Tuesday Poem - Epicentre by Jennifer Compton

Epicentre

I woke up dazed

some taniwha had risen

underneath my bed

straight up from

the centre of the earth

and humped like

a green horse

first time under the saddle.

Then the noise

a peremptory growl

travelling away from me

as swiftly as a train.

How unusual and strange.

I couldn't write a poem

for every earthquake

I have lived through

they all have their little quirks

but every other one had rumbled

towards me, done its worst

shivered, rippled, shook

then galloped away.

The house and I settled

down, drew our breath

and the earth turned.

I have been a bit knocked about emotionally by this new earthquake in Christchurch which has caused so much damage and suffering. So I hadn't sorted out my Tuesday poem. Then I remembered the only poem I have written about an earthquake. Because I was born in Wellington I have been through lots of them. But nothing major. I'm lucky. I thought of this poem because I have a friend who lives in Lyttleton which was the epicentre. So my only epicentre experience came to mind. It was in Martinborough, actually.  

Tuesday Poem - Dad by Rachel McGladdery

Dad


Rolling in one night on sea legs
made entirely from White Lightning,
he bowled up at mine and fell in through the door.

I helped him up and sat him down
and once propped upon a chair with a cup of tea he told me he had AIDS.
"Oh Dad" I said and went to hug him.
He held his hand out like a nicotine stained starfish.

" you don't have to bleach the cup"

I held him sadly as he sobbed into my shoulder,

"Don't treat me like a leopard"

I hooked up with Rachel on Facebook. She lives up there in Britland and I live down here in the Antipodes and we haven't met in the flesh but I follow the story of her life via her status updates, and maybe she follows mine. Sometimes we have a bit of a witty chitchat. She seems to have a lot of success with her poetry and she deserves to I think. Her work is so sharp and astute and full of flavour. Very tasty stuff, indeed.

Rachel McGladdery has been writing poetry seriously for around 2 years. She has performed at many venues throughout North West England. She won the NXNW Slam in August 2010 at The Tudor House Wigan and also won the title of Liverpool Lennon Poet 2010 in November 2010 and was awarded with her trophy by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. She has been published in Mental Arts Virus Magazine, Preston is my Paris Zine, Word Soup Year One, Dragonheart Press - Winter Poets,and is due to have a poem in a new Forward anthology published in February 2011 'When I speak to you of love...'. She also has work published at The Pygmy Giant. Rachel was Featured Poet in the Poetry Kit's series, Caught In The Net #72. You can see more of Rachel's work here: http://writeoutloud.net/poets/rachelmcgladdery.
Rachel lives in rural Lancashire with her 4 children and 2 cats and is a closet birdwatcher.

Tuesday Poem - Life sentence by Vincent O'Sullivan

When the man from the Arts Council mistakenly

knuckles my door in the hope an artiste

might be found on the premises,

                                                   when this woman

with frankly, Norks, you wouldn't believe them,

asks do I have faith in the beyond,

or Arkansas, as he's known around here,

a stud-nostriled bogan with musically

simian taste,

                    he or his gravid sister

wanting to borrow my 'focking tape-deck bro',

there's a queue, veritably, to my front verandah,

each expecting feedback as though manna's by right,

why, I quote Akhmatova

                                      at them, my one

stab at truth in a tricky world, 'The Venice,'

I tell them, 'the Venice of Doges is next door.'

I chose this light-hearted and, yes, tricky poem, from Vincent's most recent collection, Further Convictions Pending. But it wasn't easy to pick just the one poem. I dithered a lot. I was being lead by the nose and up the garden path, forward and back through the book. Yes, the one about the rat with the timely front tooth. Or the one about the squadroned vaginas of the tulip beds. Or the one about the eyes from different people who are introduced to each other in the optician's office. So true! But no. I picked this one because it was too delicious to resist. Sly wit, and naughtiness. Norks is naughty. And so is artiste. I just wish I knew why one of the supplicants is called Arkansas. I have been making up stories about why he is. And pondering whether it is pronounced as it is written, or in the Cholmondeley way it is pronounced in the States. Sigh. Just the one inscrutable in a world I recognise spoken into life by a voice I trust. Just the one pebble to stub my toe against. Do I want to explained to me? No, I don't actually. There is a reason for it, maybe connected to the gravid sister, just as there is a reason why the the chief magistrate and leader of the Most Serene Republic of Venice was styled the Doge, but I am not in the know about that either.

Further Convictions Pending poems 1998-2008 Victoria University Press http://www.victoria.ac.nz/vup/2009titleinformation/furtherconvictionspending.aspx

Tuesday Poem - Absurd Hats 1909 by Jennifer Compton

Absurd Hats 1909
Filmed by James McDonald

Lady Ward (Theresa) was renowned for the size of her hats
her husband's hat is just as ridiculous although vertiginous
hers is an intricacy of folds and tucks - his is a chimney.

Their marital glance, uncertain, as they flicker in the garden
mouthing - What should I say? Is that machine working?
but they seem accustomed to hoisting hats out of proportion.


It's very annoying and frustrating but I wanted to post a poem by Vincent O'Sullivan this week, and first off I had internet issues, then when that came good I discovered that this blog wouldn't respect indents and rushed everything back to the left margin. I couldn't find out how to fix it. AND it won't do italics. There are meant to be some italics in the little poem of mine I am posting as a stop gap.

Anyway, anyway - this is a poem I picked up while I was at an exhibition at the National Library in Wellington. They were absurd hats and the thing that really gave me the giggles is that they seemed to be wearing representations of their genitals on their heads. "Hers was an intricacy of folds and tucks - his was a chimney."

Tuesday Poem - Adlestrop - Edward Thomas

Yes. I remember Adlestrop -

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop – only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that moment a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

This Tuesday I will go for the bleeding, blinding obvious and post one of my favourite poems. I typed it out and as I did I pondered how the poet had used his devices. The capital letter at the beginning of the line, when he used a run on and when he didn't. And his rhymes. Just your usual sort of rhyme – afternoon/June came/name dry/sky until he hits you with mistier/Gloucestershire.

http://poemsandprose.blog.co.uk/2006/03/08/adlestrop~623132/

Couple of pics of Adlestrop then and now. It is one of those places to which I would like to make a pilgrimage. This poem gave me the idea of taking a place and 'glamorising' it by taking a poetic snapshot of it. To bring it into another sort of existence. I think the reason I like this poem so much is because it is archival. I am a sucker for delving in the archives. But although it jerks and flickers a little, and it is very much of its time, I can also be right there in that moment so long ago. I can't find out when it was written but it was pre 1917, when Edward Thomas was killed in action at the Battle of Arras (at the age of 37 if I remember right). I feel as if I know this poem completely, in all its intents. But the only thing I can't know is how I would have reacted to it if I had read it when it was first written. Would it have seemed odd and fey to me, would it have passed over my head or under my radar? One other thing - if you consider, as I do, a poem to be a conversation with other poems, then I am continually conversing with this poem. I reference it a lot. The spreading soundscape, the atonal rhyme. And in a recent poem about the train station called Alamein here in Melbourne, I go so far as to write - “I was the only person who got off here. And nobody got on.” A direct homage. But I wonder how many people know this poem these days. I wonder if anyone will get it. Anyway, this poem is very close to my heart and it emboldens me every time I read it.

Tuesday Poem - Chop! - by Steve Smart

Chop!

This is an axe

I’m not going to hurt you

just need to chop some wood

it’s cold out tonight

This is a fire

Small, slow burning

stop poking at it

it’ll burn all by itself

This is a chimney

The fire is going now

but there’s too much smoke

the room is filling up, choking

This is a bucket

The fire is spreading out of control

must find water

before skin begins to melt

This is relief

Not too cold, not too hot

the porridge is cooking nicely

come inside, get warm –

stop apologising

every time you don’t save the world

This poem is a hint

of things to come

Steve Smart is yet another Melbourne poet – we have such a lot of poets in Melbourne- (lucky us) – and I think it would be fair to describe him as a 'performance poet'. Not that there is anything wrong with that, to quote Seinfeld. I heard him read this poem in last year's final of Poetry Idol at Federation Square and liked it loads. Steve is a mover and a shaker and an instigator and a begetter, the Overload Festival is a brain child of his – with a little bit of help from his friends. To quote the Beatles. These days he is one of the conveners of the long-running Dan poetry readings, and he tours, he paints nails, he writes poetry, he slams, he is a true believer.

Tuesday Poem - The Ministry of Going In by Christine Paice

The Ministry of Going In

This is what happens

I go in

sweep the floor

clear the dishes

interview the Secretary of State over a flat white

and lamington

and ask about Afghanistan and post modern democracy

in a political vacuum

I forget to ask if she wants sugar with that

This is what happens

I go in

sweep the floor

stack plates

dry cutlery

make sure the knives

are really really shiny

and ask the Minister for Dreaming

if I need a new paradigm to contain my thoughts

There was a knife once that was not

as shiny as the others

it was held up as an example

of what can happen

if you’re careless

an unclean knife

half a second and your whole life changes

I go in

sweep the floor

foam the milk

and wonder

if there is too much importance

placed on the size of a take away cup

milk jugs are full

of constant fluctuations

and I ask the Minister for Intermittently Good Behaviour

how he is adjusting to the global downturn in fortune cookies

he says there is always another biscuit to be had

This is what happens

sometimes I don’t go in

I run in the wind

a gory phantom with a large

coconut shell necklace

I say gory on account of the beetroot I have peeled

and I ask the Minister for Outsized Accessories

if I have gone too far

in my quest and she says

she would wear that far mountain and two intertwined planets

if she could get them round her bloody neck

This is what happens

I go in

there are people

waiting at the counter

I take one not-so-shiny-as-it-should-have-been knife

and excise my bad intentions

and I ask the Minister for Procrastination

is it always as bad as they say

he says not if you catch it in time and do something about it

This is what happened

you went in

made muffins

and cappuccinos

ordered milk and bread

and did something about it

but didn’t catch it in time

you asked a doctor what the results were

and he said you’d better come in

You went in

swinging your wooden spoon

like a pendulum

backwards and forwards

into the dark

big black crow cleared his throat

and crow ordered fast

before you had time

to catch your breath

crow caught it for you

You and crow

riding a spoon

into the cold mysterious night

crow’s fierce black wings

beating the sky

and I asked the Minister For Last Things if it was true

that after you die you turn into a star

and he said he was looking into it

This is what happens

I go in

water has flooded

from the fridge

I swim round tables

like a dolphin

and I ask the Minister for New Beginnings

what she does when waves threaten to engulf her

and everyday feels strange

she says take a larger boat and throw your guilt over the side

This is what happens

I go in

my hair the shape

of a dolphin’s fin

someone hums the music from Jaws

and I ask the Minister for Psychic Disinformation

how many times he has blamed poltergeists for his own bad temper

and he says I am in the wrong film

This is what happens

I go in

sweep floor

rearrange shelving

stare at your photo

and stack my own

small bones

in with the coffee cups

I get everything right

it is one of those rare sparkling days

and I ask the Minister for Myself when I was last elected.

I was knocked out and blown away by this poem when I read it on line after it had won the Josephine Ulrick Prize. Such wit, such depth, such a bobby dazzler. Chrissy Paice has a particular and inimitable voice and I think in this poem her voice is almost stentorian.

I first met Chrissy when I mentored her through the South Coast Writers Centre and was thrilled to bits to find she actually didn't need a mentor. Well, I could suggest a few bits of marketing etc to her, and we did a modicum of fine tuning if I remember right, but good heavens what a find. I was thrilled to bits.

Her first book, Mad Oaks, has been sold out but contact her if you would like to get a copy of her second book, Staring At The Aral Sea.

chrispaice@aapt.net.au

Christine Paice is a poet and writer. She has published two collections of poetry, Mad Oaks and Staring At The Aral Sea (Ginninderra Press). Her poetry has been read on ABC Radio National and Jazz Alive, Vox FM radio, and published in the UK, and the USA. Her poetry has also been in Best Australian Poems 2004, 2005, and 2008. In 2009 she won the national Josephine Ulrick Poetry Prize. Her children’s book, The Great Rock Whale, (Lothian) was published April 2009.