TUESDAY POEM | Lighthouse & Freakish Hermit Poetry by Rebecca Loudon

Tom Beckett: What do you want from writing? What do you hope for (expect?) from a poem?

Rebecca Loudon: A map is the most basic thing I want and need from my writing. A map from yesterday to today. A map from 1968 to next week. I want a north arrow, a legend, degree tick marks, time zones, a legend, latitude and longitude lines, mountains with ridges I can trace with my fingers, blue rivers, street names, oceans and springs, lakes, Arctic definitions and national parks, highways marked in red, historical monuments and wildlife preserves, capes and points and peninsulas, fjords and inlets, archipelagos and live volcanoes, and an impossibility of folding the map back to its original configuration. And that is what I want from each poem, each story, each letter, each blog post that I write. I want a map so I can find my way back.*

Last week, doing my morning round on Facebook, I happened upon an irresistible invitation from Madame Rebecca Loudon (see above) and promptly sent off an email with a list of words in the subject line. Realising I'd more-or-less prescribed a poem to the poet (yikes!), I quickly sent off another e- replacing my ramble with one word. Lighthouse. 

Madame guarantees a one-day turnaround and - never mind the fact there are oceans and continents between us - a week later her poetry postcard arrived in my mailbox. Handwritten mail is a rare thing these days and there's something unfailingly thrilling about receiving a handmade posted object (a lighthouse!) and, too, in seeing a web-friend's handwriting for the first time. Rebecca's Lighthouse, complete with poem, musical penmanship (she's a professional violinist and poet) and four US poet stamps is a thing of rare loveliness. To top it all, it was delivered to me on my birthday - how brilliantly synchronised was that?! 

You, too, can be on the receiving end of one of these! Visit Rebecca's blog www.callingdrbombay.blogspot.com and look for the donate button on the right hand side of the page. She will write on any topic for any amount. (Either private message Rebecca through Facebook or leave a comment on her blog where you and she can exchange email addresses.). Put in a request for a poetry postcard for yourself or ask for one as a gift for a friend - they make a brilliant, surprising and totally original present. 

To learn a little more about Rebecca, her writing process and her poems, click on the links below. 

http://www.avatarreview.net/AV2/RebeccaLoudon.htm

http://www.notellbooks.org/individual_title.php?id=17_0_1_0_C

http://itsaboutimewriters.homestead.com/loudonrebecca.html

http://galatearesurrection13.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/featured-poet-rebecca-loudon.html

Rebecca Loudon 

I especially love this excerpt from a 2009 interview with Tom Beckett - 

". . . Poems begin for me from practice. When I am practicing my violin, when I am practicing drawing, when I am practicing writing. I used to write every day in notebooks. Not just poems, but anything I thought of. Then I switched to my blog to continue my daily writing practice. I believe that the mastery of any art comes from mastery of practice. It’s kind of weird. I don’t think many poets think in terms of daily practice. Maybe it’s from spending a lifetime as a musician. But we have these muscles, not even muscles—tissue, tissue memory. Practice strengthens that tissue memory. When I practice Bach every day then it’s my tissue memory that can perform Bach, not my fingers, not my brain. My brain just gets in the way of things, slows me down. It’s the same with writing. I’ve learned to have a notebook by my side pretty much all the time to jot down ideas. This is practice. This and reading.

When I rehearse, I write during rehearsal breaks. Pages and pages of fast unreadable penmanship inside my cheap notebooks. Poetry begins for me while I am reading. I am an unstoppable reader. I find poetry everywhere. In novels in cookbooks in roadmaps in billboard advertisements in history books on the back of cereal boxes. I jot ideas and words and whole lines and possible titles in my notebook. I let these simmer and later on I use these to form poems or discover that I have been slowly writing poems all along. . . " Rebecca Loudon 

(http://galatearesurrection13.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/featured-poet-rebecca-loudon.html)

*

The interview I've quoted from here is without doubt one of two most eloquent, daring, transparent and brilliant interviews I've read in ages. The other is an interview with Melissa Green conducted by SusanT. Landry on her memoir site Run to the Roundhouse, Nellie. I guarantee you'll want to read each of these interviews several times over and, too, that you will want to go on to read Melissa's luminous memoir The Linen Way, published by Rosa Mira Books. 

*

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Kathleen Jones

(Kathleen, Orchid and I met in Dunedin a couple of months ago!) with Marco Polo

by Ali Alizadeh

Please click on the quill!

TUESDAY POEM | The Dress by Martha Morseth

http://www.lizzyc.com.au/2009/09/its-all-in-the-details-the-wedding-dress-wedding-photographer-melbourne/

                                        THE DRESS

                                        You hear the door slam

                                        her car grumble away

                                        know she’ll be gone long enough

                                        to search through the shelves

                                        the box should still be there

                                        she’d never throw it away.

                                        Each year she holds the dress against her body

                                        asks, ‘Wasn’t I beautiful?’

                                        You and Isobel will say, ‘You still are, Mum,’

                                        as you watch her place her hope back in the cupboard.

                                        When you were younger

                                        Isobel was the princess-bride because she’s older

                                        you, a lady in waiting wrapped in a paisley shawl.

                                        You put your school papers aside

                                        listen for sounds of the car

                                        footsteps on the porch

                                        the house cathedral still

                                        Isobel at school

                                        on your desk the Lady of Shalott essay lies finished.

                                        You open the cupboard door as though

                                        an ancient squeak would matter

                                        place the box on your bed

                                        take off your sweater

                                        your jeans

                                        hold the brocade and pearls to your chest

                                        slide the weight over your head

                                        entwine desiccated white roses through your hair

                                        stand in front of the mirror

                                        know you are that lady

                                        seeing shadows of the world.

                                        You place the box back deep on its shelf

                                        as careful as those other times

                                        read your essay again, know it’s good

                                        hear your mother screech open the door

                                        call to you

                                        ‘Jonah, I’m home.’

                                        Martha Morseth

A few words on The Dress from Martha: "Because inspiration comes hard these days, a friend occasionally sends me a word to ignite the muse. When she suggested 'dress', I thought first of types---romantic black, religious grey, etc---and ended up remembering my old wedding dress my daughters and their friends used for play. The material was a light-weight cream brocade which led me to imagine a richer and heavier fabric of pearls and lace of earlier times that characters like the Lady of Shalott may have worn. The rest, the setting and drama, developed from that image."

Martha has a way of approaching serious, uncomfortable subjects from a wholly original vantage point, combining clarity and insight with acerbic humour and compassion. She can be sharp-tongued without showing the faintest hint of malice or unkindness.   

Born in the United States, Martha immigrated to Dunedin in 1972. She taught high school English until 1999. Her poems and stories have been published in literary and popular magazines and anthologies.  Her first collection of poems, Staying Inside the Lines, was released in 2002. Together with four other poets - Kay Mackenzie-Cooke, Jenny Powell, Sue Wootton and moi - Martha founded the Dunedin open mic series, Upfront, spotlighting women poets. Pearson has published three of her books for teenagers, two of which are short story collections - Yeah! and EDGE/a cut of unreal; and a book of one-act plays - Let’s Hear it for the Winner! Three of her one-act plays were produced for Otago University’s 2003 Gay Pride week, and a full-length play, The Trials and Tribulations of Emily, based on New Zealand’s first woman doctor, was produced in 2007. Two of her stories have been on Radio New Zealand. She has had poems published in anthologies, literary and popular journals including The Listener, Landfall, Sport, Takahe, JAAM, Poetry New Zealand, and in on-line journals as well as in her collection, Staying Inside the Lines (Inkweed 2002).

Trevor Reeves wrote of Martha's first collection Staying Inside the Lines --- "Martha is at her best when juxtaposing things with one another; events, tastes, activities, smells - a potpourri of words and images that are refreshing and delightful, yet bristling with the occasional menace. . . "

A selection of her poems and images can be found at http://www.otago.ac.nz/deepsouth/2007/index.html (University of Otago, Deep South literary journal) and additional biographical information can be found in the Writers Profiles of the NZ Society of Authors pages - www.authors.org.nz.  

(Thank you for The Dress, Martha.)

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Renee Liang

whose rich commentary accompanies the poem Where

by Paula Morris

TUESDAY POEM | The Rain Stick by Seamus Heaney

Upend the rain stick and what happens next is a music you never would have known to listen for (detail)
Charcoal & Pastel on Paper  |  CB  |  c. 2002

                                         THE RAIN STICK 

                                         Upend the rain stick and what happens next
                                         Is a music that you never would have known
                                         To listen for. In a cactus stalk
                                         Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
                                         Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
                                         Being played by water, you shake it again lightly
                                         And diminuendo runs through all its scales
                                         Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
                                         A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,
                                         Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
                                         Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
                                         Upend the stick again. What happens next
                                         Is undiminished for having happened once,
                                         Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
                                         Who cares if all the music that transpires
                                         Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
                                         You are like a rich man entering heaven
                                         Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

                                         Seamus Heaney

I unpacked this drawing last week, one of a batch I've had stored away in my little 'side room'. I'd not visited this particular image for a very long time and was surprised by the ways in which it seems - at least, to me - to speak into our current times. Seamus Heaney's Rain Stick provided the original prompt way back in the early 2000s but there's a lot more going on here than the music of that poem. It's always a mystery to me to discover the questions that make their way into our work without our knowing it and without our conscious participation (even when we think we're fully, mindfully engaged?). Behind this image, I found another drawing I'd long considered 'lost', 'gone', 'evaporated' - what was I thinking when I taped it in behind the Rain Stick? (I might post it here some time; it shows a sun dial atop a craggy outcrop - an exploration into Time after repeated readings of T. S. Eliot's Burnt Norton.) 

Life is certainly full of unexpected surprises at the moment, including - yesterday - a visit to my garden from a broody, rust-coloured hen. . . lovely! I wonder if she left an egg amongst the red-legged silver beet?  

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Harvey Molloy (his accompanying commentary is exquisite)

with the tender poem Tika

by Saradha Koirala 

                              "Goodbye takes the form of a blessing.

                              My family press tika on our foreheads

                              rupees into my palm.

                              Mountain-high through time and air

                              the red paint dries, the rice grains fall

                              leaving a trail that could surely lead us home. . . " Saradha Koirala

Upend the rain stick and what happens next is a music you never would have known to listen for

Charcoal & Pastel on Paper  |  CB  |  c. 2002

TUESDAY POEM (on a Thursday?) | THINGS by Lisel Mueller

                                       

detail from Today, a painted response to Kay MacKenzie-Cooke's poem Life's Work  |  CB 2013

                                       THINGS 

                                       What happened is, we grew lonely

                                       living among the things,

                                       so we gave the clock a face,

                                       the chair a back,

                                       the table four stout legs

                                       which will never suffer fatigue.

                                       We fitted our shoes with tongues

                                       as smooth as our own

                                       and hung tongues inside bells

                                       so we could listen

                                       to their emotional language,

                                       and because we loved graceful profiles

                                       the pitcher received a lip,

                                       the bottle a long, slender neck.

                                       Even what was beyond us

                                       was recast in our image;

                                       we gave the country a heart,

                                       the storm an eye,

                                       the cave a mouth

                                       so we could pass into safety.

                                       Lisel Mueller

(Thank you, Louisey)

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Jennifer Compton.

Jen has written a marvellous commentary to accompany A Garage

by Australian poet, Robert Gray

                                        ". . . The sun had cut a blaze

                                        off the day. The petrol pump

                                        was from the sixties— 

                                        of human scale
                                        and humanoid appearance
                                        it had a presence,

                                        seemed the attendant
                                        of our adventures on the road,
                                        the doorman of our chances. . . " 

TUESDAY POEM | Down Dulcie's Street by CB

(Down Dulcie's Street was published some years ago in a collection titled The Song of the Belly Button Man. Today's poem on the TP hub - The night I pierced my own belly button  - prompted me to post it again here. All hail to the belly button - and I do find myself wondering how many other belly button poems there might be out there?*)

                                                      DOWN DULCIE'S STREET

                                        Dulcie draws a toaster house. 

                                        Outside, a web of copper wire 

                                        weaves windows into walls, ties bricks 

                                        to fascias, laces gutters to roof 

                                        to chimney to fly-away

                                        chimney smoke. 

                                        She sends a charge 

                                        across the facade

                                        singes the white sky 

                                        blue, flashes red 

                                        onto the front doormat. 

Inside, there are no lines 

in sight. Breath settles 

into shadows, thought hovers

underfoot. There are shivers

of sound, the invisible murmur 

of magnetic fields waking. 

They shift and fold the paper 

                                                     envelope of home. 

 

                                        Dulcie walks us down her street. 

                                        Beneath the double light of moon 

                                        and sun, she draws electricity, trees

                                        and bees. Her felt-tips ripen

                                        fruit, coax flowers to open. She understands 

                                        the secrets of dragonflies, seeds germinating 

                                        in silent underground places. 

                                        You can tell 

                                        she knows ink 

                                        dreams in water. 

                                                  CB

Dulcie Kirk was in her late seventies when she drew this house and well into her eighties at the time of her passing (March 2010). I did not know her well but on the few occasions we met, was touched by her refreshing transparency and lack of compromise when it came to her art-making. She was remarkably prolific. 

This week's editor on the TP hub is Saradha Koirala
with The night I pierced my own belly button
by Maria McMillan (from her collection The Rope Walk, described by the poet as "intergenerational persona poetry sequences that feature aerial performers, 19th century ropemakers and gloomy mountain cribs.")




For this week's poetry smorgasbord, please click on the quill.