Badly stuffed animals

I knew these people who loved their pets so much

they had them put to sleep and stuffed

and mounted in the living room

because they couldn’t bear

the grief of losing openly.

Filled out with wood and wool

articulated with wire

eye sockets packed with glass:

death’s only a pause.

They said don’t be scared

it’s something to share, something

for the visitors.

I knew people who stuffed their pets so badly

that pictures of their loved ones

went up on a website called Badly Stuffed Animals

a place where pets became fixed stars.

Cast in the stone

of their own skin and hair; there the animals were home

in their wrong eyes

and buckled teeth

and skin with old air rumpling through;

with nonsense postures to have and hold them.

There was a farming family I knew, had

a blonde fawn in their living room. There it lay

with legs curled under its body.

Like a houseplant it had been placed

at the foot of the piano that was never opened.

There was something funny about that.

A fawn with a piano for a mother.

The farming family laughed about that.

I once had a lamb. Its mother had died

and the farmer had too many orphans already. Such is life

when life comes too early.

I kept him in the shed. Gave him a cardboard box, stuffed

with towels for a bed. I fed him from a bottle

and visited him at night when I worried

he was scared. When the light came on he ran to me.

His bleating was broken and ridiculous. Of all the lambs

to need a mother! When he grew up the farmer

took him away. You weren’t supposed to be sad

because lambs are for eating

so I sat on the swing and forgot him.

But I cried when we buried our dog in the garden.

Being dead is too easy. You have to remake it.

This owl has a self-conscious look.

That leopard sinks its teeth into a monkey’s head.

That stag’s head lolls its tongue. This little donkey

has a Dali crutch

in place of front legs. That chimpanzee wears

long strings of white pearls

and clutches a sculpture of Jesus on the cross.

Their nonsense postures have and hold them.

Ashleigh Young is an expat writer and editor living in London. Her work has appeared in Booknotes, Turbine, Sport, and Landfall. She is currently finishing a collection of poems. 2009 was a big year for Ashleigh, she was the winner of the 2009 Landfall Essay Competition and the recipient of the 2009 Adam Foundation Award in Creative Writing. Ashleigh also appears in Best NZ Poems 2009 and this year in The Best of Best New Zealand Poems. This is far from overnight success though, Ashleigh has been working hard behind the scenes and has been appearing in print since 2003 with a poem in Sport. She's been a regular contributor to Booknotes since 2005. Ashleigh started blogging from London, it a great, curious, read.

This is a new poem from her forthcoming book of poetry, it's classic Ashleigh - beautiful and disturbing and awkward all at the same time. Ashleigh had a poem here last year too.

For more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem hub.

	A Beggar in Rome

From ISOLA BELLA

When I arrived at the KM Room in the Villa Isola Bella, I began – without having intended it – to keep a poetry diary. I suppose the impulse was to preserve the more fleeting impressions of my time here – the things I knew I’d soon forget, in other words – and thereby keep hold of the texture of this unusual and luxurious period in life, one with no work commitments, a stimulating location, and abundant writing time. I chose poetry because I didn’t want a completely shapeless record of things done and seen – and because I needed some light relief from wrestling with prose, an activity distressingly short on instant gratification. And yet I can’t call the diary ‘poetry’ in the usual sense - perhaps it’s what the reviewer Hugh Roberts somewhat unkindly called the ‘poem as blog’, or life with line breaks. The difference is that it has so far (a few outings excepted) been a private, not a public activity.

The diary starts at ant level (literally) and works on up through personal events, news of the day and seasonal changes to more nebulous mutterings about writing and life. It’s fed by the local newspaper, Nice-Matin (Menton edition, a bit like the North Shore Times), BBC News and the English channel of France 24, where Radio New Zealand correspondent Lyse Doucet has a day job. More often, though, the things I see and hear, or think about, as I walk to and from the KM Room (podcasts included) find their way in. Web browsing doesn’t come into it, because the writing room is not connected.

 Insofar as this is not writing for an audience, it’s an entirely pleasurable activity, a bit like lying in the beach lounger when I should be knocking the lounge suite together. In contrast to my usual procedure, I try to avoid revising anything after the day on which it was written, for fear that the diary will displace The Book, the thing I’m officially here to do. It can be relaxed, light-hearted – it needn’t be polished, or ‘complete’ - what a relief! And yet, like walking to and from the KM Room, it feels like good exercise. Exercise in simply noticing and recording, in trying out different voices, and thinking about the things that don’t normally find their way into The Poems.

 As time has gone by, more and more prose has crept in, and in some ways the diary has begun to resemble the reading journals kept by the MA students at the IIML, which have always given me a lot of reading pleasure. I use it as a warm-up for The Book, and sometimes – I have to admit – as avoidance strategy. In fact, it’s a little addictive, so it’s probably good that it will come to a natural end on my return to New Zealand. Before I left in March, I met the Fulbright scholar and poet Lesley Wheeler. She said that, for her, writing was most enjoyable or productive when done in time stolen from other things. That idea didn’t connect with me at the time, but now I know exactly what she meant.

 I recently spent a few days in Rome, doing the usual touristy things, and got back to hear that the Institute of Modern Letters’ Writers on Mondays programme had briefly given me what one Twitter wit called a ‘Messianic upgrade’: for a few days, or hours, I was Christ Price. Did this happen while I was in St Peter’s, perhaps in the very moment I was standing in that shaft of sunlight falling from heaven? I suspect the erratic gods of Spellcheck, the curse and blessing of editors everywhere, are to blame for my elevation, which has occurred once or twice before — but it’s nice to think God might have a sense of humour about the unbeliever in His holy city, paying her respects to the gods of Romantic poetry and merely goggling at the accumulated wealth of popes. Here’s the entry (not A Poem, remember) written immediately after returning ‘home’ to Menton. The poetry gods, too, come in for some irreverence.

St Peter's Basilica

23 June

Roma

Sheats and Kelley,

the narrow room and bed

from which Sheats could view

the Spanish Steps where

now the flower-sellers push romance

at cleavage on legs.

Beefy gladiators (fake) and

straight-backed Swiss beefcake

with beribboned thighs,

defenders of the gates

of wealth while outside

beggars take the prostrate

posture of the faithful.

Around one corner

of the palazzo hides

Innocent X, original

screaming pope; around

another Brueghel’s villagers

skate on their frozen lake.

The emperor’s loot is

subsidised by tourist euros,

Rome’s an overheated 31°

while Berlusconi fiddles and

across the way the Greeks

are threatening to topple

the whole edifice with their

bolted paper horses,

vertical columns making

sudden horizontals, as once

the marble, bronze and

travertine fell or were pushed

and left lying on the ground

to be quarried by the latest

wave of arrivistes in search

of a fast turnaround.

The actual bed was burned.

This one bears some

resemblance, if you believe

in educated guesswork:

all that remains of what

little remains.  We’re told

his piano was saved. That’s

gone too, but the poet’s pencil sketch

of the urn is on display.

Chris Price

Chris is currently in Menton as the 2011 Katherine Mansfield Fellow, she is writing at the Villa Isola Bella, where Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote in 1919 and 1920. These photos are from her trip to Rome. 

Spring

Is coming. This is a poem about spring,

which is too much. Everything is too much.

This is a poem about everything.

I ruin everything I touch.

I ruin the jonquils, the daffodils.

I ruin the I love you.

I ruin the blue remembered hills.

The apple-trees vomit blossom. I ruin the morning dew.

Mine is a peculiar badness.

You are reduced to the smell of your hair.

Mine is a peculiar sadness.

You are almost not quite there.

Which is to say, I am terrified.

Meanwhile the grassy goodness, the lengthening day.

It’s not as if you died.

You come closer and closer away.

Tim’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Bravado, Dreamcatcher, Landfall, New Zealand Books, the Listener, North & South, Reconfigurations, Sport, Takahe, Turbine and Best of the Best New Zealand Poems. A couple of poems are forthcoming in New Zealand Books and an anthology of villanelles. His collection, A House on Fire (Steele-Roberts), was published in 2009.

This poem was originally published in Sport 39. I love that this traditional form holds untraditional content. 

For more Tuesday Poems vist the hub. 

A page from a shared journal project by Helen Lehndorf.

Okay, so the image above is intended to inspire you, it gives you a taste of what a journal can be. Do you journal? I am an erratic journaler but I love the shared project because it means get a suprise in the mail and a reason to do a page (which reminds me I must do one!).

I hope the winner of the Journal and Pencil give-away has fun with their gift. Without further ado, the winner of the prize pack, drawn by a random number generator is...

Mary!

Congratulations!

Picture via Old Chum.

Sometime last year my dad and I were sitting in the backyard of my old flat in Wellington, drinking cups of tea and sharing our traditional “parents visiting” silence, when suddenly the chair he was sitting on just disintegrated. The wood crumbled, the fabric gave way, and Dad folded up and fell through a hole in the middle where the seat had been. “My god,” he said. He hauled himself out of the hole, a bit breathless, and peered at the pieces of rotten, porous wood and torn vinyl lying on the grass. “Look at that! It’s just completely … gone.” After I’d finished laughing, I wanted to write it down. Not the most sympathetic response, I know. Well, every writer has a chip of ice in his heart.

Here’s my conundrum – I’ll see or hear something I find interesting or peculiar or funny, and I’ll think that the thing holds great creative promise. “Whooee, I’m definitely going to talk about that,” I say to myself. The hands of my brain are rubbing together at this point. Then after a few gung-ho attempts, looking for a home for the thing in the form of a poem or essay or article, I flatline. The bright shard has no apparent connection with anything else. I can’t find any meaning to couch it inside. (As you can see, I’ve cunningly solved the problem of the homeless scene of my dad busting through the chair – it lives on this blog now, so it’s Helen’s responsibility. You’ve got to give it away …)

I’ve been thinking about a book called Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson in which the central argument is that “Eureka!” moments – moments of dazzling, goggle-eyed clarity – do not happen. Johnson argues that you have to stalk those moments, bait them, wire-tap them. I don’t think he’s referring to disintegrating chairs when he talks about the spark: he’s referring more to a sense of connection; the feeling that you’ve discovered the links between seemingly disparate elements, or that you’ve realised the wider significance of a moment. And the spark is also about the excitement of possibility. No matter how quiet and routine a day, there’s always the possibility that a hole in the middle is about to open up and you’ll fall through (see how the chair comes back to resonate there?). You have to keep the proverbial eye out.

Johnson has a basic (I was going to say “helpful”, but one writer’s helpful is another writer’s hamstring) strategy for courting the spark of connection. “I have this Microsoft Word document that I call my spark file,” he says. “I’ve been keeping it for about six years now, and that’s where I write down every little half-baked, quarter-baked idea I have for anything … I spend no time organising it, but I try to reread the entire document once every couple of months.” An idea that once seemed cryptic or lacklustre may unexpectedly gleam weeks or months or years later: “because it connects to something else – and suddenly, it’s ready.”

Incredible: “Suddenly, it’s ready”! Almost without registering it, the simple act of collection becomes an act of creation. In the same way that big discussions and debates and ideas tend to come out of great cities – anywhere a multitude of connections are available – so too does story out of a network of fragments. Maybe the close proximity of elements allows us to better comprehend the possibilities. Johnson has a tidy way of putting it: “Chance favours the connected mind.”

The man makes sense! And in some ways I’ve been keeping an ad-hoc spark file for years, too – in notebooks, ancient Word documents, bookmarked pages, emails – and some of the connections I’ve made from these have become pieces of work that, for a time at least, feel meaningful.

But still, the anomalies haunt me.

The other day my brother JP told me about this old song lyric he’d come across. “Do you expect me to just quote King Lear/ While you hit me with your deck-chair?” When I read those lines I really felt like writing something. I thought about what might’ve led to that deranged moment of conflict. The old high-school copy of King Lear strewn on the floor. The expression on the singer’s face when his lover picked up the chair. The deck chair folded up for maximum impact. And I thought about the 18-year-old who wrote those lines. Maybe I should be worried that I found this scene of domestic violence so intriguing. I sat down a wrote a few lines that turned into a sort of terrible poem. In short, nothing good came of it. Many other lines and scenes and characters have failed to connect, have failed to become whole. They’re the lost souls of our manuscripts, trapped in some kind of purgatory.

You could call these things part of “the garbage heap” of experience, as Natalie Goldberg puts it in good old Writing Down the Bones (the garbage heap she describes is really more of a compost pile, where the eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and “old steak bones of our minds” become fertile soil), but I think more than enough analogies have been drawn between composting and experience and the fertile soil coming out of the fingertips etcetera.

Not everything we experience can be part of our work. Some things are homeless. They flicker in and out of view but do not light up what surrounds them. Maybe the trick is to reflect this understanding in what we write – to acknowledge the broken chairs but to not, every time, attempt to rebuild them. (The one my dad fell through – a beloved old red chair from the basement of an early Wellington flat – was irreparable.)

You can read more about Ashleigh here. She is an amazing poet and essayist and now has her own blog. She has appeared here before with a Tuesday Poem.

B tries to tell me something and I am only half listening

Well, it was just that I held him under.

I found him at the Sanctuary,

tripping about, clumsy, poisoned

most like. And I took him and

took him home and held him under

the water. Only I didn’t know he would struggle

and his little heart. I thought it was

the best thing for it, wrapped my hand

around his body and held him below

the surface of the water. I didn’t know

that under the pad of my thumb,

I would feel his heart drumming,

little heart, like fingers against glass.

Maria McMillan lives, works and writes in Wellington. She mostly writes poetry, press releases about things that make her grumpy, and overly verbose Facebook updates about the cuteness of her two small daughters. Her work will next appear in issue 3 of Enamel, due out in a month or two.

When I heard Maria read this poem at an open mic session I couldn't stop thinking about it. I had to see it in writing so I begged her for it. Maria really should be getting more attention, I hope we see a chapbook from her soon.

You can read more Tuesday Poems at the hub, including another by Maria.

As a wee thank you to you all for your support I'm doing a give-away this week.

Leave a comment here or on my facebook page and you'll go in the draw to win this lovely Lotta Jansdotter journal and some cool Penguin pencils.

Open to NZ and international readers, 'cause I love you all :)

Entries close June 30th.

I have some excellent news. My book Graft, which I wrote during my MA year at IIML and spent last year editing, has been accepted for publication by VUP. It will be published some time in 2012. It's an unusual situation as I also work at VUP, it had the potential to be very awkward! To make things a little less tense my book was read by an external reader and I'm very happy they liked it.

Why did I call it Graft? To graft something is to cut in and fix two things together, like tree branches, to grow something new or heal (as with skin). The word graft originates from the Old Norse groftr, meaning to dig, and is also linked with the verb grave, an ancient Germanic one also meaning to dig. The poems in Graft attempt to bring things together – ideas, cultures and people, sometimes to heal. There are unlikely pairs: science and magical thinking, fact and fiction, myth and history. Sometimes there are more predictable pairings with less predictable outcomes - mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, parents and children. They dig away at things, trying to find a truth or an answer or a lost person. What we find is often not what we are looking for.

To be honest I've swung through a range of emotions since getting the news. Firstly fist pumping the air and yelling 'Yes!', then a quiet Zen calm, then an attack of the 'Oh no, everyone will find out I'm a fraud and can't really write!'. I guess I stepped out of my comfort zone. Right now I'm feeling more level-headed, the sense of limbo I've felt all year is lifting and I'm thinking about the next project.

So thank you all my lovely readers. Just by stopping by and reading what I have to say you lift me up and keep me going with my writing, even on those days when I'm not sure what I'm doing or why I'm doing it.

Nihon: What God Would Make This?

The God of the Darker Jersey

sidles up to the expressway.

Present, too, the God of White

which is the new black.

Firemen slash orange suits through a delicate

filigree of ripped-out confetti:

This is the God of Unmarriage.

Meanwhile, the God of Simile makes a salaryman say to reporters:

“The skyscraper was flapping like a sheet in the wind.”

•

There is a God this day,

but it isn’t the God of Man With Brown Hands Unclasped,

spread on green trousers; & an upturned, empty

pot plant beside his work boot.

No God for the man who wears the Japan sun in his scarf.

No, that is the God of Photographers,

who paints in the red detail

to finish off

the photograph

as the man kneels beside his house

(and his mother is still inside).

Johanna lives in Palmerston North with her partner and son, Lennox. She has published two books, A long girl ago (VUP) (Shortlisted for the 2008 Montana New Zealand Book Awards) and Oh My God I'm Flying (Pemmican Press). She teaches creative writing at Massey University and College Street Normal School. It's been a year since I last had Jo on the blog and it's great to have her back!

You can see more Tuesday Poems at the main hub.

Money Shot by Rae Armantrout (2011 Weslayan University Press)

When I emailed Rae Armantrout in 2009, desperate to get a copy of her ‘Early Poems’, a book of collected works that was supposed to have been published several months earlier, she seemed gloomy on the other end of the email. She told me the book was unlikely to ever be published. I later found out the publisher was having financial difficulties in what seemed like a depressing symptom of the economic crisis that had just hit. She said she had another collection about to come out through Weslayan University Press. That was ‘Versed’ which I bought and reviewed on my blog shortly after. Six months later it had won the Pulitzer Prize and Rae Armantrout was now a household name, well, in the household of poetry anyway.

Two years on, the book of ‘Early Poems’ still hasn’t arrived and presumably the publishing house has disappeared as so many other businesses around the world have. And since ‘Versed’ America has changed, its economic and moral power has begun to waiver, the dollar has plunged, the country is in heavy debt to China and the wars in the Middle East have become increasingly drawn out and pointless.

In this time Armantrout’s poems have become unsettled and raw, there is an immediacy and frankness that perhaps wasn’t there before. I know some people will be scoff at the word ‘frankness’ to describe Armantrout’s work, which is fair enough in many ways, but it is frankness of emotion I get from Armantrout and that is what lifts her work out of the vast lake of experimental American poetry, the poems’ ability to wear their hearts on their sleeves, yet still remain mysterious and elusive. I guess you could say, they have their sleeves on their hearts.

Her new collection, Money Shot, deals with America’s issues not so much head on like a simple argument for or against, but discreetly, around the back, unable to ‘say’ what they mean other than through the appropriation of language and the brief moments that make up people’s lives. These are poems of the times, but not necessarily about the times.

The lines and stanzas in Money Shot are curt and get to the meat early, as Armantrout is well known for. They mix the language of science, market forces and occasionally, pornography, but it is the human moments that interest the most, they are the cogs that make the parts move in these tiny poetry machines. Armantrout seems aware of this and how easily a poem about finance, science and performance sex can become cold and detached. This is something she seems intent on proving as if to show the economists (and perhaps the pornographers) of the world that people are the valuable ingredient they have overlooked.

The second section of the title poem deals with this expertly as well as her ongoing theme of the things unsaid:

[…]

I’m on a crowded ship

And I’ve been served the wrong breakfast.

This small mound

of soggy dough

is not what I ordered.

“Why don’t you say

What you mean?”

Why don’t I?

Often the poems are like tightly wound springs ready to explode. There is a conscious pressure and feeling of events closing in, a prompt for action, like in Prayers:

[…]

The pressure

in my back

rising to be recognized

as pain.

The blue triangles

on the rug

repeating.

Coming up

a discussion

on the uses

of torture.

The fear

that all this

will end.

The fear

that it won’t.

And there is often a downward gaze, away from these larger issues, a focus on the menial patterns of life, of luxury. The ‘blue triangles’ on a rug and later in Exact, the command to:

quick, before you die,

describe

the exact shade

of this hotel carpet.

In these patterns and the small overlooked details Armantrout seems to be asking questions, not so much of the world or the reader, but of her poems. She wants to understand and the poems are her fingerprint analyses, her DNA tests, the methods find the methods that got us here. And sometimes in the echo of a word or the half-fingerprint of a phrase she manages to say exactly what she means.

Bill Nelson is a poet and blogger. He grew up in South Auckland and now lives in Wellington. He won the Biggs Poetry Prize for best MA poetry portfolio at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009. His writing has appeared in Hue & Cry, Sport, The Lumière Reader, Blackmail Press, 4th Floor and Swamp. He has also guest edited at Turbine and Blackmail Press. You can read his poem 'Giant Steps' on the Best New Zealand Poems 2010 website.