Tuesday Poem - 'On Looking: In The Lost And Found' by Michael Harlow

ON LOOKING: IN THE LOST AND FOUND

On this mouse-coloured street where

everyone is trying to look like each

other, they are looking to undress the

world with such a fine cosmological

eye, you might think they are trying

to see into the heart of a star itself.

Whole families out in their glads snapping

pictures of each other’s mums and dads,

and you and me. They have such a gaze

for all of it. That seeking dream: looking

for a black cat in a dark room. But if you’ve

come this far and end up in the lost and

found, you know that old story, where no

one becomes someone one day; you pray

for one thing and you get another. You know

that looking for a black cat in a dark room

where there is none – you find one anyway.

I bumped into Michael Harlow at the poetry conference and Litcrawl recently in Wellington. I first bumped into him in Christchurch in 1980! He is in fine fettle – just scored the Kathleen Grattan and the Lauris Edmond! So good to chew the fat again, and when I got home to Australia I returned to his book, The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap. After my first reading of it I had asked Michael if I might post a poem – but Michael is sometimes not so great at answering emails. I thought maybe he had changed his email address. People often do. But no, it was just one of those things. So, as I say, when I got back to Oz I pulled the book off the shelf and gave it another read. Because I had forgotten which poem I had asked for the first time, and supposed, as I read, my first pick would jump out at me. But do you know, it didn’t. The book had shifted on me. It was quite a perilous and slippery feeling, to think you have read something, and, as you read it again, to find out you have not. I was quite at a loss.

I don’t know where this poem is set, but it irresistibly reminds me of Lecce in Puglia, of going out in the evening into the full flood of the passegiata.

I very much like the astute line endings, the precision of the punctuation, the vernacular ‘glads’ (for glad rags, and also of course for so much else).

And I also like the winding helix of a line – ‘where no / one becomes someone one day;’.

I think the whole poem swings on that line. It is really using the curse/blessing blessing/curse of the archetypical fairy tale.

And I just adore the way the poem opens with a mouse-coloured street (a rough translation of a vernacular term I opined to myself) and looms up to the big finish with the black cat. (I had to go back and rejig my initial apprehension.) So what exactly was going on? Never mind, I loved it.

 http://www.press.auckland.ac.nz/en/browse-books/all-books/books-2009/The-Tram-Conductors-Blue-Cap.html

Tuesday Poem - 'New undergraduates tour the psychology clinic' by Melinda Smith

New undergraduates tour

the psychology clinic

This is the room where the troubled come to be untroubled

This is the room for the opening of mouths in pain

This is the room for picking lightly at the scab on the deep wound

This is the room of dignified gibbering

This is the room of the short fuse

This is the room for the vomiting of memory;

for the smearing of consequences, the flinging of blame

This is the room which was once in darkness, with a velvet curtain

                                                                    and a wooden grille

This is the room of stripping

of disembowelling

of the scooping out and spreading of glistening innards

This is the room of fear of silence

This is the room of too much truth, and not enough

This is the room of fear, of silence

This is the room of the rushing and botching of reconstructive

                                                                                      surgery

This is the room for the impersonation of friendship

and the purchase of listening

This is the room of the drinking of too much water

and of jiggling in the low chair and of the dogged crossing of legs

This is the room for the rewriting of diaries

This is the room of the long clenching

This is the room of rocking without sound

This is the room for the binding of deep wounds with gauze

                                                                                    bandages

This is the room for the closing of mouths in pain

This is the room where the unhealable come to be unhealed

I was well contented to have the chance to be at Melinda Smith's La Mama gig in Melbourne recently, and because of Ken Smeaton's excellent filming of poets' project, it exists out on youtube if you care to partake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtYzXrwmRqc&feature=share

Melinda's book Drag Down To Unlock Or Place An Emergency Call (Pitt Street Poetry) is one of those books that you really want to read, and then read again. A true cut and come again book. And the judges of the Prime Minister's Award agree with me because it won last year's prize. (And it is a prize that is worth winning.) Melinda is a poet to watch, and I am already on the qui vive for the next book. What a wonderful poet she is, and a tip top reader, and a hell of a good person to kick around town with.

http://pittstreetpoetry.com/melinda-smith/

Tuesday Poem - 'Front Verandah' by Sophie Tarrant

FRONT VERANDAH

He starts the day by lighting incense in the neck

of her vase. She breathes in a gust of wind until the scent fills her.

His hands, which she has seen break tree branches as thick as his arm,

tappity-patter the bongo drums. The rhythm pulses through her chest

of drawers. She sings along

with wooden wind chime voice, out of time but melodic.

He eats lunch at the table, his leg touching hers.

He pays no attention to the view through her windows

even when she swings and whines with rusty hinges.

He reads a magazine with ads for shampoo, models with dyed

blonde hair. Part of her palm tree comes through the window,

a few fingers brush the open page.

The fringe of her frond is yellow from sunlight.

He leaves her, walks away down the street

comes back with a sprig of frangipani, pink as a blush.

He tucks the stem into her thick fronds

layered across the windowsill. She feels warm inside,

shades him with her maroon veil.

He lies down to rest on her white cushioned forehead.

When the kookaburras laugh on the power line outside,

her ferns rustle, shhhhhh, and the birds fly away.

His snores vibrate through her chest

as vibrantly as bongo beats.

I met Sophie Tarrant up in Brisbane at the Riverbend reading (she runs a reading called Below Deck which I must get to next time I am up that way.) And then she was in Melbourne just as I was putting on a Big Read at Collected Works for NZ Poetry Day, so I invited her along and after dithering over Janet Frame and Chris Price she chose to read Glen Colquhoun, and was a total asset. Later that night she gave me her chapbook Memories of Home and I liked it a lot and chose the verandah poem because of its evocation of Brisbane (such a spirit of place!) and the charm of the personification of the verandah.

Hear her read her poem.

http://www.sophietarrant.com/poems/2015/3/30/front-verandah-poem-by-sophie-tarrant

http://www.sophietarrant.com/

https://www.facebook.com/belowdeckpoetry 



 

Tuesday Poem - 'Frankston Train' by Garth Madsen

Frankston Train

Armpit to armpit, everyone sweats in a different

language here. A woman's voice calls out the

name of each station as we arrive, another

scratching in the race of life, she says Mordialloc

as if there can be less dialloc. Four urban

minimalists play euchre, I cannot see if their

cards are real or not. The echo girl sits under the

'no feet on seats' sign, her foot on the seat, the

angle showing the curve of her in-step better than

high heels, she tells her mobile phone that she

was named after a car number plate. The

powdered aeroplane blonde with an imitation

pearl necklace becomes a delta, people pushing

past her on either side. A drunk shouts, “Of

course, I'm smart. I went to school, didn't I?'

A father, a mother scold their son as if they are

trying to make him smile for the camera. The

lowrider with an earring drops a water bottle at a

ninja bitch's feet, there is an empty McDonalds

wrapper under her seat and a browning apple

core. The rainmaker with crickets in his ears

drums the seat between his legs. The bonsai

brunette sheds her black cardigan and flicks her

anklet at the far border of my vision and I ask

myself where her story ends and mine begins.

One of my favourite Melbourne poets is Garth Madsen, and he lives out on my train line – the Frankston line. He is very tender and astute about the place where we both live. His 'Frankston For Beginners' is a must-read, as far as I am concerned. I have no idea how you might acquire a copy though. He had a big launch for the book, out at Seaford, (with enough food, including a chocolate fountain, for an invading army whose quartermaster had gone awol so the troops are pretty hungry, about as hungry as hungry troops can get) and then there was a reading at Red Wheelbarrow in Brunswick, and then as far as I know that was the end of it. Anyhow anyhow, when Avril Bradley decided to do an anthology of poems about Frankston, Garth was a must. Those who know Garth truly appreciate him. We had a lovely launch for the anthology in the remoter reaches of the McClelland Sculpture Park in Langwarrin - well done Avril for pulling it all together – and this poem was a stand out for me. And a shout out to Michelle Leber whose stunning photo is on the cover of 'City Of Stars”.

PS Garth often blocks his poems so they are as neat as bricks an expert bricklayer has laid – but no matter how I fiddle I can't make my blog block – so please forgive my my hod, my grout, my towel.

Tuesday Poem - 'Waiting' by Tracy Ryan

Waiting

Waiting for bog

to blossom

with white flame

of bog cotton

is groom not given

to see the dress

before the day

Knowing her only

one long cold season

is love meeting

weekdays only

or sensing no more than

the moon's dark side

thus the moon's

wrong meaning

Yet bog in continual winter

is most bog wearing nothing

but more and more water

her deep nature

reiterated

bog is what bog does

And yet another launch at Collected Works of a wonderful book! This time Hoard by Tracy Ryan, joint winner of the Whitmore Press Prize. It's a deep, unfathomable book, and a shifty, slippery book. With who knows what within. So like a bog, so like a hoard within a bog. (Tracy's pronunciation of the local way of saying 'hoard' is still resonating with me.) And how much I appreciated the quiet, stringent perfection of the laying down of the words on the page.

Marion May Campbell's trenchant launch speech is published here in Cordite -

http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/campbell-ryan/

- and it pretty well covers anything else I might be moved to say about this book.

http://whitmorepress.com/new-releases/

Tuesday Poem - 'Night Watch' by Robyn Rowland

Night Watch

Time is elastic, its zenith fit to breaking

when you wait for the ambulance – now leaning over him,

now rushing back and forth from house to street straining

for sirens, night so dark and wet and quiet out there.

Listening for breath in a slight boy of fifteen years

is an ancient art requiring silence. Kneeling on your hall floor,

ear right to his lips, beside the frenzied shouts of his father,

whose panic of pacing is the only thing he can offer him.

Your own son watches his friend from the corner,

slumped, slightly beaten, the first fire of alcohol seeming

less necessary than it might have been, not worth the effort now,

while the friend he tried to carry home lies on his side, still.

Slapping his rump to try and wake him feels like assault.

Strange to be able to do things he would never allow,

ice you run across his cheeks a cruelty. Beyond limp,

he will not jerk away, open his mud-brown eyes.

When they finally come, wearied knights of the new wars,

they cannot rouse him, tell us it's not good, open his lids to pupils

so huge, so pitch and utterly void, his mother gasps, sinking,

and you never saw anyone so unconscious who wasn't dead.

You make your son sit and watch. They strap on an oxygen mask,

fail to open his mouth for a tongue block, quietly ask what he took -

vodka yes, but weed? pills? needles? No. Just vodka. Straight.

“He was kicked,' your boy says, 'they punched me in the head.' And vomits.

Clipped on a stretcher, they lift him out of the hall. In the long night,

fourteen hours twisted in tubes before he rouses, you remember

they loved pizza by the swimming pool for the last three birthdays, watched

videos, Xbox, played Star Wars with Darth Vader the only enemy -

and when you turned sixteen no-one had parties at all.

Robyn lives in Ireland and Australia so she launched her new book Lines of Drift (Doire Press) both there and here. I caught the Aussie launch by Catherine Bateson at Collected Works here in Melbourne and invested in a book. I must say I liked the epic poem Unbroken Stone In A Stubborn Sea – but just too long for a blog I reckon. Again the scroll scroll scroll problem. But this mini-drama called Night Watch caught my attention. Such a shriek of a poem. Recollected in tranquility, as they say.

http://www.doirepress.com/writers/k-z/robyn_rowland/

Tuesday Poem - 'Wondernight' by Alex Skovron

Wondernight

for Zofia Radwańska

1

I was a child

when a picture book

brought me this/

a study

dark among its panels

the household

asleep/ a pendulum

somewhere

softly clicks/ midnight

Suddenly

bookshelves stir/ the books

are coming to life

they wake/ start

to converse/ glide or file

to the floor

begin a vigorous

debate/ each volume utterly

unlike the next

It is a wondernight

of books

the room vibrates/ colours

& covers throb

pages windmill/ a dance

of books

that should have stayed

the shelf

where day belongs

2

Try to recatch

the colour of that tale

I fell for/

find

I can almost

close my memory

around it

almost/ stubborn is the

old steep

impossibility

to be a little boy

again

3

Dwindling

the night gives notice

to return/

the books

must reinstate a front

for the sun

a facade/ for morning

to discover

perfect order/ shelves

repossessed

the spines & sequences

restored

4

And I wish

that I could hold this

Polish fable once

more in my hand/ protectively/

lest by the colour

it no longer

lent/ the flaws

in the text

& the art

I picked at/

these books should finally

close their dream

& I/ unreconciled/ resume

my book

to book search for myself

I missed out on Alex Skovron's launch of Towards The Equator; New & Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattman 2014) but I did catch him reading at The Dan recently, and that was a treat. He brings such force and colour to the work when he reads. (As if it doesn't contain enough already!) The poem I chose comes from his 1988 book The Rearrangement, and the title poem is a stunner. But too long, I thought, for a blog post. Scroll and scroll and scroll. I can only suggest you invest in a copy and have a good browse through the greatest hits of one of our best poets. Alex really knows how to poet! (I also enjoyed very much, on my first time through this book, the selections from his 1999 book Infinite City. Oh and The Man and the Map 2003.)