Tuesday Poem - 'The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch' by Jennifer Compton

The Threepenny Kowhai Stamp Brooch

If I get lost someone will pick me up and post me.

I am already licked and stamped on my green lapel.

The brooch from Te Papa will see me safely home.

It's 3^D — as in LSD — pounds, shillings and pence.

Let us go out and do the passegiata on the waterfront.

If and when I get lost, you can slide me into the red box.

Of course I will be posted back into the past —

back to when kowhai was pronounced kowhai.

I got my six monthly statement for This City from Otago University

Press today. And oh dear, not one sale. Just a lot of 0s and a $1.30

carried over from the last statement. What a pitiful document it was.

So I emailed and asked how many copies are left. Just 84. So when

the present liquidity crisis eases, I shall order them in 10 at a time and

flog them at cost at poetry readings. (It's a handsome book, but an

expensive book. $30 plus postage for the average punter. About $12

for me.) I haven't given that book a fair chance to sell out. I shall

renew the struggle.

I picked this poem to represent the book because it has done well

for itself, although I was extremely doubtful when I wrote it if I could

place it. I couldn't see how the different pronunciations of 'kowhai'

would work on the page. But Les Murray took it for Quadrant, then

it was in Best New Zealand Poems on line – then it was in the book

The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. And the last time I was in

Palmerston North, Joy Green told me they were teaching it at Massey.

So woo hoo little poem.

A dear friend had bought me the brooch, from Te Papa of course. I was

wearing it when Fiona Kidman took me on the Writers Walk around the
waterfront. We started at her plaque in Oriental Bay and worked our way
 back to Queens Wharf. Then we stopped for a coffee, and as I walked
towards the table, the poem presented itself to me, fully formed. One of
those ones you get for free.

http://www.otago.ac.nz/press/Thiscityjennifercompton.html

Tuesday Poem - 'Ghazal' by Andy Jackson

Ghazal

Melbourne

Pretending to gaze out the window, the whole carriage listens

to its only conversation. Clouds hold and won't release rain.

Pedestrians, unsure whether to move left or right, collide.

Drivers at intersections wave us across, smiling, briefly.

A plastic shovel, face down in our backyard. Wilting

leaves. Cobwebbed pages. Overhead, another plane lifting …

We have become no-one to each other, bleached, thin.

Drought opens cracks in the wall, the shape of our gods.

Streets away, the grinding wheels of a turning tram. Near,

insect-hum, a neighbour hammering a nail into a mortgage.

I stroke the immense flank of a ghost gum and wait,

sandalwood breathing softly against my wrist.

Incense circles the room, the wrung half-limes sing

their silence to a wet blade. Home, as solid as smoke.

Immune Systems by Melbourne poet, Andy Jackson, is a new(ish)

book out from the irrepressible small press, Transit Lounge. And it's

tip top. Of course. Cool and astute, exact and exacting, honed, grounded.

http://www.transitlounge.com.au/index.htm#fiction

Tuesday Poem - 'Spirited Questions Overheard' by Michelle Leber

SPIRITED QUESTIONS OVERHEARD

Very Old Madame Yin Asks Very Old Minister Yang:

The evening, too brief for idleness, must you chatter

on the subject of fresh air and unobstructed spaces?

Tossing — more than ideas in your bed,

why are you restless like Mounting Stag?

Too much happiness? Perhaps you need

ask physician if extravagant joy is injurious to the Heart?

Very Old Minister Yang Asks Very Old Madame Yin:

Memory prefers a nap — again I enquire

which part of you is like a watercourse?

After your name circles my lilies,

silver hair flowing like Celestial Horse,

can doubt and panic be left behind?

I cling to your answers — for what purpose

did we meet halfway up the mountain

to glimpse light and dark in each other's eyes?

From Notes On Text

extravagant joy is injurious to the heart (from Huang Di Nei Jing

translated by Ilza Veith).

I feel so very fortunate to be right in the thick of so much

marvellous poetry-making. Recently I went to the launch

of Cocky's Joy by Michael Farrell (Giramondo) and that is

a book and a half. As Laurie Duggan writes in the blurb —

“You feel there's a language being created here and yet it's

your own language.” So true.

And I came home to re read The Yellow Emperor by Michelle

Leber (Five Islands Press) to bring myself to the point where

I could pick just one for my Tuesday Poem deal, and there was

another wonderful book, a book and a half, under my hand.

Two wonderful books in one night! And of course the language

Yellow Emperor is couched in. What very difficult choices the

poet made, and with what a deft hand she made them. With

what subtle and seductive artistry. I did find this book a bit

of a struggle at first. Michelle has given us a foreword and

some after-notes to place us in the historical/legendary

milieu — just enough, not too much, not too little — so I

wasn't lost in that sense. What lost me was that I pride myself

on being a bit of a literary detective, and I could not penetrate

where this book had come from! I could sense an aftertaste

of Arthur Waley, and maybe a soupcon of Ezra Pound. But

none of my reading, which has been westerncentric, could help

me place the provenance. Of course, Michelle has been a lecturer

and clinician of Chinese Medicine for over twenty years. That

has informed the book. But what helped me in the end to get a

grip, was a certain sort of elliptical and enigmatic French film,

where the rules of engagement in conversation have a rock/

paper/scissors tone, and wit always wins.

To quote the last lines of the last poem in the book 'QI, Blood

And Essence' —

'Remember, the emperor and I

know where you live.'

http://fiveislandspress.com/catalogue/yellow-emperor

Tuesday Poem - 'Two boys on roller blades' by Carolyn McCurdie

Two boys on roller blades

They've set up a goal:

some wooden struts

wedged in the gutter, strapped

to a power pole

and a sheet of black vinyl salvaged

trimmed, for this.

They flow across the road

up and back and around

loose, lazy

as if it's the camber of the road

that lifts them, drops and lifts

till a neighbour's car in careful low gear

washes the boys to the side

in a cross-current.

Hockey sticks dangle, wait.

Then wrists flex; they check,

snag the pockmarked puck, flick it

whack it, gulp into the goal.

Circling again, no words

just eyebrows.

I am just back from a big trip to New Zealand to launch the three new

Hoopla books from Mākaro Press. (And a few gigs on the side with my

good mate Coral Carter who came along for the ride.) I think I can safely

say that all three Hoopla poets (me, Bryan Walpert and Carolyn McCurdie,

plus our sidekick Coral, plus of course our esteemed editor and publisher

Mary McCallum) had a great time. But then - and how we were

staggered and almost on the point of dumbfoundery - our books entered

the NZ bestseller list. First Bryan, then Carolyn, then me. Then Carolyn's

book shot to number one! Well knock me sideways and tickle me with a

feather! Cheers to Mākaro Press and all who sail in her.

It was hard to pick just one poem from Carolyn's debut book. It is so fresh

and well grounded, so charming and perspicacious. But I went for the lads

and their hockey sticks, for reasons that will be obvious.

http://www.booksellers.co.nz/book-news/nzs-bestsellers/nielsen-weekly-bestsellers-lists-week-ending-saturday-25-april

Carolyn McCurdie is a Dunedin writer who has worked as a teacher

and librarian. Winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society’s International

Poetry Competition and the Lilian Ida Smith Award, she is a long-time

contributor to New Zealand’s leading poetry journals, and has published

an ebook of short stories and a children’s fantasy novel. Carolyn is a member

of the Octagon Poets Collective and helps to organise live poetry events in

Dunedin.

http://www.makaropress.co.nz/makaro-books/the-hoopla-series/