Monday, July 22, 2013

Tuesday Poem - Everything is possible by Tim Upperton


Everything is possible

I was watching this film by Quentin Tarantino.
It starred Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
Maybe it was by Martin Scorcese.
Anyway, it was that predictable kind of crazy.

The women were beautiful, but didn’t have much to do.
Mostly they got emotional with Robert or Al.
They weren’t treated particularly well.
They took their clothes off, as women often do.

It was Michael Mann! Mann’s the man you want if you want manly.
Al and Robert are manly, though not so very tall.
Al’s hardly there at all.
At the end, everyone was shooting insanely.

Women took off their clothes more than they put them on.
It’s the movies, where this is possible.
I’m thinking of buying a convertible.
I’ll cruise fashionable streets with the top down.

Beside me is a beautiful woman in a blue dress.
Her beautiful head nods yes, yes.
Everything is possible. We are so alive.
It goes on and on as long as we drive.


What a delight to find this cruisy, insouciant poem in the latest issue of Landfall. It's there by virtue of winning the 2013 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition. I met up with Tim while I was in Palmerston North being a Visiting Literary Artist, and what a nice bloke! And isn't his work good! Always. It's like he has got a gatekeeper and nothing gets out the door until it is good.


Author’s Note – Tim Upperton

Tim Upperton is writing his PhD. thesis on the poetry of Frederick Seidel. His poems have been selected for Best New Zealand Poems in 2008, 2009, and 2011, and his first collection, A House On Fire (Steele-Roberts), was published in 2009.  His poems have been published widely in literary journals and mainstream magazines in New Zealand and the US, and recently in the anthologies The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (VUP) and Villanelles (Everyman). New poems are forthcoming in Sport, Landfall, and an anthology, Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty-first Century (University Press of New England).
Tim reviews books for the Dominion, the New Zealand Listener, and Landfall, and he blogs occasionally at A Spurred Word. He judged the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition Open Section in 2011.
First Prizes
Northland Short Story Competition (twice)
Manawatu Short Story Competition
Takahē magazine Poetry Competition
Bronwyn Tate Memorial International Poetry Competition 2011
Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition 2012 and 2013

Links
Best New Zealand Poems 2008, 2009, 2011
Author page at Agni
Turbine 2008, 2009, 2011


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