Saturday, Ocean Creek by Fred D’Aguiar

Sometimes the morning shakes itself from its moorings

To this world and lifts skywards with a fighter jet's roar,

Everyone lucky enough to be up and about looks to the east

But the sound follows idly a much faster comet too quick

For lazy eyes, so we ink in a sleek cross with exhausts

And settle for sound in place of sight for peace of mind.

A morning without wings, or adrift on one wing-beat,

Skimming waves for their fumes and saltlick,

That's gulls, waves, and wind, sharpening pines.

That's me happy to see that I am nowhere to be found,

Thrilled to be lost at last in things outside of myself

Until I belong to a world that ignores my footprint:

That pine umbrella, a flock, a handclap away from liftoff;

The pike of a heron, on one pirate-foot, stalking its reflection.

This poem appears by kind permission of the author

Editor: Belinda Hollyer

'I should never ask / directions to my childhood,' writes Fred D’Aguiar, 'there is no way back home; home is always elsewhere.' This sense of dislocation is at the heart of his writing, in particular the complex legacy of slavery and colonialism. 

His latest collection of poetry, The Rose of Toulouse, from which this week’s poem is taken, traces the places he has lived, together with their histories and his own. His transformations and shifts – between Britain, Guyana and the USA – are his identity: 'Each year I travel, my passport photo / looks less like me.'

'My first scrape with the arts happened in Secondary School, in London around age 13,' Fred remembers. 'An English teacher read a few poems to us and asked us to write imitations. I forget the poems now but I remember the feeling of liberation when I started to copy the poem in terms of my experience or to put it another way, translate my experiences as a teenager in terms of the given forms of the poems. 

'A few years later another English teacher, Geoff Hardy, revisited the same poets and this time his readings made me pay attention to the poets themselves, to the intensity of feeling in their utterance. From that moment I knew I wanted to write but had no idea what I would write. ... This is wisdom miles after the event and partial wisdom at that, fashioned by my desire to turn a chaotic past of accidents and incidents into seamless narrative, or at least a story with as many of the crinkles in it ironed out by a highly selective process of recollection.'

Fred D'Aguiar was born in London in 1960 to Guyanese parents and grew up in Guyana, returning to England when he was a teenager. He trained as a psychiatric nurse before reading African and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury. His previous collections of poetry include Airy Hall (1989; winner of the Guyana Poetry Prize), and Bill of Rights (1998; shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize). 

He is also the author of four novels, the first of which, The Longest Memory (Pantheon, 1994), won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His plays include High Life (1987) and A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1991), which was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London.

Fred D'Aguiar is currently Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies at Virginia Tech State University.

You can hear Fred read part of one of his poems on the Poetry Archive, here. And If you want to order The Rose of Toulouse at the special price of UK£8, with free UK delivery (the RRP is UK£9.95) go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the code TRACE (it's case-sensitive) at the checkout - valid until 30th June.

When you've listened to Fred - do check out the sidebar for poems posted there by our Tuesday Poets. 

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Belinda Hollyer, a New Zealand writer and anthologist living in London. She doesn't write poetry - she thinks it's far too difficult - but other people's poems inform and sustain her life. The details of her other publications can be found on her website, and also on her blog, where her Tuesday Poems reside.  

Sonnet for a Hunter by Marisa Cappetta

He catches rabbits

in the paddock

with spotlights.

He catches frightened

sand coloured luckless

bundles, quivers of musk.

He catches them alive

with his hands. I thrive

on this, complex and complete,

like Australian heat.

He makes our den

with the foxes. We rest

with eyes alert

like spinifex, like silent red dirt.

                           
Editor: Andrew M. Bell

Marisa Cappetta won the 2011 Hagley Writers' Institute of Christchurch Margaret Mahy prize. Marisa's poetry has been published in anthologies, e-zines and journals including Crest to Crest, Takahe, InterlitQ, Enamel, Voiceprints 3, Snorkel, Blackmail Press, Turbine and Landfall. She is the recipient of a NZSA mentorship, and is on the boards of the Canterbury Poets Collective and Takahe magazine.

I first heard Marisa reading her poetry at a Canterbury Poets Collective reading when the readings enjoyed a warm and cosy home at the Madras Bookshop and Cafe, sadly now replaced by a bustling Cafe sans bookshop. I've heard her read a couple of times since, most recently at the WomanSpeak event at the Pallet Pavilion in central Christchurch. Her work is always a joy to listen to, drawing, as it often does, on her rich ancestral heritage.

"Sonnet for a Hunter" holds a special appeal since I lived in Western Australia for eight years. The images speak to me. I must confess that I don't entirely understand the poem, but I enjoy the ambiguity. Is the "he" of the poem a man or an animal? Does it matter? The couplet "sand coloured luckless/bundles, quivers of musk" is a striking image of a helpless ensnared rabbit and the final line locates it succinctly in the arid landscape of inland Australia.

You can read more of Marisa's poetry at http://marisacappetta.com

"Sonnet for a Hunter" is published on Tuesday Poem with permission.

For lots of other wonderful poetry, go to the blog roll of our Tuesday Poets. This week's editor Andrew M. Bell is Christchurch poet who also writes screenplays, fiction and non-fiction. His work has been published in NZ, Australia, Israel, US and the UK. You can find his poems here.

Resilience by Keith Westwater

Mathematicians      have worked out

how to calculate       the bounciness of a ball:

(the coefficient of this  x  the cosine of that)

+   the differential of today's weather     all ÷ by

a piece of string      (and the speed of the train)

=  the same as     dropping different balls together

and seeing which ball     has the longest bounce

Measuring how well     a person will rebound

after being dropped on     is still being worked on:

some believe     it has something to do with

the thickness of their skin           whether their stretching

reaches a breaking point     or results in       withstanding

whether they can fight and flee          how many times
the person has returned to a vertical position before

     
Keith Westwater 


                             Editor: Alicia Ponder

I love this poem and its real yet understated sense of drama.  The jumpiness reflecting not only the subject, personal resilience, but the metaphor itself.

The mathematical description of pain could, being so terrifyingly distancing, act to push the reader away, but instead it does almost the opposite, as 'a person' is brought into the equation.  Not blatantly a poem about Christchurch, it clearly has its roots in the work the poet has done there in the wake of their devastating earthquake, because the prose fissures even as it bounces.

Keith Westwater feels a deep association with New Zealand, its geography and history, and is proud to be a third generation Pakeha here.

He joined the New Zealand Army as a Regular Force Cadet (Parkinson Class) and spent the three years based in Waiouru.  After that he took to education like a fish to water, gaining a B.Sc in Geography, a Diploma in Teaching,  and a postgraduate Diploma in Education at Massey University.

Keith began writing poetry in 2003 while attending the 'Writing the Landscape' course at Victoria University of Wellington, and gained a Master of Letters in Creative Writing in 2009 through Central Queensland University, Australia. He is a Tuesday Poet and blogs here.


His work has appeared in Landfall, JAAM, Snorkel, Idiom 23, and other publications and he has received or been shortlisted for awards in New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. His poetry includes an equal first place in the 2006 Yellow Moon Spirit of Place competition, and first place in the International Tertiary Student Poetry section of the 2009 Bauhinia Literary Awards.

Keith's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Ash was published by Brisbane-based trans-Tasman publisher Interactive Publications and awarded the publisher's 2011 IP Picks Best First Book prize.

This week’s guest editor Alicia Ponder, loves poetry, speculative fiction and writing for children.  She lives in Wellington, New Zealand, is the author of Wizard's Guide to Wellington, co-author of two art books and an early reader, and has published short stories for both children and adults in New Zealand and overseas.  She blogs her poetry here at an Affliction of Poetry and other writing as A.J. Ponder. 

Remember to check out the sidebar to see some wonderful poems posted by Tuesday Poem's 30-strong team of poets.

The All Blacks by Robert J Pope

Sound, trumpet and drum,

For the All Blacks have come,

   Bowed down ‘neath their burden of glory;

They have put in the shade

Old Achilles, and laid

   On the shelf all the heroes of story.

Neither England nor France

Could withstand their advance,

   Though ’gainst Newport they had a near squeak;

Old Ireland fought gamely,

Nor did Wales suffer tamely

   The process of eating the leek.

Nicholls, Nepia and Cooke

All played like a book,

  As did Parker, the Brownlies, none fleeter;

And more I could name

Who have just as much claim,

   Were it not for the bonds of my metre.

Yet it might be as well,

In case our heads swell,

   To remember a former mishap;

Let us not crow too loudly,

Or bear ourselves proudly.

   South Africa’s still on the map.

Then here’s to the boys

Who have made such a noise

   In all lands where the oval is kicked,

While they’ve burnished her fame,

They have guarded her name,

   And returned to New Zealand “unlicked.”

© Robert J Pope

From King Willow: Selected Poems by Robert J Pope, ed. Mark Pirie (HeadworX, Wellington, 2012)

         Guest editor: Mark Pirie (Wellington, NZ)

This is a classic New Zealand poem by Robert J Pope. I first came across his collections in the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa, when I was editing a book of this country's cricket poems in 2010. I included Pope’s ‘King Willow’ in A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009.

I became intrigued. Subsequently, I picked up copies of his books second-hand in Lower Hutt and Wellington and in the Alexander Turnbull Library I discovered more, including manuscript books, a school songbook and scrapbook that Pope and his daughter had deposited. The work was all out of copyright restrictions at that stage, and I decided it could be of value to have the best of his work collected. King Willow: Selected Poems (HeadworX 2012) is the result.

Pope was not a major poet of the English language but I believe he was a significant one in the context of New Zealand poetry. His poetry was always competent and well made with an ability to mimic and parody the more famous works of his era and revitalize them in a New Zealand context. His most interesting poems concern the All Blacks tour of Great Britain, France and Canada in 1924/25.

When I posted Pope’s rugby poems on the Poetry Archive website during the IRB Rugby World Cup 2011. I was uncertain how much interest there would be, but to date, the poems have had over 3,500 visits. All Blacks historian Ron Palenski was one of the visitors, and included a few of the poems in his just-published anthology of NZ rugby poems Touchlines (NZ Sports Hall of Fame, 2013) – which he says was inspired by A Tingling Catch.

Perhaps the best of these is ‘The All Blacks’ which would not be out of place in any future anthology of this country’s verse. As poet Ernest L Eyre (also included in Palenski’s anthology) once wrote of this era and the earlier Originals tour of 1905/06:

Ah, you boys who play at Rugby ev’ry weekend on the green
You will never see such matches as we veterans have seen!
Though you may play clever football, of a new and later brand,
You don’t possess the “ginger” of old Rugby Football Land. 

For the “All Blacks” were the heroes of that land of wondrous fame:
They had overrun the Empire, and they made New Zealand’s name. 

Well put. The patriotic nationalist verses by Pope while typical of their time are a vivid blend of what helped mold New Zealand’s name overseas, and few New Zealand names are more famous now than the All Blacks.

Invincibles 1924

The players named in the poem are: Mark Nicholls and Bert Cooke (five-eighths), George Nepia (sole full-back), Jim Parker (wing-forward), and brothers Maurice and Cyril Brownlie (key forwards). Of course Nepia, Cooke and Maurice Brownlie are well recognised now as All Black greats.

Brownlie, as Palenski notes in Touchlines, was the Colin Meads of his era. Of particular interest to me about this team is that my grandfather played during this era (1919-1929), and coached the North Shore Seniors with Bert Cooke in 1938. The team became the Invincibles, one of the greatest teams to leave our shores.

Each of these extraordinary teams (Originals and Invincibles) played with the old 2-3-2 scrum and wing-forward formation eventually outlawed by the English rule makers in 1932. While the Originals sole defeat 0-3 at the hands of Wales in Cardiff soured their remarkable tour, the Invincibles went one better.

The poem certainly gives us the fanfare of their arrival home in 1925. It first appeared in the New Zealand Free Lance, March 1925 (and I first found it in Pope's Turnbull Library scrapbook.) For those who enjoy watching the All Blacks each winter, this poem will ring bells.

King Willow: Selected Poems (HeadworX 2012) includes previously uncollected and unpublished poems and music scores accompany selections from Pope’s two published books. An appendix includes a selection of his prose writings, including his Wellington club cricket essay and sporting ‘contorts and retorts’. Copies are for sale at Unity Books in Wellington and can be ordered from HeadworX mpirie@xtra.co.nz

This selection of Robert J Pope not only ‘gives a substantial picture of the man and his times’, it gives a significant New Zealand poet the recognition he should have always had. 

- Alistair Paterson, Editor of Poetry NZ.

Robert J Pope (1865-1949) was a well-known Wellington poet, cricketer and songwriter in his day – and till the end of the 1940s he held a reputation as a national songwriter for his school song ‘New Zealand, My Homeland’ – but today, his work is little known and out of print. Pope’s poetry, lyrically gifted, showed musical flair and easy felicity of rhyme. He began writing and publishing in earnest during the Edwardian era, and his work notably covers the two world wars and the national politics of the period, 1902-1944.

His most interesting work concerns sporting verse on the 1924/25 All Blacks “Invincibles” tour of Great Britain and France and suburban satires on Wellington city-life. Pope was a leading light verse parodist of his day, publishing mainly in the Free Lance and The Evening Post, and was a precursor to the ‘Wellington group’ of the 1950s.

Publications by Robert J Pope:
Some New Zealand Lyrics (Ferguson & Osborn Ltd, Wellington, 1928.)
A New Zealander’s Fancies in Verse (Whitcombe & Tombs, Wgtn, 1946.)
King Willow: Selected Poems edited by Mark Pirie (HeadworX, Wgtn, 2012.)

Touchlines: An Anthology of Rugby Poetry can be purchased from the NZ Sports Hall of Fame, Dunedin. Email: info@nzhalloffame.co.nz

This week’s guest editor Mark Pirie is an internationally published New Zealand poet, anthologist, literary critic, writer and publisher who is currently researching a book on his grandfather Tom Lawn’s rugby career. In 2010 he edited and published 'A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009'  http://tinglingcatch.blogspot.co.nz

The anthology of New Zealand science fiction poetry (IP Brisbane) which he co-edited with Tim Jones won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work 2010. As a publisher (HeadworX) and author Mark has over 100 titles listed in the National Library of New Zealand. His website is www.markpirie.com and he co-organises and updates the 5000+ catalogue of PANZA, the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa. 

Remember to check out our sidebar to see which Tuesday Poems have been posted by our 30-strong team of poets.

3rd Birthday Communal ‘Jazz’ Poem: Scratch

1.
When looking back
choose your mirror well

2.
This memory, I know, is less like a recording
and more like Chinese whispers
but still I replay it

3.
Who scratched, who scratched,
who scratched this surface?
Shud-shudder-shuddering
lined rep-rep
                    repetition

4.
Is it you, Lily, hiding again
behind white linen corners of the laundry line?
Your oboe voice criss-crossing time
then snapping back on the wind

5.
Her voice stumbles into silence
glasses the sea's surface to mirror
the bright burning Sumatran tiger sky
stretching, snapping, scratching and
reeling out the spool of memory

6.
Yes! It is you, Tiger Lily, it is you!
Come, reach for me, speak to me in tongues of memories
unlatch the thunder from this silence
unwind me, remind me when it was

7.
catch the
(whispers)
it's time to
(latch the window)
catch the 
      grab it! the tail     oh boy

8.
Miss Lily's a teaser
Miss Lily's a cat
don't try to appease her
she'll disappear fast —

9.
boy in the dark, when Lily come back
from powdering her nose and
brushing whiskers,
take his chance. Lily purr smoke in his face
inside the last dance

10.
follow the glance, the shoulder
the line of breath held in and out
we've only scratched the surface
of what this dance could unwind

11.
there's the trombone girl
kicking through a drift of notes,
Death dancing with the boy
in black while way out the back
they're dealing in words - Miss Lily
doubles down.

12.
Breathe, Lily, the air is rising
the meter fresh out of ivory notes
- tickled -
and so easily plucked.
Tonight we go hunting.

13.
Oh boy. Inside the last dance
dealing, doubling, doubting
and hunting for what?
Always more, Lily. Always more
smooth moves, music, conundrums,
exclamations

14.
Who can catch this cat?
Whispers in the mirror,
whiskers in the window,
a smoking piano, a shuddering key?

15.
(piano) tip toe (forte) oh! Bow
across whiskery strings.
Trombone conundrum
metronome roams
memory ticks back the days.

16.
Little stalker, true lily, night
bloomer, what will you bring me?
Lily among the thorns, lovely
looking-glass nectary, roaming
the corners, Liliales, O Lilium,
I'll catch, catch, catch you yet.

17.
Late night bloomer. Hunter stalker.
Sinuosity's slick slink sliding. His mirrored length
a memory's pause.                             Zapateado
flick of flamenco, heels' percussion.       Gracias!
Miss Lily a cat?  No way.

18.
Trombone slides towards silence.
Passing chords diminish
forte to piano.
Twitch of a departing tail: one final
brush across the drums.


1. Harvey Molloy  2. Helen Rickerby 3. P.S. Cottier 4. Michelle Elvy 5. Andrew M. Bell 6. Keith Westwater 7. Mary McCallum 8. T. Clear 9. Rethabile Masilo 10. Renee Liang 11. Catherine Bateson 12. Alicia Ponder 13. Claire Beynon 14. Janis Freegard 15. Saradha Koirala 16. Eileen Moeller 17. Helen Mckinlay 18. Tim Jones

Tuesday Poets who sat this one out: Zireaux, Sarah Jane Barnett, Booksellers NZ (Emma M), Helen Lowe, Kathleen Jones, Cathryn Fitchett, Jennifer Compton, Leah McMenamin, Elizabeth Welsh, Robert Sullivan, Belinda Hollyer.

Tuesday Poem is three years old and over the three weeks starting April 2, 18 of our 30 poets, day at a time, from NZ to Australia to the US and France, contributed a single stanza to our communal 'jazz' birthday poem. And the whole extraordinary poem is here now, posted Tuesday April 23 2013.

Why jazz? We wanted something that unfolded like jazz does - an emphasis on repetition and rhythm, and the winding and unwinding of lines and phrases and words. With each poet writing a separate stanza, we needed something to pull the long poem together, and the language and rhythms do just that. It's hard to believe this poem isn't from a single brain.

Delicious things happen in the poem - the sinuous and playful winding and rewinding of the whispering and whiskers of Lily who may or may not be a woman or a cat or a plant... oh memory/metronome who could forget that teasing/tail, the scratch/catches and oh boy, the oboe ... and more, so much more. Such delights! Such fun! Just read the comments to see how much we, and our readers, enjoyed it. We're going to miss the daily excitement.

'Our best collaboration yet', says Janis, and she's right. There were so few technical problems - the stanzas appearing silently, magically, day after day - and each Tuesday Poet who took part, threw in such energy and talent the blog was bursting with it. Still is. Thank you too to the Tuesday Poets who couldn't contribute this time but watched on supportively. We feel privileged to be part of this amazing global poetry community. Finally, thank you to our regular blog visitors and supporters, and to those who simply land here and take the time to read.

More details on how we made the poem here.

Finally, NZ lost a fine poet this week when Sarah Broom passed away after a long illness aged 40. We were privileged to host one of Sarah's poems on the TP hub over summer, 'All my life.' And her work has appeared on other TP poet sites. Helen Lowe's TP post this week remembers Sarah, and so does Michelle Elvy's. We offer our condolences to her family and friends.

Now, do please read the Tuesday Poems popping up in our sidebar throughout Tuesday - where it says 'Tuesday Poem' at a poet link, click and read. Such riches as we head into our fourth year. Mary & Claire.

Two Poems by Wang Ping

from The River in Our Blood 

A Sonnet Crown

I

The geese are painting the sky with a V, my lord

The Mississippi laughs with its white teeth

How fast winter flees from the lowland, my lord

And how’s the highland where songs forever seethe?

At the confluence, I sing of the prairie, my lord

My joy and sorrow soar with rolling spring

Its thunder half bird, half mermaid, my lord

No poppies on hills, only ghost warriors’ calling

Today is chunfeng—share of spring, my lord

Two spirits, one on phoenix wings, one on lion’s seat

Across the sea, kindred spirits, my lord

Prayer through breaths, laughing children on the street

Let’s open our gift, acorn of small things

Let river move us without wants or needs  

IV

Moon on river’s bend, long day of mayfly

No sound or word from Damascus’ desert

Limestone ridge along Silk Route—face of Dubai

Crumbles—wind in hyssop, thyme, wild mustard

This flayed land, so raw, parched, only seeds fly

To take roots in the conquerors’ footprints

Dusk weeps like sand through hands, pulling first cry

From Azan’s throat, a black slave as god’s imprints

Home under the ash cloud, darting swallows

From hospitals, roses on broken walls

Tanks at the border. Shadows at ghettos

Remorse in maze—the last muezzin calls

The Dervish whirls, palm to earth, palm to sky

Who gave us the hand to feel your sublime?

Editor: Eileen Moeller

In Wang Ping’s poems, we experience two cultures dancing -- between widely different languages and traditions, between history and the present, tradition and iconoclasm, toughness and tenderness, the political and the intimate. 

Born in Shanghai, Wang Ping moved to the U.S. in 1986. And in the midst of life's shifts and turns, one thing remained constant: a river flowing through the landscape, whether it be in her homeland, or here in the U.S. -- a river that also flows through her recent work on a crown of sonnets, titled “The River In Our Blood”, from which I have chosen the two poems above. 

Though it focuses on the Mississippi, the first poem (I) is driven by image and symbol, to celebrate chunfeng, the Spring Equinox, connecting the scene and the speaker back to China in happy ritual.

The second poem (IV) explores the brevity of life along the Silk Route, past Damascus and Dubai, pulling the reader along to witness scenes of war and destruction. Yet despite this, the call to prayer survives, the Dervish continues to whirl, the belief in God’s goodness is palpable. Clearly, the great sense of unity in these poems is the result of Wang Ping’s deep involvement in the "Kinship of Rivers" project.

Her two earlier books, Of Flesh & Spirit and The Magic Whip, focus more intently on what divides the bi-cultural self, how language and family heritage shape the psyche, what it means to be a Chinese-American woman bearing up under the weight of generations of brutal treatment. In the poem "The Splintered Eye", she tells us, "There's a sleeping wolf in everyone's head." She deconstructs this assertion in poems that move from image to narrative and back, poems about foot binding, about the drowning of newborn girls, about girls being given names that reflect disappointment.

She also writes of her American experiences with Chinatown, with stereotyping, with love, sex, and motherhood, about war, consumerism, and the victims of September 11th. The world is a brutal place.  
In the first book, even the river is suspect. A haiku titled "A FLASH OF THOUGHT FROM THE RIVER" tells us "I really think I have nothing to do with humans / though I occasionally drown a few / to remind them of their origin." In this fierce and muscular work, one can see the poet risking all to face down and tell of her origins, and to then be able to turn, as the sonnet does, and say, "Let's open our gift, acorn of small things."  

Wang Ping has many publications, and has been the recipient of many awards in the U.S. She is on the faculty of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. You can visit her website at  www.wangping.com and the Kinship of Rivers project at www.kinshipofrivers.org

                   

This week's editor is Eileen Moeller, who is from the U.S. Eileen currently lives in Philadelphia, PA with her husband Charles, who is a practicing psychologist. Her poems have appeared in Ars Medica, Philadelphia Stories, Paterson Poetry Review, Melusine, and SugarMule. You also can access her poetry blog at http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com

Once you've read the hub poem try the riches in our sidebar.