Tuesday Poem: Editing the hub!

Today I have the pleasure of editing the Tuesday Poem Hub, so won’t be posting a poem on my blog. Instead here are links to three female Tuesday Poem editors who I read each week:

Elizabeth Welsh, poet and editor in London, especially check out her flash fiction, Mary McCallum, co-creator of Tuesday Poem, and who always gives a generous reading of other poet’s work, and Jennifer Compton, whose approach to life is an inspiration.

[An unrelated but interesting image of Braille wallpaper in Barcelona, 2010.]

SWAMP Issue #10 – Gravity

Issue #10 of SWAMP has just come out. I had the pleasure of editing the poetry section with Malcolm St Hill, and have joined the editorial team on an ongoing basis. One of my favourite poems of the issue is “Landslide” by Craig Stanton. I find it both tender and controlled.

Submissions are now open for Issues 11 and 12 of SWAMP. The theme for Issue 11 is “Integration/Disintegration” and for Issue 12 “Pollination”. Deadlines will close for Issue 11 on June 29 and for Issue 12 on September 28. Anyway, check it out!

Tuesday Craft: Simple scarf and fabric basket

I can’t believe this is my first craft post of 2012. Then again, it hasn’t been a big crafting year with Sam and a PhD to keep me busy. This scarf  was actually knitted last year as a Christmas present for my dad. The pattern is called ‘manly scarf,’ but I think it could be worn by both men and women. I knitted it with a small needle size so the scarf ended up using a lot more wool than I thought it would (four balls). I say this because I managed to buy some of the wool on sale, but when I ran out I had to pay full price. So if you want to knit the scarf, get four balls up front. The scarf needed some blocking at the end to make it symmetrical and flat, but that quite an interesting process. The pattern is a simple two row repeat, and free from Shifting Stitches.

My second project is a fabric basket for Sam’s toys. I made it during May, 2012. Unfortunately the photograph doesn’t show the linen base (the same fabric as the handles), which I think is the best part. The pattern comes from Pink Penguin, although for my basket I scaled it up by 250% as I needed it to be large. If I was going to make this basket for myself or as a gift, I’d skip the patchwork (it was fiddly and time consuming), and just use a patterned fabric. The look would be a little more sophisticated.

Tuesday Poem: “The buffalo grass turned purple” by Malcolm St Hill

The buffalo grass turned purple

The buffalo grass turned purple
and I’d almost thought
it wasn’t going to happen
this year.
But in the peak of winter
it always does.
And I wonder about
the number of cycles
I’m yet to see.

And each morning
(some time after this),
the unfurling of flags.
New leaves on the sticks
of Chinese Tallow trees
revealing their increments of green.
Marking another season and
the slow march
of the inevitable.

There’s a mechanical certainty to the seasons
like the swinging of a pendulum
pumping out
the phases of the moon.
I’ve missed the slow extrusion
of my fish-scale fingernails.
They feel too long
and I clip them.
The white arc of the trimmings
like the crescent moon.
They flick into the lawn
and my fingertips are nimble again.

Malcolm is the poetry editor for the postgrad writing journal, SWAMP. He and I coedited the poetry component of SWAMP #10, which is due out pretty soon. It was a fun process. Both of us read the submissions and then made a ‘yes’ and a ‘maybe’ list, then wrangled over the final ‘yes’ list. There were some poems that we immediately agreed on, and then the rest came down to a matter of taste.

What I enjoy about Malcolm’s poem is the way it initially looks to be talking about nature in a way that externalises it from himself. The phases and cycles are happening ‘out there.’ The final stanza of the poem turns this around when the poet talks about his “fish-scale fingernails” that are “like the crescent moon.” For me, the last lines suggest that by trimming his nails away he trims away the idea that he is somehow separate from the rest of nature; he is “nimble again.”

Malcolm is a poet and prose writer who seeks, through his PhD, to divine his grandfather, one of the deified Australian Light-Horsemen. What began as a rendition through verse and morphed into creative nonfiction, still draws heavily on poetry as a means of exploring the inexplicable, a conveyor of emotional truth, and in charting responses to trauma. He is also interested in how to convey character through creative nonfiction, giving voice to those previously mute or unheard. Malcolm’s poetry has been published in the University of Newcastle’s Creative Writing Anthology, Archipelago and by Catchfire Press in Voices of the Valley.

Back to the PhD

This is what Sam looks like when he concentrates. Here he is working hard to pull the cord from my camera case. It is also what I look like when I concentrate.

At the end of April I return to my PhD studies. Sam will be spending 26 hours a week in a forward-thinking and fun childcare we found close by. After nine months spending all day together I will miss him a lot, but I can’t wait to write and read in the silence of my study. Before I went on maternity leave my supervisors and I agreed that I should focus my research thesis solely on the depiction of nature in Robert Hass’s work (I was looking at two other poet’s work before this decision). It’s a good decision. I am looking forward to spending my time with his poems.

Later this year, my first collection of poems–my other baby–will be published by Hue & Cry, so that is something amazing to look forward to.

Pledge for my book

Hue & Cry Press–the publishers that are putting out my debut collection of poetry in July–are crowd sourcing the funds to print the book using a website called PledgeMe. It’s a pretty awesome idea to get small creative projects off the ground. You can pledge however much you want from $5 to $500, and depending on the amount you get a different reward. One reward, of course, is my book of poetry - A Man Runs into a Woman.

If you’d like to make a pledge, big or small, here are the detailsIt will make my day!

Tuesday Poem: Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell

Blackberry Eating by Galway Kinnell is another poem that I’ve discovered while tutoring stage one creative writing at Massey. Kinnell is an award winning American poet whose work is intimate and resonant. Oddly, I seem to drawn to poems about blackberries, my favourite poem being Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass with its final killer line, “saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” Both poems, though, are about language, as I’d guess a lot of poems are, which is probably while I like them.

What I found interesting was, after reading Blackberry Eating in the student readings, I went to see if I could find an audio version online in order to listen to Kinnell read the poem. The version I found is different to the printed version (he has added the words “or broughamed”), so at some point there have been multiple versions of the poem. Anyway, have a listen.

Check out more Tuesday Poems at the Tuesday Poem hub.

Tuesday Poem: ‘My Father’s Love Letters’ by Yusef Komunyakaa

My Father’s Love Letters

On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams’ “Polka Dots & Moonbeams”
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter’s apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he’d look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

‘My Father’s Love Letters’ is one of the poems that my tutorial group (stage one creative writing) are studying. It is such a tender and brutal poem; it never gets old for me (also, such skill with line breaks!). The poem was sourced from the Internet Poetry Archive where you can also find out more about Yusef Komunyakaa.

Read more poetry at the Tuesday Poem hub.

Tuesday Poem: “Bamboo Poem” by Dave Snyder

“Bamboo Poem” by Dave Snyder (PDF).

Charlotte Simmonds sent me a link to Snyder’s fantastic poem that appeared in The Iowa Review. I haven’t got permission to use the poem on my blog, so I’m posting the link. The poem is seven pages long, and it earns it’s length. I’d be interested to hear other reader’s ideas about the poem. For me it is both a disenchanted love poem and a poem with environmental commentary.

For more Tuesday poems check out the hub.

Tuesday Poem: “Mowing” by Robert Frost

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound–
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

(Source: http://www.sonnets.org/frost.htm#004)

I discovered “Mowing”, a wonderful sonnet by Robert Frost, while reading an article about using field trips to help teach nature writing (for my PhD–this is not my usual bedtime reading!). In the article, the teacher taught his students how to mow a field using a scythe. Fun. The article also talks about Frost’s dedication to factual description of the countryside. For example, he names the flower in the poem as “Pale orchises”, not accidentally, but because he wanted to be true to the field that he has mown. “Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak”, he says. Robert Hass, who is the focus of my PhD thesis, is also persistent and specific in his descriptions of the natural world. I see it as a sort of homage; a purposeful naming to make others notice.

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.