes en la noche.
seguramente no darán fruto hasta que vuelvas.

I’ve brought the young mandarin
and peach trees into our bedroom/
I thought you might have left them unplanted on purpose
and be pleased I have them in the room with me,
next to the mirror (we’d wanted a moon-mirror)/
their branches look lovely invading the room,
already they’re halfway across the tv screen
and now it’s hard to watch the tuesday night boxing.
surely they won’t fruit before you’re back.

XXXIII (29-11-2013)

me han preguntado si realmente
te has ido: que porque te han encontrado
en el jardín botánico, que porque te han visto salir del supermercado,
que porque te saludaron a la salida del cine, que porque
se cruzaron contigo en las escaleras eléctricas del Meridian/
les he dicho que no, es decir que sí te has ido,
¿y cuándo es que volverá, entonces?, me han insistido,
en cualquier momento, mañana o pasado,
hoy mismo quizá, contesto:
pero ellos saben que les he mentido.

people ask me if it’s true
you’ve gone: since they’ve come across you
in the botanic gardens, seen you coming out of the supermarket,
waved to you leaving the cinema,
passed you on the escalators in Meridian Mall/
no! I say, in other words yes you’ve gone,
and when will she be back? they keep on asking,
any time now, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,
perhaps even today, I reply:
but they know I’m lying.

---

Meinenung K. Kunthee

While we have the freedom to write and publish as we like, it's worth remembering - yet again - what a rare right this is for many contemporary writers. One of these was the Thai poet and political activist, Meinenung K. Kunthee. Known as 'the People's Poet', he was murdered on 23 April. PEN International has called for an official investigation, which seems unlikely. Other writers and commentators are currently under threat in Thailand.

Poetry by Riemke Ensing

A Voice of Her Own

A long time ago I made the point in an anthology introduction, that trying to yoke poets into some kind of ‘tradition’ or ‘order of descent’ might seem a tempting thing to do, but it could also be a heavy-handed muting of particular voices. I should have made far more of a point of it. What poets don’t have in common seems to me far more interesting to listen to than what they do. Similarly, the traces that come through from other places or cultures, or the cast of mind poets don’t share, are more decisive and worth attending to than simply the fact of their living in the same country. Riemke Ensing’s poetry, over several decades, has carried the kind of strong independent voice that bears this out, as vigorously aware now as it ever was of the background she shares with few other New Zealand writers, yet as attentive and attuned to what she does have in common. It’s good to hear her as well as read her in this month’s blog, and to know something too of the kind of poetry she admires.

Vincent O'Sullivan

Intimations of Mortality

Only a short while ago, a friend mentioned Tomas Tranströmer – the 2011 Nobel Prize winner considered to ‘be Sweden’s most important poet’. His poems are spare and dark and I immediately took to the title of one of his volumes – The Deleted World – from which these lines from the poem ‘Midwinter’ are taken.

...Ringing tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world,
There is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled over the border...

It is difficult sometimes to know what it is exactly that captures one, but that last line recalled one of the many stories my almost life-long friend and companion once told me of one of his many escapades between France and Spain in the early 50’s when he was a student of the piano at the Paris Conservatoire. He was doing just that – smuggling an old Spaniard across the border back to his homeland. The man died on the journey.

And so a poem suddenly conjures an entirely different world as well as the one in question. And that ‘ringing ice’ for instance, that ‘crack’ – how so very unexpectedly one is back there at the age of ten, in another country, hearing and seeing just that as one falls into the freezing water.

I suppose, because like Webster I have been ‘much pre-occupied with death’, these last few years –the poems I’ve been writing and reading have tended towards trying to make sense of the fact of death. So many friends and family members are no longer here and as one gets older, intimations of mortality increase on an almost daily basis. That is why I am also drawn to the poem ‘After a Death’ by Tomas Tranströmer.

When my partner – how I dislike that so American word that conjures up Stetsons, spurs and John Wayne movies – was dying, the garden was suddenly filled with fantails for three or four days. They were everywhere. Flew against the windows, flittered about under the verandah roof, gathered in great flocks in the bottlebrush trees and finally even came inside. I rang my friend Emilia Oppenheim, wanting a legend, a significance other than death, but she defusingly inclined towards Stein – ‘a bird is a bird is a bird’. She too has now died and a poem is in the making although it is taking its time.

After Bill’s funeral the fantails had gone. Instead great noisy hordes of Tui were darting and cavorting about in the trees. Previously there might have been one or two or even three, but this was a most unusual sight and sound. And because of the flurry of black feathers and white collars you couldn’t but make a connection with musicians dressed up in concert gear. Here is the poem I wrote some years later.

It won the 2012 NZSA Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition.

---

A different kind of Hemingway episode

after reading ‘There Is Never Any End to Paris.’

[For my friend and companion Bill Trussell, 1920-2009]

Conditions for writing could not have been more dangerous.
There was the year you died
and then another and another year.
Everything froze over.
Grief was deep and nothing seemed bound to earth.
Whole hillsides came down in a rush.
I hardly wrote at all
but stars were close and very bright
lucent through the open window
as though death were normal and every day
without this desperation or desire.

There was wind too and rain
and much silence being solitary.

And all the time there were birds.
The trees full of them, and the garden.
Musicians in white ties, fiercely fast,
chatting, whistling, making passes at each other
as though it were spring and not this depth of winter
with life almost at standstill.

---

The blackbird of Glanmore

And then, just recently re-reading Seamus Heaney, there’s another bird poem.

That ‘shadow on the raked gravel’, that ‘blue light’ in the ‘midwinter’ have a worrying resonance. Is it significant that these particular poems appear at the end of each respective volume? Heaney too has gone and ‘the world is now a different place’ as Marco Sonzogni so movingly pointed out at his session about the art of translation at the New Zealand Writers Week Festival in Wellington recently when he took out a framed photograph of Seamus Heaney and put it on the table in front of him on the podium. They had worked together and become friends and poignantly we too were included in that privilege.

I peruse Heaney’s many volumes on my shelves. Some are first edition hardbacks given to me over the years by my friend Dorothy Howie. All are treasures and there is much to engage the mind and heart. I read his magnificent translation of Beowulf particularly – aloud – as performance – and I think of all the people I’ve known who have died and for whom I would have loved to build a great pyre, Heaney included.

...On a great height they kindled the hugest of all
Funeral fires; fumes of woodsmoke
Billowed darkly up, the blaze roared
And drowned out their weeping, wind died down
And flames wrought havoc in the hot bone-house,
Burning it to the core...

How much more magnificent a rite than our paltry and stereotypical ways.

In the year that Bill died, I was asked to put together a set of poems for the Charles Brasch [founding editor of Landfall] Centennial, by Donald Kerr, Keeper of the Books at the University of Otago Special Collections Library. One of the poems I wrote for that volume was the title poem ‘O lucky man’. I had seen some of Brasch’s diary entries, and the last one, written on May 6, 1973 (he died a few days later on the 20th) seemed to me quite amazing, ‘seven or eight little poems since turning on the light’.

---

O lucky man

[for Charles Brasch]

Eight or nine small poems for breakfast, you record.
O lucky man! Here it’s a wonder
there’s any writing at all with the light slowly failing
and such clouds inexorably dark across the moon.

Rilke had one of his characters admit to maybe ten good lines
at the end of a long life. It has to be better than that
but every day the horizon is closing in –
‘life’ and ‘art’ – the two unequal parts of the equation
never finding the balance to make that perfect symmetry.

This morning though, three blackbirds
at the bowl of persimmons on the outside table.
Poem enough itself
and a Chinese painting to break the fast.

I have always been drawn to the Chinese poets and Japanese Haiku and to the visual, particularly. Yeats continues to be heard. I hear him in the garden when I’m planting my bean rows and thinking of honey bees. And who could forget his ‘two women, both beautiful, one a gazelle.’ But I always go back to Eliot, and more particularly his Four Quartets, which I first heard read as a first year student at Ardmore Teachers’ College in 1957. It was the first English lecture of the year. A tall man leaned into the open door jamb and flicked a book out of the back of his corduroys. He started to read. He read for a long time. Nobody stirred. We were mesmerized. I don’t think anyone understood a word of what was being read, but we were transported by the rhythm, the music, the whole newness and strangeness of it. Somehow we knew it was great, that it was important and had much to come to grips with and would be amazing. And it was, and continues to be. When I read lines from ‘East Coker’ and ‘Little Gidding’ I get revitalized with a kind of energy and courage. I mean if Eliot was struggling, my smaller, and in the larger picture, insignificant attempts at making sense of language, and the world, are easier to put in perspective.

For us there is only the trying.

Riemke Ensing

Poetry by Diana Bridge

The Laureate blog's current guest is a poet I very much admire. Diana Bridge has had five volumes published by Auckland University Press, and is also a Chinese scholar. Here she pays tribute to a favourite English writer, translates a classic Chinese poem, and posts three of her new poems.

I

Several years ago I was introduced to Geoffrey Hill's marvellous poem 'The Peacock at Alderton'. At the time I had been raiding the Wellington Public Library for Hill's small volumes. Though his topics were sometimes frustratingly recondite, and a poem's sense often hard won, what kept me reading was Hill's blend of compressed lyricism and hard-hitting observation. I particularly loved the way he jumped between registers, the demotic strength of his language allied to the loveliness of so many lines.

One of the things that had attracted me in Hill's work was glimpses of a poet-narrator who stands at an angle to the poem's high, sometimes angry, sometimes anguished, moral seriousness. In the poem below, that self takes up more of the stage. The poet-narrator welds together a variously-sourced identity, one that is wrested from improbable combinations, intricately balanced. As the poem goes on, that constructed self continues to stalk lines of apparently pure description: Hill's magnificently observed peacock feathers. And, when feathers morph into bird and the poem lifts into an account of the peacock of the title, the writer self continues to shadow it, the conflation clinched, right at the end of the poem, with the mention of the peacock's voice, his occasional scream.

The Peacock at Alderton

Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare: the threads hanging
from some luminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes – like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his fulgent cloak stark as a warlock's cape,
the maharajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.

Geoffrey Hill (2007) | Listen to The Peacock at Alderton

Some time later, I gave in to the urge to respond to what I had read of the corpus of this towering poet, and to sum up in a poem something of its effect on me:

Prospero’s stones

I have thumb-printed your last volume.

Here are incantations. Satisfactions struck
in half-line lengths, driven phrases that lap
around each other. I shiver as they bind.
Here are the peacock’s screams at evening:
harsh as the santoor, refined as a high
high string, dashing the face of 'we shall,
tee-tum, live happy ever after' with a splash
of anguish. Here stones are scored with
a prophet’s bloody one-eyed censure.
Release me from their charge? You will not.
Yet see them, often as not, fracked into
lyric slices or, hollowed to catch rainfall,
cupping reflections of untainted beauty.
Then there are some – I would say hallowed
but let it be soft-cornered by acceptance,
where all that we expected was late stubborn grief.

(Published PN Review, December, 2011)

II

In the 1980s, I read a lot of Chinese classical poetry and finished up the decade writing a dissertation on one of the formative aspects of regulated verse, the verse form perfected in the Tang (618-907), and regarded as the apogee of classical poetry. While I was writing my thesis in Hong Kong, poems of my own began to float into my head, probably as a gesture of rebellion against the court language with which I struggled every day. Thirty years on, at the instigation of a far better scholar than I, Peter Harris, I am beginning to collaborate with him on the translation of a selection of favourite classical Chinese poems.

I offer here a translation of perhaps the most famous classical Chinese poem written in a husband's voice, that of Du Fu (712-770), to the wife from whom he was separated. The background to this poem is of civil war, detention and separation. It is probable that it was written around the time of the full moon that marks the Mid-Autumn Festival, which Chinese families traditionally celebrate together with moon-cakes, wine and gazing at the moon. In September of 756 Du Fu had been captured by rebel soldiers and detained in the capital, Chang'an.

A moonlit night

Tonight there is a full moon in Fuzhou.
My wife will watch it on her own.
Away from them, my thoughts are with my children,
Themselves too young to understand, or miss me in Chang'an.
A scented mist has wet her mass of hair.
In the clear moonlight her jade-white arms are cold.
When shall we two lean in the open window,
Light drying up the joint tracks of our tears?

III

Three new poems

Camellia Gully

Within days the lime that canopies the left side
of the valley has thinned into a parasol. Its greens
and pale yellows are the shades of summer – the way
we feel, against expectation. The season is autumn;
autumn has much to recommend it – runs on the board,
for one thing, although the tree is drier, bonier and its raised
bark splits. You could wring the symbolism out of that.
Next up, a drift of outsize spangles, as the wind shakes
into frenzy all the glossy bushes, those subspecies
that lie together in Camellia Gully. And now the tree
is given over to gold. It is still dressed, still itself.
Let it be true, we whisper, for the rest of life.

When the tree opens

The pine tree halts, like a spine on the brink of parting,
and lets you into its world. You look up into the hollow
where, keen to see biology reflected, you spot,
sheathed in that tough cable stretched across its mouth,
the great rope of the cauda equina, the pine's plait of nerves.
Further in, concealed below a fluff of lichen that wraps
the opening's corrugated lip, you glimpse in layers
of assorted wood the shelves of a whole library.
Before the scene has time to settle, shelves convert to lines,
the lines of a single poem: a free verse composition
braced with an armature of rhyme so cunningly implanted
no one twigs. And so you stretch it to the limit,
your way of seeing. It takes a spider to re-route you.
Unmoved by anything you see, or strain to see,
it struggles to complete its mortal mission. As it sways
across the chasm, it traps you in its glittering rigging,
hooking you on a wonder not of your own making,
entangling you in passions set far outside yourself.

Is there anything to match it?

When it appears, its arc spanning the harbour,
and there it lies in all its braided brilliance, everyone
talks colour. Is there anything, they ask, to match it?
I think about the course the rainbow takes: one foot
grounded in the moment, its unmoored trunk sways
upwards, light as longing, before its weight tips it
into a U-turn; then comes the symmetry of its descent,
when it is down, down, if not to earth, it must end
somewhere; its hoop is like a circuit of the mind,
taking you to the edge of the universe and back.
A poem ends in human arms. The rainbow
is a flyover to anywhere you wish. But for that,
I’d say of all things it is closest to a poem – up to,
and including, the moment of its dream-like fade.

Strangers on a World Poetry Day

Fleur Adcock, the Auckland born; now UK resident poet, editor, and translator recently celebrated her 80th birthday, and for World Poetry Day we would like to acknowledge her contribution to the world of poetry.

The British poet Fiona Sampson in a Guardian review of Adcock’s 2013 collection Glass Wings observed:

Like her fellow New Zealander [Katherine Mansfield], Adcock is a literary writer in her limpid, apparently artless style and the precise emotional intelligence of her observations. It's a technique whose ambition is revealed, as was Mansfield's, in its modernising effect. Informality and immediacy are vivid ways to remake a world; and Adcock's style has not dated in the half-century since her debut.

Here, as an instance of Adcock’s 'informality and immediacy' is her reading of 'Strangers on a Tram' from the 2010 collection Dragon Talk.

Jasmine Revolution Poem

One of the luxuries of living in a decent democracy is the liberty to be embarrassed by most contemporary political poetry. Poetry has become so polite we are even a touch wary of being reminded that words are so easily there for the taking. No one is trying to tell us which ones we can use, which ones we can't. If no one needs to keep us quiet, then why on earth would we feel we're at risk? But there are dozens of countries where poets pay a price for not accepting that the word-hoard of language belongs only to a few. One of the things a laureate blog might do is at least to show we know about such writers. There’s solidarity even in that. And it doesn’t much matter whether they are good writers or mediocre ones or even less. Translation barriers usually prevent us from being able to judge. But aesthetic judgments are not what most matter to them. What does, is to be part of a world where language is not claimed to be the possession of political elites.

Mohammed-al-Ajani, a thirty eight year old Qatari, the father of four children, did not respect the regime that governed him, and that he had no part in choosing. He said so in a poem, a straightforward statement that had none of the subtlety say of Mandelstam's famous poem on Stalin that took him to the camps. In one sense it was the broadest kind of 'banner poetry'. But he read it aloud, and was sentenced to fifteen years solitary confinement, for conspiring against the state. This is part of his 'Jasmine Revolution Poem,' translated by Abu-zeid.

When we lay blame
only the base and the vile suffer from it;
and when we praise
we do it with all our hearts.
A revolution was kindled with the blood of the people

tell them in a shrouded voice, a voice from the grave,
tell them that tragedies precede all victories.

This question that keeps you up at night –
it won’t be found
on any of the official channels. . . .
Why, why do these regimes
import everything from the West –
everything but the rule of law, that is,
and everything but freedom?