Posted in Art, Paper, Poetry, Writing on November 18, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I haven’t forgotten you, I’ve just been really busy – you know – writing a book and all that.
By the way I have finally loaded the darling little chapbook onto Etsy (here’s hoping it doesn’t find it’s way onto Regretsy!)
Thanks again to the most lovely Helen Rickerby, who has hand crafted each of these little works of art.
Posted in Poetry, Writing on October 16, 2009| 1 Comment »
Seraph Press invites you to celebrate the launch of
Watching for Smoke
by Helen Heath
on Sunday 18th October at 3.30 pm
in St Peter’s Hall, Beach Road, Paekakariki
This hand-bound poetry chapbook will be launched by Dinah Hawken, and will be available for sale at $15 (RRP $20)
Posted in MA, Poetry, Writing, tagged writing is like giving birth on October 15, 2009| 7 Comments »
So we finished classes yesterday and now have just over 3 weeks of editing before we hand in our books. Everyone is a bit nervous.
I guess because the MA is nine months long there are inevitable analogies of pregnancy and childbirth connected to the process. A couple of months ago I started feeling like I was in labour with this book. I was pushing and huffing and hurting. I don’t know what’s going to come out, or if it will have any birth defects.
There’s a point in labour called transition, you can tell you’re in it when you start whinging “I can’t do it, I caaaaan’t!!! I never want to do this ever, ever again!” It’s the most intense part of labour; some women vomit or shake all over. Midwives like this point because they know it means any minute a head will be making its way out.
I wonder if Chris (our teacher) sees herself as a midwife of books? Either way I felt like I was in transition with my manuscript, I’m tired, I caaaaaan’t!
Right now I think the head must be crowning because it hurts, I’m tired and I don’t know what I’m doing but the end is very close.
To get me through I tried to remember how the post-birth adrenalin felt, a massive surge invulnerability and awesome, death defying prowess. ‘I made this!’ And you are looking down at your ugly purple squished up crying bundle covered in cheesy looking vernix, thinking it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. You forget the pain and decide they need a sibling.
Posted in MA, Poetry, Reading, Writing on July 8, 2009| 9 Comments »
Well, how did those weeks fly by so quickly? Next week we are back to our safe little cluster in class. Kay has sent out her next batch of poems for us to read (lovely) before we discuss in class and I’m getting reading to lead a discussion on how poets have been influenced by science, incorporated it into their use of form and language.
I hope I can pull off two hours worth, gulp!
In three weeks I need to hand out my last bunch of work for class discussion, nothing like a deadline to get you going!
“Only fables present the world as it should be and as if it had meaning,” – Kurt Gödel (Austrian-American logician, mathematician and philosopher)
“The original Muses might be imaged now as little Apples, home-computers wired into the great mother memory bank of the world, promiscuously fingered by the swift digits of the global villagers. But a computer does not a muse or music make.” – Phyllis Webb
“We have to break down poetry into its elements just as the chemists and physicists are doing in order to reform the elements.” – William Carlos Williams
“Sir: In your otherwise beautiful poem ‘The Vision of Sin’ there is a verse which reads – ‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born.’ It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill… I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – ‘Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.’… The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry. I am, Sir, yours, etc., Charles Babbage”
– Charles Babbage to Tennyson, 1851
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
– Emily Dickinson
Posted in MA, Poetry, Reading, Writing on June 30, 2009| 5 Comments »
(reading is sexy)
I’ve tried to do some different things to keep me going over the break, like watching some of the Lannan videos and listening to podcasts. I’ve also just spent a fab long weekend away with Emma, Meg, Francie and Mel from Damien’s class (and my mate Tina) for a bit of intensive reading and writing with a workshop atmosphere. It’s worked so far, I haven’t had time to miss class.
I’m glad I handed my reading packet out before the break so I wasn’t wasting time fretting about it. I’m feeling good about my portfolio so far, I have about 60 pages of poems in three sections with a sequence of Ghazals in the middle section, hopefully to be the gem that the book hangs on. This takes the pressure off for the second half. I like to spend plenty of time revising my work and there’s still time to come up with some better poems so some of the weaker ones can drop out. I dropped them off to my lovely supervisor today and we meet on Friday to discuss.
A couple of my poems have been accepted for online journals Swamp 4 and soon to be released 4th Floor, which is encouraging and I’ve got a couple of readings lined up for later in the year – Writers on Mondays (which is part of the class requirements) and Stand Up Poets at the Palmerston North library both in September.
Exciting news is that Helen Rickerby asked to publish a chapbook of my work through her publishing house Seraph Press and we are at page proof stage with that. Thanks Helen!
Posted in MA, Poetry, Reading, Writing on June 30, 2009| 3 Comments »
Lannan Foundation Video
The Dream of the Unified Field: selected poems 1974-1994
Bill mentioned Jorie Graham on his blog and I looked her up, her style took my fancy so I thought I’d watch her interview (IIML has a video library but you can also download podcasts here).
She has a reputation for being difficult to read, in response she said that an apprenticeship to the work of the poet is often required to gain understanding. You need to become acquainted with their collected work, their obsessions, language etc. Things unfold after in-depth reading, try reading all their work in chronological order as fragments will be more difficult. This did make sense to me, especially in light of my experience with Louise Glück.
She also discussed difficulty of subject “If people don’t have the knowledge (eg classical Greek myths) to understand my poetry that’s not my problem”. Ha!! I do angst about the scientific content of my work and if readers will comprehend it. It’s quite liberating to hear poets say things like that. It is quite an elitist attitude and one that I have some problems with, yet when she said that I couldn’t help thinking “YES!”
On language she said something like – understanding the complexity of language leads to an understanding of the complexity of your inner world. She wants to challenge people to extend themselves and surely that can only be a good thing?
She also said “abstracting emotion doesn’t work, rehearse your vocabulary on the concrete first before you approach the ‘invisible’ – internal or abstract. Approach the invisible via the senses, read Hopkins, for example.” I think this is probably good advice for me to follow. With my Elemental sequence they only started working once I added concrete, sensual connections.
After watching the video I trotted over to the library and got out her selected poems for a read.
The title immediately appealed as it harked back to the Field Theory of poetry that Phyllis Webb talked about. The blurb reads:
Jorie Graham’s poetry insists that ‘the visible world’ exists: but what is its existence? Beyond the subjective, the merely lyric, she ventures with philosophical rigour into an area ‘saturated with phenomena’, in Helen Vendler’s phrase, a place of shifting perspectives, vertiginous reversals, but always moving towards possible celebration. Those who argue that poetry and science are at each other’s throats find here a poetry which brings into tense equilibrium science philosophy and history.
Well, I’d love someone to say that about my work.
It’s interesting to see her form change over time, her lines grow longer and longer. Couplets and stanzas disappear, poems grow longer.
In the late 90’s her lines get so long and the last word or words of the line tab out to the end, or sometimes she tabs and then goes on, then breaks a stanza mid way – en dashes too. I like it; in fact I tried it out on some new poems this weekend.
Her poem I watched a snake is interesting, each stanza introduces a notion of sewing, stanza 2 – thread, stanza 4 – knot, stanza 5 – stitch, stanza 6 – pattern, final stanza: stitches, pattern, fastens.
In addition the snake has duel meaning of biblical lust versus work
and then: “Desire / is the honest work of the body”, Passion is work / that retrieves us,” This is overlapped with an Elizabeth Bishop style of observancy. In the Lannan interview she talked about “Self” and separation, body / spirit / mind. In this poem she seems to be trying to stitch them all together – very clever.
Posted in MA, Poetry, Reading, Writing on June 10, 2009| 2 Comments »
Phyllis Webb is this year’s happy find for me. Several people suggested I read her and then repeated the suggestion when I started writing Ghazals. I started with her selected poems – The Vision Tree: Selected Poems, Talonbooks, 1982, as that was the only thing available at VUW library, WPL or the MA library. Webb is Canadian, born in the 20’s, writer, broadcaster and creative writing teacher at Victoria (BC). Sharon Thesen in her introduction to The Vision Tree wrote:
What we are often most grateful for are the poem’s open completions, which do not stop the poem, but which cast their strange felicity back over the other lines, so that the whole poem is gathered into a unity without proposing a closure.
I read and re-read this volume. You just can’t read her work once, it is dense and surprising and multi-layered. I kept coming back to one of her earlier poems “Patience”:
Patience is the wideness of the night
the simple pain of stars
the muffled explosion of velvet
it moves itself generally
through particulars
accepts the telling of time
without day’s relativity. (stanza 1)
These metaphors are startling for me. Then the last four lines. Patience isn’t concerned with details or comparison, Patience is vast, thick and heavy, sharp and piercing. What else is vast? The wide night sky is vast. What are in the night sky? Stars. What goes on for eons? Starlight.
‘The muffled explosion of velvet’ I imagine the night sky as a big piece of thick, heavy velvet that is shaken out with a crack / snap and once laid over you is so thick and heavy it almost suffocates.
This is clever because instead of using three un-related metaphors for Patience she has used three that are intertwined and the third is a metaphor for her first metaphor – the night sky. So it is all woven in on itself. Makes me dizzy!
Then when she expands the rest of the stanza it is as if she is talking about Einstein. She is talking about time and space. The last word of the stanza – relativity, (the theory of which describes how things stay in orbit) again going back to the night sky and space and also relationships.
This stanza is extraordinary! I wasn’t sure at first if that was what she intended or if I was just reading my own interests into it but I later read an essay of hers in which she odes say she is influenced by ‘Field Theory’ much to my satisfaction.
The second stanza goes on:
But more than these accommodations
patience is love withdrawn
into the well; immersion into
a deep place where green begins.
It is the slow beat of slanting eyes
down the hearts years,
it is the silencer
and the loving now
involves no word.
Patience is the answer
poised in grief – the knowing –
it is the prose of tears
withheld and the aging,
the history in the heart
and futures where pain
is a lucid cargo. (stanza 2)
This stanza is quite different from the first, it comes not only down to earth but then down a well. It becomes less abstract and more human – love withdrawn is a very human condition. Silent years of wordless, withdrawn love grieved. Tears withheld as years pass and on into the future, where pain is still a ‘lucid cargo’. You need patience to endure never-ending heart break.
So, I’m thinking stanza one, two people are in orbit – in love, then in the second stanza love is withdrawn so patience morphs, earths. The second stanza is also longer than the first, which intimates that the loss and suffering goes on for much longer than the time of being in love. The lines get shorter too. ‘pain is a lucid cargo’ – Christ!
Chris lent me her copy of Water and Light: Ghazals and Anti-Ghazals. (Coach House Press, 1984) as it is out of print and not in any of the libraries. The selected poems had some Ghazals in them but not the whole lot. I have to say that I was not as drawn to her Ghazals as I was to her earlier work. I really enjoy the way each couplet in a Ghazal is a leap, 5 or more seemingly unrelated topics each contained in a separate couplet, which then combine to create an over-reaching deeper meaning. They were helpful to read while thinking about writing Ghazals and thinking about what Ghazals may or may not be but they seemed to lack the crazy multifaceted nature of the earlier work to me.
Dinah lent me Nothing But Brush Strokes: Selected Prose by Phyllis Webb, which has some great essays. I ended up using an extract of ‘Up the Ladder: Notes on the Creative Process’ for my reading packet handout. It has in it a poem called ‘Field Guide to Snow Crystals’ and her notes say it is about the Field Theory of poetry. This got me excited. The physics of Quantum Field Theory originated in the 1920’s and influenced a poetics of connection that Muriel Rukeyser described as “not a point-to-point movement but a real flow in which everything is seen as deeply related to everything else”. William Carlos Williams said in his essay The Poem as a Field of Action that “The only reality we can know is MEASURE”. He saw structure (not subject matter) as being the poet’s contact with reality, the only way we can modify it. This has been making me think about form, because of course the Ghazal is Field Theory in action.
Posted in MA, Poetry, Reading, Writing on June 9, 2009| 4 Comments »
SO we have 5 weeks without classes and I’ve spent the morning starting to read blogs again. Wait a minute I thought to myself. Didn’t I used to have one of these things?
Well, beloved readers I will be back on line at least for the next 5 weeks. I’ve been writing and reading my butt off and have lots to share via my reading journal and perhaps a poem or two but I’m feeling a bit shy.
One of my main goals for this year was to break through to another level with my writing and I’m not sure I’ve done that yet (ie- suffering from writer’s angst). However I do feel things brewing and I’m sure that by November 10th (deadline day) some kind of break through will have been made or something, mutter, mutter.
Lucky for me I usually work well with revisions.
Back tomorrow with some real words.
Hxx
Posted in MA, Poetry, Writing on April 6, 2009| 8 Comments »
An update from my reading journal
J Bronowski, Magic , Science and Civilization
The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge. Science has one logic, there is only one form of truth; there is no distinction between man and nature. Magic has two kinds of logic, a natural logic and a supernatural logic.
Newton’s laws of motion
1 Every object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force.
2 Force equals mass times acceleration
3 To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
Newton and Gravity
Every particle of matter attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses of the particles and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. The particle with less mass/density will accelerate more than the other particle, that’s why light objects fall to earth faster than the earth falls towards them. As objects get further apart the force of gravity drops very quickly.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity
Stretch a sheet out flat, attaching the corners to secured posts. begin to place things of various weights on the sheet. The heavier the object, the greater the curvature of the sheet. Smaller objects slip along the curvature of heavier objects. The curvature of a light object doesn’t affect the heavy object much but the curvature created by heavy objects is what keeps us from floating off into space. The curvature of the earth keeps the moon in orbit but at the same time the curvature of the moon is enough to affect the tides.
I like these explanations. I had a conversation with my father about “what scientists know”
or scientific truths. I like that there are natural laws.
I’m trying to grow the one ghazal for my father into a series, thinking about “Truth” and what scientists have faith in, or take as a given. There isn’t much. The conversation got quite philosophical (as in logic and probability).
(Super)Natural Logic – maybe that’s the title of my book?
Ghazals for my father
i
The truth about stones is
some fit in my hand, some under.
If you press a stone with your finger
your finger is also pressed by the stone.
If you pull a stone on a rope
you will be drawn back to the stone.
If you carry a stone in your pocket
you can rub your thumb across it whenever.
I collected small beach stones from Ithaka
and intended to bring them home.
ii
The truth about beds is they
are better when you share them.
If your partner is heavier than you
you will slip into their curvature.
The curvature created by your partner
keeps you from floating out to space.
If you dance with your partner
you’ll stay in motion until someone cuts in.
If something isn’t there you can’t ever
know if you’ve proved its absence.
iii
The truth about earth is
you’ll be drawn home.
If you travel along one latitude, eventually
you’ll return to your starting point.
If you stay in one place
the continents will still drift.
If you dig a hole all the way through
you don’t end up in China.
Once you have been conceived, then
at some point you will die.
Posted in Poetry on April 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »
I said a little something about the best looking debut lit journal I’ve seen.
Emma Barnes has put together this yummy little number. You can read some bits about it here and here.
You can buy it here. I’m in it so it must be good 😉
Show Your Workings 