poems

One could argue that getting behind in your poetic commitments falls into the category of good problems to have.  As mentioned earlier, I find that my lyrical confidence is decreasing rather than increasing at the moment, but there is only one solution to this and it is the opposite of not-writing.

I am struck by how my theme is largely stories about my family and my ancestors.  Against the big themes I keep offering the small, or rather, intertwining the small with the big.  I’m not sure why, but don’t suppose interpretation is particularly my responsibility in this regard.  However, it may worth mentioning, with regard to what appears below, that I find images and stories from Pompeii too upsetting to consider directly.  It’s a particular quirk of mine that has persisted since childhood, when it was part of a more generalised terror of disasters.  (Gosh but I was easy to wind up in those days.  I must remember that when I come to write on Giovanni’s more recent post about starting school.)

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I have been enjoying Cilla McQueen’s “publication in many parts”, Serial, here at the New Zealand Poet Laureate website.  I decided to try my hand at a homage to that style in response to Giovanni’s two posts on Haiti and Avatar.

I should note, too, that for someone who makes at least part of her living teaching Film Studies, my relationship to the cinema is surprisingly ambivalent. The scale of the spectacle in a movie theatre presents a physical barrier for me. Since my mid-teens I have been affected by irregular bouts of nausea and vertigo watching films of all kinds on the big screen, which, now compounded by pregnancy, makes cinema-viewing at present more or less impossible. So Avatar remains a no-go zone for me, which is why, in part, I’ve tried to come at Giovanni’s discussion from a rather more obtuse angle.

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In response to this post at Bat Bean Beam.

The fibreglass butterflies ascend
the front of the unit. There is a

flower-shaped windmill with a
happy face, planted in the ground

below. It rattles when it spins.
A small ceramic gardener displays

a length of butt-crack; china
flowers and toadstools inter-

mingle with the pansies and
lobelia. Once I saw a golliwog.

Hand-painted pins and badges stick
to the side of the letterbox like

fungus, though the back flat’s
portion is completely bare.

Tourists draw up in rental cars
sometimes, mostly visitors from

Asia. They take pleased photos,
stare at the proliferation. You

can imagine the owners’ hands by
night, extending through the front

window, affixing objects man- and
home-made with all the happy slap

and pop of a kitchen fridge-magnet,
a plastic suction-cup.

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In response to this post at Bat Bean Beam.

Draw out now
and bear unto
the governor of the feast –

What I’ve got
you got to get
and put it in you –

you! Take some time
to love me.

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For the first time since I began contributing to Giovanni’s site, I have struggled to make my contributions.  To the owner himself, I gave this account:

I am learning grim things about from where my writerly inspiration comes. Four or five weeks of quiet times and really busy work was like being in the writer’s desert. Then today one of my dogs had an emergency trip to the vet and suddenly I’m 2010’s Philip Sydney. Fear and loathing, it seems, fear and loathing.

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In answer to this post.

I’m going down to Alphabet Street
for the which, with sounds of woe,
some child, born in a marvellous year
will learn, Computer Says No.

Just you know why, why you and I
thank my beauty. I am fair that shoot
the most beautiful fraud in the world,
to tear out this charnel’s darnel-root.

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In answer to this post.

Penelope at the door
or Penelope on the shore

knows no-one’s coming home.
The house is over-run with

idiot suitors; the slaves
build coracles that each day

sail further and further out.
The birds of prey nest low;

their eyes measure her for
carrion. Carry on. No-one’s

coming home, but no-one. No-
one’s coming home.

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Colloquy with this post.

Beautiful women, falling from heaven
hope not to land in an aisle with a spill.
The blockish heels on their work-shoes
aren’t enough to stop an awkward slide,
and the metal-edged shelves offer no support.

Beautiful women, falling from heaven
get bruised knees when they land at low tide.
It’s fortunate that their high-riding skirts
don’t usually come too close to sea-level,
since beauty abhors a darkened hem.

Beautiful women, falling from heaven,
rattle their keys and their consciences at dusk.
They need hairspray, insoles, needle and thread;
they’re sewing themselves a safety net,
and need to get off the metro before the shops close.

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