Between Yes and No by Philip Salom
Flying Island Books / Cerberus Press, 2014
Philip Salom is a poet and novelist who has, like several others of his generation, made a career straddling academia and a kind of award-and fellowship-winning literary writing (see the long list on his personal website) that has enabled him to retire in his late fifties to write full time.
Tracy Ryan, whose new and eighth full-length poetry collection we’re celebrating, Hoard is also a four-time novelist (Vamp, Jazz Tango, Sweet, Claustrophobia), a memoirist and translator. Her work has been acclaimed in multiple commendations and short-listings and has received the Times Literary Supplement Underground Poems Award; the ABR Poetry Award (2009); and twice won the West Australian Premier’s Book Awards for Poetry (2008; 2011). This collection was co-winner with Jill Jones’s Breaking the Days of the 2014 Whitmore Manuscript Prize.
From the remarkable debut collection Killing Delilah, through to the magnificent Unearthed (Fremantle Press 2014), Tracy has delivered poems of such arresting image economy and tensile musculature, that so many, no matter how strange and unsettling, assert their uncanny logic with retrospective inevitability, at times seeming to deliver in a mindflash an x-ray of the reader’s own psychic nakedness. This poetry is charged by an uncompromising feminist poetics and an intensity rare in a culture that often shopfronts irony at the expense of affective appeal and resonance. Not that irony’s ever lacking here – far from it, but it’s irony of a higher order – an irony that pulls on the soul.
This poet is a resistant phenomenologist for whom the ease of language must be made difficult; she is the concrete thinker undoing routine concretions and conflations. At its most quickening poetry hosts a space for juxtapositions, that according to the routine imaginary and reflex semantics are oxymoronic; it’s a space where paradox thrives and disrupts the purring continuum of bland; it’s language acutely re-earthed in us, releasing intensified currents through its lifelines.
Ryan returns, from her corner of the Irish diaspora in south-western Australia, to the Irish peat bog; which as a form of wetland has suffered great abuse both rhetorical and material – because of its in-betweenness: being neither quite liquid nor solid, zoned with the abject and thus, repressed, if not negated by drainage and infill, despite serving variously as placenta of birdlife, or the invaluable carbon sink. It has been treated like women’s sexuality as something to be controlled if not murderously suppressed by ruinous husbandry. More recently, wetlands in general have been reappraised thanks to the long struggles of eco-activists but not so, it seems, the peat bog, whose cultural shaming has been so frequently allied to classist and sexist reductionism – 38% of Irish bog habitat has destroyed between 1995 and 2012, according to statistics Ryan cites on p. 32.
So in her own words Ryan brings her ‘feet of drought and tinder’ back to the bogach – which in Irish and Scottish Gaelic means soft – to read there the hoard, not just of hidden artefacts brought to light, but to activate the slumbering potential of bog-speech, to catalyse our thoughts through bog’s eco-poetics. These are poetics drawn from an open, interrogative approach, an auscultation, of what the bog might have to say for itself, of its appeal, material and sentient. Of the bog I might’ve been tempted to say ‘she’, but cautioned by Ryan, from reflex gender alignments, especially where soft is concerned, I will not say she. ‘When first I saw you/spoke rock and soil to me// & like the new born/I must imprint’ (from the first long and superb poem ‘The changeling addresses Ireland’, p. 5). And here you notice the ambiguity of ‘imprint’: is it transitive or intransitive; is it in the body or on the page – the elision of the object invites us to read both. The eco-ethics are subliminally performed in these echo-poetics: through subtle seismics of word-music, through assonantal chains, the sly alliterative threads, through the orchestration of blanks and gaps, of ‘hummoch and hollow’ as speaking ‘nothings’. The slow fuse of the image-work finds ignition through the concerted effect of all these things – recovering so much that is lost through abstraction and quasi-automatic catchphrases of our instrumental or ritual transactions.
This is the concrete worker par excellence, undoing routine concretions, bringing matter back to life through poetic interruption and rearrangement. In the space of this slim, beautifully designed production by Anthony Lynch, poet-publisher of Whitmore Press, Ryan plays host to the unheard and unsaid in ‘hearsay’. What we might, by reflex, call the descent into the undifferentiated mud becomes here an exquisitely Derridean reader of difference – the bog as hoard of corporeal integrity and golden artefact. The bog is celebrated as the anaerobic preserver of life, gobbling as it does CO2 from the atmosphere.
The collection entertains an ethics of what Heidegger called co-respondance between bard and bog-hoard: the space of the poem hosts the multiple aspects of peat bog: the bog of oblivion; the bog of loss; the bog of archive; the bog of data retrieval, whether of pollen, farming, social or religious practice; the bog of secrecy; and of the secret’s betrayal; the bog of slow decay; the bog of denial, or of willed oblivion, and of mnemonic appeal.
Here the word c/leave encapsulates some of these oxymoronic tensions, between cleave as ‘cling to’ and ‘leave’ or ‘pull away from; between the diasporic uprootedness and stick-in-the-mudness; between identity and difference; the bog remembering what would be repressed, ‘wreaks chthonic havoc’ (‘Under’ p. 9) as this poetry does.
dressed like a well but still treacherous it courts a fall (‘Under’, p.9)
Here we’ve got the sense of the mythic, the well being magical conduit between worlds lower and upper, between frog and prince – and the subtly suggestive verb ‘courts’ does all the work: of the royal high brought low. The bog, wearing its carpet of moss, its peaty layers, its strange carnivorous blooms, ‘courts a fall’ for those whose fail to ‘read’ it in its own terms.
Here hoard itself spells the ethics in poetics
hoard in the wrong hands gets melted down recast as meaningless commonplace precious (‘Hoard hurt’, p. 19)
The difference between exquisitely wrought objects that the bog ‘respects’ is, on their unearthing, treated with contempt in name of reduction to marketplace value; so goes Mallarmé’s distinction between currency and gold; the poet re-establishes the economy of the gift or of sacrifice against that of exchange value. Thus of the 5000 year old golden torcs recovered, it’s the ‘heft’ that talks here, the body’s intimate encounter with its weight, which Ryan celebrates – not the shine to the I/Eye that escapes this reductive economy:
I need not the sight but the heft of your beauty (‘Hoard bereavement’, p. 21)
In itself unmarked like the Platonic chora, the bog opens something like a pre-linguistic space and while it challenges the principle of naming, it becomes itself the borderline of the mnemonic, the beginning of the map generative of the name. ‘Bog mnemonic’ – ‘this wet portent/dense ledger’ […] awaiting our undivided attention.
The changeling poet returning from centennial removal is in excess, the great-great et cetera; the digresser from the line, the diasporic offshoot, always in principle the revenant.
denied corruption this go-nowhere this little stickler who lies unqueenly on territorial borders no rooted yew to stop her mouth to stem unhallowed utterance once breached (‘Bog speech’, p. 27)
This Plathian reminiscence is very telling: the yew is ghosted by its second person homophone, the pronominal mask of the masculine Other in Sylvia Plath’s poem, wagging its death-dealing blacks. Here the order of the bog undoes the hierarchical, the taproot, the surveying maps of ownership. It celebrates the liminal, mocks all king- and queendoms. Thus we must also, in the logic of the liminal move beyond the gendered implications of bogach. In the spaces here Ryan shows the ruin of the collective imaginary:
A mirror is not a lake is a dark mirror tarnished over mass-swollen near opaque till we call her bog thinking her soft long suffering (‘Landfill horizon’, p. 35)
The refusal to reduce: the metaphor of the (cancelled) mirror is a mise en abyme of Ryan’s activist poetics: the (k)not of resistance; the refusal of the politics of anthropomorphic identification, of the reductive equation or captivating binaries which align the soft with the exploitable to be raped. And the aggregate portrait sent back by the bog treated as ‘negative mirror’ becomes our own destruction: when we reward its softness by making a tip of it.
The bog accommodates the nothing as something; it remembers; it holds its voices; it marks the parlous history of the negation of the wetlands in dangerous mythic or metaphoric conflations. The bog only pretends to cover up; it is active archive preserving difference: you call her nothing but she remembers. This is: ‘the utter resistance /of ground that isn’t’ (‘Bog road’, p. 38).
Another aspect of resistance, this time proliferative, and rhizomatic is celebrated in the Bacchae-like furze associated with the bog district of the Irish midlands:
see what can bloom from nothing come to fruition out of confusion vulval and dentate her terms ungraspable given to proliferation queen of the barren the margin of past glories largesse and opulence all but forgotten futile the burn set by tenant or farmer the hopes of management she’s in her element (‘Fire climax’, p. 45)
This quasi-inclusion through the rhyme ‘ement’ enacts the viral invasion of what husbandry would extinguish – a delicious ironic revenge on the agents of violent repression.
In ‘Revenant’ the poetics are superbly active in performing the call of the title
Revenant Come back to vacancy where formerly whole nests of torcs lay one above the other each level a buffer meant to divert the casual robber first bronze then silver but best was deepest don’t say it you were so sure no one could reach there Over this turned ground you hover discarnate now persuaded whatever you had & amounted to was here & so you wander (p. 44)
Whereas the tremulant R, as the rhotic ‘R’ is gorgeously called, is left unpronounced by many English speakers, and is only ghosted in the changeling’s tongue, here it comes back triumphantly through the soundscape of this poem, just as, it can be said to haunt the whole collection.
And so the eco-poetics at work here resoundingly revive the tremulants cruelly repressed in our habitual rhetoric and ecocidal practices. All power to you Tracy Ryan: congratulations on Hoard, this magnificent new work of poetry.
I am pleased to announce that Robert Wood has joined the Cordite Poetry Review masthead as a Commissioning Editor. Shortly, we’ll start a series of critical essays from Australian and international writers, about one a month. This is in addition to what we’ll have in our quarterly and special issues.
Wood grew up in a multicultural household in Perth. He holds degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a National Undergraduate Scholar and a Benjamin Franklin Fellow respectively. He has edited for Margaret River Press, Wild Dingo Press and Overland, and volunteered for the Small Press Network, Philadelphia Fringe Festival and Books through Bars. He has published work in literary journals such as Southerly, Plumwood Mountain and Counterpunch and a academic journals including Foucault Studies, JASAL and Journal of Poetics Research. He currently hosts a reading and conversation series at The School of Life and is a regular contributor to Cultural Weekly. His next book, heart-teeth, is due out from Electio Editions later this year.
More appointment news soon …
I Too Am Salammbo by Hong Ying
Translated by Mabel Lee
Vagabond Press, 2015
Hong Ying’s I Too Am Salammbo is a selection of poems from 1990-2012, based on a Chinese selection published in 2014. Though almost all the poems contain conceptual, or imagistic, interest (bar some of the ‘city’ poems: ‘Berlin’, ‘London’, etc.), the formal repetition gets a bit wearing.
Conversations I’ve Never Had by Caitlin Maling
Fremantle Press, 2015
Few writers seem to get the viciousness of Perth. John Mateer’s early poems do, and some of Deborah Robertson’s short stories. There’s also Laurie Duggan’s one-liner, ‘you can see why all the really savage punk bands came from here’ (‘Things to Do in Perth’), and for the encyclopaedic and lyrical, John Kinsella’s wonderful, aptly sprawling ‘Perth Poem’.
Inside My Mother by Ali Cobby Eckermann
Giramondo Publishing, 2015
Celebrated South Australian writer Ali Cobby Eckermann’s fourth volume of poetry, Inside My Mother, is her most substantial and diverse collection to date. Although the book includes a handful of reworked earlier pieces, most of the seventy-three poems are new. Across four sections, these poems enrich and intensify the politically urgent subject matter that Cobby Eckermann’s oeuvre has, over the past decade or so, addressed so effectively. As an Aboriginal descended from the Yankunytjatjara language group, Cobby Eckermann’s chief concern is to express what she sees as the untold truth of Aboriginal people, both in terms of vital aspects of their culture, as well as regarding the (ongoing) detrimental impact of European colonisation. In this new work, Cobby Eckermann’s personal story provides a strong substructure in relation to which these larger issues are artfully explored.
Heart Starter by John Tranter
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015
What is more old-fashioned than modernity? New York in the 1960s; Paris in the 1920s; Edwardian England: how entranced we are by the bygone milieu of modernity. John Tranter has long appreciated the poetic potential of the almost-new, almost-old, as seen in his poems on movies, jazz, the New York School, and so on. But as seen in his latest book, Heart Starter, his interest in such things is not merely nostalgic. Rather, his work is obsessed with remixing the magic pudding of modernity. The past, in other words, is there to be used, not revered or sentimentalised. Tranter’s poetic revisionism treats source texts and forms as transitional objects (to use Winnicott’s term) that offer open-ended play and creativity, rather than demand compliance.
Trickster by Shane McCauley
Walleah Press, 2015
It is something of a paradigm in literary criticism (poetics included) to couple West Australians with place. Of late Tim Winton and John Kinsella have occupied this ground, but it is there in thinking about Randolph Stow and Dorothy Hewett and many more besides. It was Winton, after all, who wrote – ‘we come from ‘the wrong side of the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere”. The place, thought of quite literally as location, is simply ‘wrong’, meaning not quite right, meaning askew. This is to say nothing of the spirit here, or how, for a great number of people (some Noongars and others included), this always was and always will be the very centre of the world.
Still courtesy of Allen & Unwin
Throughout 2014, Judith Beveridge selected one poem per month, from a litany of external sources, to spotlight in Cordite Poetry Review, and she delivered excellent choices … writing a bit to each selection. We have compiled them all here in one article. Enjoy!
I forget who it was who said that the writer needs to be ‘holy in small things’, but I think there is a great deal of truth in that. That’s one reason why I’m attracted by Todd Turner’s poem ‘At Willabah’. Here, the poet guides us through the details of the landscape in a not dissimilar way to the deep engagement with particulars in such poems as Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a Naturalist’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘At the Fishhouses’. Place in poetry is often a point of exchange, and in this poem it works to become a bearer of human feeling as the speaker looks and looks at what is before him. You sense that Turner has undergone that meticulous discernment of image and word, the deep seeing that enables the world to open out, and he balances that arduous attention to detail with a lovely sense of the line and with sonic acuity as in the ‘crooning of frogs’ and the ‘searing horde of cicadas’ that ‘smoulders with a resinous hum’.
For me this poem is not so much about observation, but rather revelation gained through ‘trained worshipful attention’, the ability to keep looking and listening until the world opens itself up, until each thing becomes an object of thought, an aspect of immersion. The affectionate accuracy with which Turner makes the water and the canoe known to us keeps us engaged. He delves deeper and deeper into possibility, ‘still there is enough light, enough shadowless/ dark out here to stay and buoyantly float, hammocked, on this iridescent bed of backwater’, strenuously orchestrating his language and imagery until by the end, we too, lie ‘dumbstruck under stars’ – not an easy line to get away with unless the poet has drawn us line by line through a swell of detail, though their rhythms of affinities and recognitions, and given us opportunities to witness how sensual panorama is changed by perspective, both spatial and inner, and made complex by affect. By the end, this watertight poem has bound together weed and frogs, lily-pads and mosquitoes, nests and cicadas, water and stars and set them all magically ringing.
At Willabah Walking the long trodden path down towards the dam, I hear pebble stones squelch underfoot, and the wooden jetty out over the brown spangled water pulses with the crooning of frogs. At the foot of the landing thick tangles of tall grass, green on the blade, flaxen like wheat at the tips, shoot up between the narrow gaps of slatted planks and through the middle of a weather worn tyre tube, giving the appearance of ease. Either rife or in decline, lily pads brim in bright and mottled stages of bloom and ruin. They look like a drifting patchwork of miniature parasols, each stem softly landed. But they have risen from murky depths, launched pea-green sails and hoisted ceaseless bulbs into the warm flushes of air. Late afternoon sunlight crosses the dam and an undershot cloud of tadpoles darts beneath the dirty gold shallows under the dear little dead one, floating on its side. At the first mellow hint of dusk a hidden swarm of cicadas begins to rattle, amplifying a static reverberant pitch that fills the place with a thronging charge. Upturned on stilted racks above the edges of swampish ground, a large red canoe lies heavily with its curved ends turned down. It is mosquito-peppered and sun bleached from bow to stern, has lain here long enough for a community of insects and organisms to thrive. Lifting it up and turning it over, I see a small black spider scurry across the length of the gunwale then shelter under the dry mud-caked taper of weed stuck there on its side. I lower the canoe down gently off its perch and drag it by the ring rope to the water's edge before going back for the partially sunken oars that lie in a melded slurry of bog and grass. Out over the dam, jutting there steadily, the canoe hangs in the balance on and off the jetty. I lift it from its back end, tipping the scales. It slides with a sudden splash, and in an instant, undulant wavelets swish into tremolo then recoil, whitewashed in dissolving pools. I ease myself into the lumbering vessel and wait until the rocking ceases... Tideless, level and brilliantly still, the water is a reflecting threshold of the bottomless blue, a blank scroll glazed with a long shot sequence of idle air and suspended inland sky. I set off, levering the blade-end of the oar into a rung and mutable clouds lap in diminishing ripples. I row on across the silvery water mirror before letting the canoe drift and curve then run aground into the twig-ends of a white, overhanging lichened tree, where an almost unseeable nest, not wedged but pierced, woven around a branch, is stitched and webbed there into place. As night sinks in, blue lit, draining the heat, the searing horde of cicadas gradually dims and smoulders with a resinous hum. Though still there is enough light, enough shadowless dark out here to stay and buoyantly float, hammocked, on this iridescent bed of backwater. I let the oar slip, the canoe slide, and soaking it all up, run my hands through the rain and sun-struck litres. Feeling no solidity as the water recedes and emptying flows, I notice a gentle braiding between skin and bone, leaving only a distilled measure of silt to behold. Now, drawing upon its intricate undergoings, its fervent source, the dam, doused in nightfall, magnetically blackens and seeps like a fumarole. I lean back, immersed in a brightening shroud, watching the smoke-spun strands of vapour freeze in a levitation of steaming shafts. Cutting through the thick of it and crossing the haze, I gape, lying dumbstruck under stars.
The Guardians by Lucy Dougan
Giramondo, 2015
‘The dog ran in there / It had been a mistake / to take up his old trail.’ The bold lines that open ‘The Old House’ (48) from Lucy Dougan’s latest collection, The Guardians, deliver a fine sample of Dougan’s deceptive simplicity. What better emblem for the concept of guardianship than the family dog? But the sentimental cocktail of love and loyalty embodied by this familiar friend is immediately crosscut by the ‘mistake’ of memory, an error of the senses that leads directly to the unheimlich. Continue reading
Poetry for Cordite 53: THE END is guest-edited by Pam Brown. Read Corey Wakeling’s interview of Pam from 2012.
Let me start at the very end, the dead end, the living end, at wit’s end, the end of the line. Whether you dread the end or can’t wait for it, the questions are: ‘When to stop? How to finish? Where does it ever end?’
As the forever-quoted Samuel Beckett wrote in Endgame, ‘The end is the beginning and yet you go on’. Game over, lights out, end of story – please send poems on THE END.
Please submit only once, with a maximum of three (3) poems in one (1) document … but first, please read the submission guidelines.
I
Names change
but the concept
stays the same, tracks you
across the valley.
Night rides in on a gust
star-scatter
like so much porcelain.
Is an alibi a deleted scene
or a red thread? Dust in the pigment
matted mane under silk folds.
Like painting
desert blossom
you go by bone structure
not appearance.
Number the joints
count the filaments
know that it takes a single slip
to spoil the line. One hump
can still pass as a horse. Two
is fooling no one.
You look to the brush––
the concept slides.
II
One stands perfectly still, inclines
gently her head.
Two argue about the weather.
One keeps mostly to himself.
One is revealed only by delicate
stokes.
One has never seen the ocean.
Two pretend to be otherwise.
One thinks, a pose is a fusion of form
and subject.
Another says, half a rock
is also a rock.
One knows you could yield your life
to this place
and still not understand it.
One believes actions can be governed
at a distance.
Two discover a kingdom
in a fleck of salt.
One finds it easier
to pass through the eye
of a needle.
One forgot to interpret
the scenery, insists he is
not lost.
Two make plans
and put them in motion.
One spits on the ground
completes the pattern.
The Law of Poetry by MTC Cronin
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015
MTC Cronin’s ‘The Flower, the Thing’ is a favourite poem; one to which I often return. What strikes me immediately – and what stays with me – is its first word: ‘urgently’. That word sucks its reader in; it says that what comes after is ‘urgent’, is going to pull at you. It says, read on. Continue reading
Tropeland by Rob Walker
Five Islands Press, 2015
South Australian poet Rob Walker’s latest collection, tropeland, is exceptionally playful. Puns and wry twists in language are balanced with humour and a self-conscious sense of otherness, the speakers always slightly displaced from their subjects. Walker is not pessimistic in this process however; there is a consistently optimistic tone throughout tropeland, as well as a canny awareness of failings and ironies in life.
Jam Sticky Vision by Luke Beesley
Giramondo Publishing, 2015
Luke Beesley’s long-term preoccupations with film, visual art, writing and literature, return to the fore in Jam Sticky Vision, with the poet now expanding the scope of his work to include 90’s alt-rock bands, like Silver Jews and Pavement. With allusions to filmmaker David Lynch and lo-fi rock musician Bill Callahan couched unselfconsciously beside poems about James Joyce or Henri Matisse, Beesley’s poems may seem to be drawn from something of an eclectic palette. What links the poems nicely together, though, is a close examination of the here and now. In the epigraph from John Dos Passos’s essay ‘The Writer as Technician’ (1935) this idea is more precisely expressed as ‘a time of confusion and rapid change like the present, when terms are continually turning inside out and the names of things hardly keep their meaning from day to day’.
Sentenced to Life: Poems 2011-2014 by Clive James
Picador, 2015
Clive James’s Sentenced to Life is a poetic autopathography outlining his years living with emphysema and leukemia. While illness biographies ‘present information about diagnosis, treatment and outcome trajectories’, more importantly, they ‘share how the illness has affected the sufferer’s wider life course, social network and views of health care institutions.’, as Rachel Hall-Clifford puts it in her Autopathographies: How ‘Sick Lit’ Shapes Knowledge of the Illness Experience. However, James’s poetry is most often centred on his personal discomfort, regrets and ultimately his quest for reassurance that his writing and memory will survive his death.
certain trace elements remain
stalked by monumental plastic bags
the venal serpent has so many moving parts!
but worrying about it is sound inspiration, featuring
pannikin set on pate & talc on gormless elbow
file some excess weight from the handle of your spoon
back in the shelter going mad nothing happens
the machines preceded me
a kind of vivisection in corridor unlit
the press of the nail, warts under leather
black-lemon reflux, urinals belch
a varicose etiquette in service of extraction
no one coming, not even the landlord
im not the ppl they had in mind
im not emitting the agreed upon signal
but this rites company enough
& if things get tough theres always my photo id
with head cocked at the future like a flint
& the viscera there, still unread, recommended for you.
Unidentified girls of Pembroke sing
The sea was so rough and my hands is so tough
A long time agoooo
Blow-boy-blow – – my diggyman
Drunkdrunkdrinky
It goes on like this actually goes on like this coming out of the walls
In a vicious glandular whisper
Did the stones learn it from the girls aurora borealis
Songs of the girls trapped in stone ,
wind in the chimney fattens then rakes the fire
Pentecostal polish on my collar
Mixing in the sheen flakes of death
Fly ont’ the spit of strathspey re-born again to die on whale-jaw hill
The stench of the white man precedes me
Here come Pegasus, bags loaded, walking sideways, it is not only our fancy.
Hi Peggy, on this rottenest of days the sun comes out to appal.
Black Polly Harvey’s out of breath, deliberately stumbles in her plucking
The most beautiful, the most insouciant, still craven
Polly
. .hurtling
Then wandering the chalk groves hand in the hand
Louche, douche, I perve on you in the showering can
The air still burnt with our conversion.
Morning with Ernest Louis Matthewsand breakfast by boat-
Frying eggs on s flint of tin, watch the birds of extinction
Caper
Look away from the earth, where the atmosphere and its inert lover twitches, the
commingling licks
exchange of cumulus rump, voluptule
fire among the bitches
As we cusp you remarke on that pleasnought smell
Some sort of . . . sea-keg rides the continuous albas above yonder
Make your head as rough as possible
A major dirge oafs the lung
As we make way with square oars to the Blaskets
sharpley and with hardly withouten effort I prise from you
a sigh, not the vaste soupir (oh.) of the sea
something more morbidly flushed
p.haps a ‘radiant travesty’
au revoir, Club-toe!
I am airs cheerful as I ought to be [GODDAMMIT]
& you can tell by the jauble
that this is sung
in le langue gelée
spoken in jelly
“it should have ‘spitoon’ in it”
What is a bivalve? What is behavior?
not sphinx but spinx don’t gender the enigma
Dear Bridie McCarrotty
Sister to Mellamurphy
He’s got a song to sing but it’s not about you
Dear Sir I am fallen in love with a pipe. Your pipe.
Item: Smooth tadpole tobacciana pipe, grit to suck
surface issues and teeth chatter
ouch and very fine!
<<See the restitution of angelic bisexuality>>
joined in enflamed opposition
round like a colloquoy of major and minor demon tongues
cured in raw bivalvoline.
I once methought we should have our bones thrown in together
Now I’d be pleased if our singing and kissing-bits
Beput in the one can of langues en gelée
For all its advantages – or perhaps
this is another advantage – Te Aro
has no harbour frontage. Nor does it have,
at least from the street, even a view of
the harbour. But this last points to how
the suburb has the basic affinity
with the sea of being only slightly
above sea level. And, complementing
Wellington’s mysterious mid-city quays,
there’s an argument for ‘Te Aro Bay’,
anti-inundation magic and global
warming memo; acknowledging the tidal
alter ego beneath the dry land hustle
of the gentle incline to Brooklyn Hill.
I don’t hate you
For your ignorance
I don’t hate you
For your entrenched racism
I don’t even hate you
For supporting government policies of cultural genocide
I don’t hate you, but…
I do want you to at least
Embrace your own disfunction
Acknowledge it
And then analyse it–
Just as you analyse me
Then I want you to
Research it
Observe it
Write about it
And then maybe even preach about it,
Just as you do about me.
No, I don’t hate you, but…
I do wonder about you sometimes
Canberra, 2004
This poem first appeared in I’m Not Racist, But…, Salt Publishing, 2004.
After surviving the bypass it seemed the
house would succumb to national security
concerns, the police televised busting the
door down during an anti-terrorist
(or ‘te aro rist’ perhaps the term)
operation. An honourable scar, this
could be held renovation where by ‘house
painting’ is understood ‘words painted on
the house’, however vile the bypass it
at least delivering the masses within
consciousness-raising distance, if also
worth considering here putting up a
billboard the income from which to fund
protest and revolution in Aotearoa.
(i)
Sometimes I feel as though
I am living half a life
A jigsaw puzzle I can’t
work out:
I am here,
I am there,
I am only half here.
I am half myself,
I am more than myself,
I am my worst self.
It goes on, it goes on,
I struggle, I get up,
I fall, I have all the pieces
But I just can’t seem
to put them together
I’ve lost something I need
I’ve lost something I never had
I’ve lost myself
I am losing.
(ii)
I betray what I have promised
and before and afterwards I feel sick
but without it, I feel empty.
I turn myself inwards, try to find
what is missing, I spend a lot
of time alone. I don’t find
what I’m looking for, I don’t
find any answers.
Outside the wind howls but
the frost is leaving the garden.
In the wind, the leaves shiver.
