eavesdropping keith richards-style

The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards on writing songs in his autobiography Life (Back Bay Books). He talks about being forced to be tuned to the world to find material, and how it made him feel like a bit of a Peeping Tom - something most writers would find familiar. "One hit requires another, very quickly, or you fast start to lose alti­tude. At that time you were expected to churn them out. 'Satisfac­tion' is suddenly number one all over the world, and Mick and I are looking at each other, saying, 'This is nice.' Then bang bang bang at the door, 'Where's the follow-up? We need it in four weeks.' And we were on the road doing two shows a day. You needed a new single every two months; you had to have another one all ready to shoot. And you needed a new sound. If we'd come along with another fuzz riff after 'Satisfaction,' we'd have been dead in the water, repeating with the law of diminishing returns. Many a band has faltered and foundered on that rock. 'Get Off of My Cloud' was a reaction to the record companies' demands for more -- leave me alone -- and it was an attack from another direction. And it flew as well. "So we're the song factory. We start to think like songwriters, and once you get that habit, it stays with you all your life. It motors along in your subconscious, in the way you listen. Our songs were taking on some kind of edge in the lyrics, or at least they were beginning to sound like the image projected onto us. Cynical, nasty, skeptical, rude. We seemed to be ahead in this respect at the time. There was trouble in America; all these young American kids, they were being drafted to Vietnam. Which is why you have 'Satisfaction' in Apocalypse Now. Because the nutters took us with them. The lyrics and the mood of the songs fitted with the kids' disenchantment with the grown-up world of America, and for a while we seemed to be the only provider, the soundtrack for the rumbling of rebellion, touching on those social nerves. I wouldn't say we were the first, but a lot of that mood had an English idiom, through our songs, despite their being highly Ameri­can influenced. We were taking the piss in the old English tradition. ... "And because you've been playing every day, sometimes two or three shows a day, ideas are flowing. One thing feeds the other. You might be having a swim or screwing the old lady, but somewhere in the back of the mind, you're thinking about this chord sequence or something related to a song. No matter what the hell's going on. You might be getting shot at, and you'll still be 'Oh! That's the bridge!' And there's nothing you can do; you don't realize it's happening. It's totally subconscious, unconscious or whatever. The radar is on whether you know it or not. You cannot switch it off. You hear this piece of conversation from across the room, 'I just can't stand you anymore'... That's a song. It just flows in. And also the other thing about being a songwriter, when you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer, you start to distance yourself. You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years, observing people, how they react to one another. Which, in a way, makes you weirdly distant. You shouldn't really be doing it. It's a little of Peeping Tom to be a songwriter. You start looking round, and everything's a subject for a song. The banal phrase, which is the one that makes it. And you say, I can't believe nobody hooked up on that one before! Luckily there are more phrases than songwriters, just about." Author: Keith Richards    Title: Life Publisher: Back Bay Books Date: Copyright 2010 by Mindless Records, LLC Pages: 179-183 Thanks to delanceyplace.com for the extract.

Tuesday Poem: Rock-Crystal by Ursula Bethell

Routine-galled, dulled, by many years cumbered,

slipping halter holiday-wise,

away into the west land.

So much cool green to see; such deep silence

to hear; clear silence; bright waters;

such deep-green of tree-shade; such chiming

of gem necklaces – birds shaking,

concealed, the leaves with crystal songs.

To hear, at evening, young mountaineers,

come down godlike from sunlit pinnacles,

tell of prowess and peril, and, taken from pocket,

show faceted crystals from high rock-surfaces.

To muse: All this, it has been like to crystal,

cold-dropping waters, clearest bird-voice,

sheerest silence, light-flashing glacier.

To be invited: Please have this crystal.

And so, like fay-bestowed flower in the fairy-tale,

beauty, fast in a crystal, bearing,

back to the city.

Humanity has ever found it comfortable

to render richest experience portable,

heart to heart with a sign indenture,

sum up in symbol, most high adventure;

till, years gone by, and significance broken,

folk ask: What mean you by this token?

Let us in kindness covet for every man

one lovely memory at least in life-span

fit to be locked up in crystal reliquary,

so all may see it, yet none see, save he.

___

I found this fascinating poem in the Guardian online. And there's a terrific write-up to go with it. As the article says, Bethell was one of our seminal poets. Born in 1874 in England, she died in Canterbury NZ in 1945. 

Many of her most beguiling poems celebrate the sloping garden she built at Rise Cottage, on the edge of the Cashmere Hills. They often begin like letters or journal-entries, informal, matter-of-fact: "I find vegetables fatiguing" ("Perspective"), "My garage is a structure of excessive plainness" ("Detail"). Sometimes, Bethell half-playfully addresses the plants themselves: to an orange-tree sapling she writes, "O little Omi-Kin-Kan, your green shoots are so sturdy ..." ("Citrus"). From such informalities, the poems blossom into rich verbal gardens, relishing intense colours and litanies of plant-names. 

Bethell the painter and Bethell the musician collaborate in her best work. The garden she writes about is a repository of spiritual meaning, and also symbolises her love for Effie Pollen, the woman with whom she shared the happiest, most artistically productive, years of her life.

This week's poem, "Rock Crystal", travels beyond the garden and celebrates wider nature. It's a "holiday poem" but one that takes a metaphysical turn, and invites us into the process by which a refreshing new vista expands into the visionary. 

Read more here.  



Then check out the Tuesday Poem blog by clicking on the quill in the sidebar or going here to read a provocative poem at the hub plus a whole host of others...  

Tuesday Poem: What I'd take etc....

What I’d take in the event of a tsunami

              & what I wouldn’t

Tiny ivory elephant in a tiny woven box in the cupboard

                    the missing tusk, fine as a finger nail

Photo cut in a circle – badly – to fit that old frame

                    the frame, the running boys inside it: too big to carry

Daughter, her things, she won't pack light,

                     the filled apple boxes waiting for the op shop

                    

Bass guitar with a name that sounds like kissing and telling

                    the piano out by a semi-tone, all those piano lessons

The iron pot which rings like a bell when you drop it

                   the iron pot which rings like a bell when you drop it.

Mary McCallum

This came out of an exercise I invented for a poetry workshop of Year 9-11 year olds at Newlands College. I had a fantastic afternoon there last week, annoucing the winners of the school-wide poetry competition, running the poetry workshop, and talking about the NZ novels that influenced my fiction to a scholarship English class. What a terrific bunch of switched-on students. 

Thanks to Newlands College teacher extraordinaire and Tuesday Poet, Harvey Molloy, who got me involved.  

The exercise was to make the students write in precise concrete detail rather than writing abstractions and the familiar. It yielded some terrific stuff - terribly poignant at times and all evocative of character: the girl who would leave behind the bra with the scratchy underwire, the other one who would take her great grandmother's blue rosary, the boy who would take his Baxter but not his Thomas, one who'd take a tiny red triangular pick but not the guitar 'that keeps it company'. 

I liked the way they played with the relationship between the give and take line in each couplet. 

My poem: there's a lot about weight here - the need for relative lightness in the items that can be taken - and how the lost and absent things we live with often become heavy - so can't be taken for two reasons. What of the iron pot? It's that will I/won't I thing... it is heavy, and the line signals that the potential for it to be dropped is huge, and yet the ringing it would make - the sound of its 'thisness' as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say - is beautiful. 

Worth it then? To try? Perhaps to hear the bell? It's my best cooking pot, so many meals have been made in it, like magic - something from nothing. Cook porridge cook.... May as well. 

The poetry submissions for the competition were good to read and the winners were standout. 

Check out Tuesday Poem now www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Tuesday Poem: Tight by Helen Heath

My mother folded
heavy blankets
into hospital corners
topped with candlewick.
At night I was pinned down
like a butterfly in a case.

Now we are hiding
from each other
but I'm the only one
playing the game.

Inside the wardrobe
I spy old wallpaper
and under the carpet
oiled floorboards.

Who'll find me
now she's gone --
knees by ears tight
breathing all of me.

Poet Harvey Molloy pocketed Graft
at the Unity launch 

Helen Heath launched Graft (VUP) this month at a moving ceremony in Unity Books, Wellington. Moving because it's Helen's first full collection and because these are poems that spring from both heart and brain but come back in the end, each and every one of them, to the death of Helen's mother when Helen was nineteen, over 20 years ago.

In a post on her blog nearly two years ago, Helen wrote about how the death of her mother had defined her and quoted this:

My mother is a poem
I'll never be able to write
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.
                     Sharon Doubiago

And of course we've just had Mothers Day, and on top of that (bear with me) my middle son turns 21 any day now, and I've been looking through all those old photos and thinking what it means to be a Mum and feeling a bit emotional. Then there we were on Mothers Day morning and middle son wasn't home yet and the others weren't up yet, and my husband was making coffee ... A knock at the door. On the doorstep, forgotten his key as usual: middle son, his cheeks fresh with cold. He'd walked nine kilometres to get home to see me.

I digress. Mothers.

A number of the poems in Graft are directly about Helen's mother like the one above which constricts my throat -- the claustrophobic feel of it -- the heavy blankets pinning the child down -- all that briskness and efficiency -- the tightness in the cupboard, of the air, the child-in-the-woman curled up so tight, foetal, full of missing, glimpses of another time - wallpaper, floorboards - so close.

There are poems which appear to be indirectly about Helen's mother too: inserted throughout the collection are poems about science and scientists - a fascination of Helen's -- and an area, I think I'm right in saying, that her mother was involved in. These scientists in the poems are people like Marie Curie and Beatrice Tinsley who died of terrible diseases, often brought on by the work they did. The work they did unfolds here in precise and majestic detail.

There are fairytale poems too - which so often have absent mothers - and poems about faith and about Helen as mother.  The effect builds powerfully, so powerfully, poem by poem through each of three sections.

In the second of three sections in the book, there are poems are about Helen's journey to her mother's homeland, Ithaca, to find her mother there. Through language and mythology and place she tries to place her feet where her mother trod and perhaps treads still. One part of the long poem Graft feels like the answer to -- the CPR to -- the open door to -- Tight.

I lie under the olive trees
and say to them, to the hill,
to the sea: I am ready.
I press my ear, my cheek,
to the ground. I smell the dry earth.
I say to the island: I am 
ready to hear you now. 
I wait. After a while
I hear it. There is nothing there
but a hum of silence,
the tension vibrating. The hum
touches my cheek, passes through
to my mouth.
I swallow, turn and look up.  


Later in the same poem, she says:

If I dig a hole all the way through
to before, perhaps then I can hold her.

This middle section of the collection especially grabs my heart, for the search Helen's engaged in, and for a different reason too. Like Helen I am part Greek, and know that feeling of going to that country to find what you do and don't know. These poems with their delicious details of language and place ('Everything familiar/yet askew. Apo thalassa sto Vathy.') made me want to go back there very soon.

In the third section, there are more poems on family, a little science, and a series on Justine of the Hutt Valley who wears ugg boots and gets pregnant to the brother of the speaker of the poem and decides -- against the tide of the book -- not to be a mother -- but has an abortion instead. Aaaah - it's like letting the air out ... but no, the final poem is Justine's, and she's rising above it all somehow, floating, like magic, like faith ... The Rapture? Which returns us, perhaps, to the first poem in the collection which talks about Isaac Newton and the Book of Revelations. My only small gripe: I really wanted that final poem to have Helen's mother in it somehow. Justine's interesting, but feels like an interloper...

Such a good book, though! A powerful collection that I read at a sitting and continue to be excited by.

On the Tuesday Poem hub this week, Helen Rickerby who published Helen Heath's earlier chapbook Watching for Smoke, is posting from Graft too. I am looking forward to seeing what she has to say -- go here.

I didn't mean to say quite so much here but am pleased I have. Now I really have to get on with the speech for a certain 21st. Oh, and one more thing about Mothers Day on Sunday... After a time with my children, I went to visit my Mum. Of course I did.


Tight is published with permission.

Emily Perkins' The Forrests my review

Here it is - within the six minute slip of a time slot on National Radio's Nine to Noon. I had so much more to say, but the guts of it is here and I am grateful for that.

To clarify about the 'will it win the Booker' question at the end of the interview -- okay, I didn't hear that --  I heard: 'could' it -- I mean, who can possibly say if it will? There's more than the book itself to consider, there's the competition, the politics, the sheer Britishness of the award etc -- but yes, I definitely think it could win the Booker. Oh yes I do.

As I say in the interview, it's as good as any other Booker winners I've read lately: Enright, Hollinghurst etc. This book grabs hold of you and is very very hard to dislodge.

Mark Doty's Vita Nuova

On my blog roll it says When Women were Birds under US poet extraordinaire and memoir writer Mark Doty's blog heading. So I clicked on it, intrigued. For some reason the post isn't there - he must have reconsidered! But I found this wonderful post by him instead about the nexus between creative writing and real-life writing on blogs and how restricting the latter can be toxic for the former. It is also a post about the relevance of our old lives and that tricky thing: old uncollected poetry - something that does take up my thinking from time to time, and about unexpectedly making a new life: la vita nuova, and the joy it brings.

Tuesday Poem: Sea Fever by John Masefield

I learnt this poem off by heart as a teenager. Loved the sounds, the rhythm, the romance of it. Learnt Cargoes off by heart too for the same reasons. Unlike Byron and other poets I revered in those days, I knew nothing about Masefield except that he was English and my English mother liked his poems and kept them in the loo (with a whole lot of other poets, I have to say.)  

With my chapbook out and about in the world, I was invited recently to speak to a local poetry group. I could turn up at 11 and do my reading or I could go at 10 - driven by Marjory and Barbara -and discuss Masefield. How could I resist? I went at 10 gripping my copy of Palgrave's Golden Treasury which I won for coming second in Form 4C, Wellington Girls' College. 


The meeting was at Joan's lovely home in Petone facing - yes - the sea. There were nine of us. We heard from Richard via Wikipedia about Masefield's life, and then waited our turn to read a poem or two. Wonderfully, no-one else read Sea Fever or Cargoes, so I did. 

We agreed Masefield - who was England's Poet Laureate from 1930 to his death in 1967 -  wrote poems that felt modern to us, and that this came from the crispness of the language, the freshness of his observations and the beliefs expressed, which included reincarnation and sort of proto-feminism (Barbara read an incredible poem on his feelings about his mother - and all women - giving birth). 


We talked about how what seemed anti-romantic: the 'dirty British coaster' in Cargoes, could now be thought of as romantic viz. the 'Tyne coal', the 'iron-ware', and were treated to Richard reading an extract from the long poem Reynard the Fox which has been compared critically to Chaucer and which I'd never heard of before.  


The language: who can beat 'the wind's like a whetted knife' ? And those gorgeous rhythms which are just delicious to hear read aloud. 


Richard told us all about how Masefield's parents had died when he was young so he was sent off to boarding school. Then this from Wikipedia:

After an unhappy education at the King's School inWarwick (now known as Warwick School), where he was a boarder between 1888 and 1891, he left to board the HMS Conway, both to train for a life at sea, and to break his addiction to reading, of which his aunt thought little. He spent several years aboard this ship and found that he could spend much of his time reading and writing. It was aboard the Conway that Masefield's love for story-telling grew. While on the ship, he listened to the stories told about sea lore. He continued to read, and felt that he was to become a writer and story teller himself.

Don't you love it! 'To break his addiction to reading'!! Of course he fell in love with the sea and wrote about it so compellingly, so beautifully, and spun the sea yarns into gold. Here's Cargoes.

Cargoes by John Masefield

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amythysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

From SALT-WATER POEMS AND BALLADS, edited by John Masefield, published by The Macmillan Co., New York, US, © 1944, p. 124; first published in SALT-WATER POEMS, © 1902.

Now do go to Tuesday Poem for an astonishing Kath and Kim 'poem' posted by the provocative Zireaux. Yes, Kath and Kim. 

The Poets' Birthday by The Tuesday Poets 2012

The shyest sparrow's supplications in the early evening trees

are a careful arpeggio - each note liberates a flotilla of leaves
fleeting, indeed, left scattered as archipelago in a dew-grass sea.  

The song's begun: feathered entreaties lift from every hedgerow, every

field, join in one great arc of beak and wing and downy plume --

brief benediction for the worker trudging home, a heart-lifted pause

at day's end. Summer's pages fall. Leaf by leaf, they shorten days,

strip bare the trunks, spill forth a concertina of split, sagging plums,

crimson globes -- Demeter's heart strung low against the blue note 

sky. Furrowed fields lie flat beneath the tramp of corn-fed feet.

The scene is set, two candles lit, another year opens a window 

through which we pass in streak of silver, burst of wheels' screech, breath

of horns' bright blasting. Inside, the chink of glass against china,

bubble of laughter tossed from one guest to the next draws us

to warmth, the blissful promise of shared experience. How it swells

the soul's bright plumage! A winking flame copies itself on the clean

slope of the knife before it passes. The reflection flickers: and beyond 

the window frame, a final guest hesitates in mauve-hued shadow, ghost 

of Keats maybe, listening still, reticent, reluctant to eschew 

autumn's arias. And hear now, along the bay, 

the pulse of song ticks out again in joyous iteration, a boy kicks 

a ball against a wall, a sole finch adds bebop syncopation. Gabble, 

and its consistency of warm honey dampen the tenor, the tune -- best

left out in the tang of sharpened daylight. Shadows unwilling to retreat

stand shoulder-to-shoulder and beat the day's thrum chanting come, cold,

come, dark, come firelight, we too have our part. Gladly, watch effulgence fade,

into this gentler glow of murmured crackle and spark-fed thoughts. Each year

is gathered and falls away in a clap of digits, up from nothing to where

we find ourselves surrounded. It's come to this: the riffle of breath, the winking

flame. One is out, then the other. Stay with us, poet, it's time to start over.  

A global birthday poem written line by line by 26 poets from six countries and 12 cities over two weeks: from Tuesday April 3 to April 17 2012. It has been written to celebrate our second birthday. 

The Tuesday Poets are (in order of their lines): Melissa Green, Claire Beynon, Saradha Koirala, Janis Freegard, T. Clear, Catherine Bateson, Renee Liang, Elizabeth Welsh, Alicia Ponder, Tim Jones, Kathleen Jones, Helen McKinlay, Helen Lowe, Eileen Moeller, Orchid Tierney, Susan T. Landry, Keith Westwater, Belinda Hollyer, Harvey Molloy, Bernadette Keating, Andrew M. Bell, Michelle Elvy, Catherine Fitchett, P.S. Cottier, Helen Rickerby, Mary McCallum.

Unable to post this year: Sarah Jane Barnett, Robert Sullivan, Zireaux, Emma McCleary 

It's up on the Tuesday Poem blog, but as a matter of record - and solidarity - I wanted it up here too! Our global birthday poem. It continues to astonish me... the way it unfolded, the richness of the language, the way it feels like it has one voice not 26 voices ... Look at all the poets attached to it! Very cool indeed. More on it here. 

Tuesday Poem: Penny Lane

– she says, I’ll get my hat 

We meet at Heketara Street

by the seawall but sometimes

if I’m early, it’s the lane

with the crabapple tree.

In truth, we meet where we

intersect. Sometimes I get as

far as her gate, she my door.

Penny’s always ripe in red

or orange wool, and old

Molly's at the end

of a Thai scarf, her hips

barely holding her legs in.

I’m scraped together, really,

bits of this and that – mended

boots, Adam’s jacket, 

Ruby gasping on the lead.

– she says, there’s this poem

And there’s something in it

about being in labour

and the pom-poms cheering

her on but Penny isn’t sure

it sounds right. We walk under

the power lines and the man

on the ladder, and we talk

about cooking cabbage tree leaves.

Before we know it, we’re at the end

of the sealed road and touching

the gate and turning – back past

the car park and the spent condom

and the buses, back past the man

up the ladder and the woman

with the dachshund. At the lane

where we part

– she says, the crabapples

what a shame -- Elsie could make

jam with them. When I get home,

the phone rings. I’ve lost my hat, have

you seen it? I’ve looked everywhere.

I look, but we both know

it’s not here. Within a week

or two, she’ll arrive at Heketara

Street patting her head.

– she’ll say, I picked up a book

and there it was. And

we’ll turn into

the wind and walk on.

                                  Mary McCallum

I used to treasure these walks with my friend Penny, when we were both writing and needing to talk about it. She left Eastbourne a year ago, so Ruby and I walk this walk on our own now.  I sometimes think I see Penny coming along that lane I think of as her lane. And for months, Ruby would pause and wait a moment where Penny and I used to intersect before moving on. When Penny returns for a visit, we try and do the walk. Hats and wind and all. 

Do please click here to enter the Tuesday Poem hub where our global birthday poem is posted. We had 26 poets from six countries and 12 cities posting a line at a time over a fortnight. It was terrific fun. And now it's done. Visit do. 

Happy Birthday to us. Ra Whanau ki a korua. 

Global birthday poem unfolds

At Tuesday Poem there is a global birthday poem unfolding. Our second birthday, our second global poem. It's an amazing undertaking that does my head in everytime I organise the roster and each time a line goes up. 


In a nutshell, 26 of the 31 Tuesday Poets living in six countries and 12 different cities contribute a line each over 14 days to create a single fabulous poem. Many of us have never met each other, and yet we do it - on trust, and in good heart, because we are a community  and it's our birthday. 

The poem kicked off at one minute past midnight on April 3, 2012 with a line from Boston poet Melissa Green, my Tuesday Poem co-curator Claire Beynon (a kiwi visiting Ibiza, Spain at the time) contributed the second line ten hours later, with Saradha Koirala from Wellington New Zealand posting the third. 


After that we bounced across the globe from Wellington to Canberra to London to Philadelphia to somewhere in Italy to Seattle to Dunedin and more.  I will post the final line at one minute past midnight Monday night from Wellington, NZ. There have been so few glitches - sometimes the poem disappeared off the blog due to some scheduling issues, but it was no biggie. It popped up again in no time at all.... 


And how do we post? We're all administrators for the Tuesday Poem blog, so we log in, add the line, and then add our name to the list of poets at the bottom, before passing the baton to the next poet in this roster.

Our first global birthday poem was Tuesday written last year. This year we've called it Birthday Poem (working title). And it started like this:

"The shyest sparrow's supplications in the early evening trees
are a careful arpeggio - each note liberates a flotilla of leaves
fleeting, indeed, left scattered as archipelago in a dew-grass sea." 

It's many lines past that now. 

Here's what I said on Beattie's book blog last week: 'It's an exciting process watching the lines go up one by one - seeing the thinking behind each line - the language, the line-breaks, where it's left for the next poet to pick it up. It's like watching one poetic mind at work, with each poet like one of the many competing voices that a poet hears as s/he writes: 'break the line there' 'no don't' 'rhyme it' 'don't you dare' 'how about plums to echo plume' 'what are you thinking?' and so on. "

What I love most of all is thinking of the poet who is next on the roster mulling over his/her line - while drinking a coffee in Dunedin, perhaps, or eating dinner in London, or walking past spring bulbs somewhere in Italy ... 

It's Penelope in Canberra at the moment pondering on Catherine Fitchett's line posted from Christchurch. Helen Rickerby tomorrow. Then me. The final poem is published on Tuesday Poem on Tuesday April 17. 

Grass, acid, vanilla: the chemistry of book smells

The Missing Sock

San Francisco Laundry, photo by Mia

My friend snapped this photo and sent it to me yesterday. It's a laundry in San Francisco - and look at the name! It was Mia whose basket of socksand accompanying bag of 'orphan socks' featured in an earlier post here Who by Socks? Which in itself was a sequel to Jenny Bornholdt's brief but brilliant poem Socks posted here prior to that.

So if those two posts were the question, this - thank you dear Mia - is the answer.

Tuesday Poem: Just to Say by Bryan Walpert

I came to that old poem,

folded in the leaf of a book,

and meant merely to take

a peek, like visiting a home

I’d lived a few years in long ago,

curious what had changed,

but of course it was the same,

and I couldn’t help but linger

in that meadow where we still sat

as lovers. The air rippling through

the grass carried a thought

I could nearly catch,

and still hushed the bees,

busy as always laying gold amid

the buds, while the sun slid,

endlessly of course, behind

cherry trees whose petals

fluttered like a feeling

I’d forgotten, as I’d forgotten

the scent of dusk that settled

along azaleas, the pond,

even the blanket somehow

that you had forever spread

beside the river for us to lie upon,

and it was only the foolishness

that seemed new, the kind

you feel when you find

you’ve come late to the obvious,

that even a first-time reader

should have known how soon

the end was approaching when

the jays, weaving shadow braids

between branches, sealed

the seam of the horizon,

descending to wherever it is

our oldest best selves are stored,

so forgive me if I’ve remained

too long in this poem. I’ll leave

you asleep now by the river,

murmuring the memory of my name. 

My friend Bryan Walpert, will be launching his second collection of poetry, A History of Glass at the fabulous Palmerston North City Library this Wednesday 11 April at  7.00 pm, starting with drinks at 6.30 pm at the Bruce McKenzie bookshop next door. The event is free and open to the public, so do get along and take a friend.  

I am wondering if I can get myself up there - a bit of a road trip - a bit of poetry - wind my way home.... I'll see, I have some projects needing attention this week, ones that actually involve getting paid. Hah! Now there's a thing.  

A History of Glass is beside my bed at the moment - and I dip into it regularly - a poem at a time - having read it through in one reading when it arrived in my letterbox. It is a stunning collection, each poem a complex and tasty treat, and I will review it next week. 

Another poem from Bryan's collection featured on my blog here and Bryan's No Metaphor, from a previous collection, was the first poem on the Tuesday Poem blog, so it's a fine thing to reference it this week when we're in the middle of our second birthday. 

There's a global poem going on at TP to celebrate - so far a dozen poets have posted a line each and there are more than a dozen to go, with the final poem posted next Tuesday. Do have a look! It's fun to see where it goes...