Tuesday poem: Roll up! Leap through!
July 29, 2013
Roll up! Leap through!
Outside, beyond the neon tights, the paisley
sequinned flares of the artistes, tracing
such rococo knots in the canvas sky,
waits a lion called Frank, the last of his kind.
Tastes have changed, and lion-taming,
with such clear-cut rules of whip and chair,
has become passé, so yesterday.
The sententious prescripts of the pure —
that modern hygiene of the mind —
sweep scuddy sawdust aside like lice,
and draw a line through bear and lion.
So Frank, mane beige and moulting, lives
a most solitary life, a stuck record repeating
the rank smells of piss and popcorn,
the hooplah! and the swish of knives,
carving the air like a Sunday roast
around the tasty ribs of Madam Frisson.
She is just as bored and trapped as he
as she awaits her husband’s swinging arm,
as sensitive as a brass metronome.
Soon Frank will be too shabby, even for this
ring of superannuated fantasy.
No scrubby savannah of reconciliation,
no release for a circus-bred beast,
into a sudden pride of compliance.
Just the screams from the audience
at the trapeze and the squirt-flowery gambit
of painted clown. His dreams are smeared
with a thin imagined relish of gazelle,
as he bobs and bobs that shameful mane.
Soon, though, the final bob; the final doze.
He’ll leap, ungoaded, through the hoop of death
onto who knows what plains, what deer-rich grass?
P.S. Cottier
This is another poem written in response to a prompt, or in this case, ten prompts. The Canadian journal Contemporary Verse 2 has a yearly competition where they post a list of ten words, and the poets (who must have enrolled previously) have 48 hours to create a poem which must contain each of those words. Loads of fun, and some of the successful works are terrific. Hop over to Canada for a look. I just noticed that they used a little snippet of my poem on the introductory page for the competition. Which is nice to see.
I didn’t win however; hence the posting, but I quite like the poem.
(I had a slightly bigger cat in mind than the overly cute thing in the photo, by the way…)
Click this feather and fly to New Zealand, after your return from Canada, to read more poetry:
Incidentally, Janis Freegard is featuring another poem by me about a creature that sometimes bites: the smiley emoticon. Here’s the link. Thanks Janis!
Tuesday poem: Ten minute prose poem
July 22, 2013
My skull peels back like a hairy banana. A hairy banana dusted with a coconut of dandruff, which confettis the floor. Inside I find the familiar lumps: the lobes raised into a fairy ring of concentric bumps. Those brain tits, as Jean calls them.
Pouting against bone
modestly encased in skull
my brain jiggles thought
My fingers locate the zips that hold the sims in place, and slowly — mirror work is always slow — I unzip the first bump nestled like an egg on the top of the brain. I am losing my ability to speak French, you see, and this sim is my language supplement. Rain and tears, dogs and hatred, have been running into each other like a water-colour; or as in the subtle distinctions between air and smoke and sea and ship that we see in Turner’s works.
French bleeding meaning
parapluie of sense
springing unwell holes
Easy then, to replace the chip, rezip, and close. Tomorrow the chemist. Dandruff clouds.
Fin
P.S. Cottier
*
This weird little thing was written at Au Contraire, the New Zealand Science Fiction convention,in the poetry workshop facilitated by Tim Jones and Harvey Molloy. The exercise was to write a poem describing a piece of future technology, and building it or taking it apart for the reader. Loads of fun! As my title implies, we had just ten minutes.
Two points: I don’t have dandruff. And I do wish I spoke French properly. I used a haibun form, which is not really French. But neither is it English. That is, in fact, three points.
My own work has dried up, slightly, as anthologising takes over my life, so it was nice to snatch ten minutes from the unrelenting maw of Other People’s Poems…
Click this feather. It will take you to New Zealand, which has been experiencing more earthquakes. At the time of writing this, though (and based on the news in Australia), there has been no loss of life or even serious injury in Wellington. Best wishes to everyone there at what must be a difficult time.
Well, that was nice
July 18, 2013
Wellington could be covered by a giant’s pocket handkerchief. Such a lovely place, even when there are four consecutive days with gusts of rain that are correctly described, in meteorological terms, as gusty.
I enjoyed my short stay there, working on lists of poems with Tim Jones, who is a very patient and funny person. Tim lives in the right place, as he very easily overheats. ‘I’ll just take my coat off,’ he says, quite frequently. Also ‘Is that heater too high?’. To which the correct answer is ‘NO!’ I don’t think he would like Darwin…or tropical Canberra.
I met many Tuesday poets in Wellington, including Mary McCallum, Keith Westwater, Helen Rickerby (publisher of Maria McMillan’s wonderful collection The Rope Walk, which is such an attractive book, and the launch for which I was lucky enough to attend) Harvey Malloy, and Janis Freegard. So nice to meet people only known electronically!
Tim, Harvey, Janis and I gave a reading at Au Contraire. I think that the full range of speculative poetry was represented, including Janis’s surrealist works and Harvey’s delicate ghost poems. Some of Tim’s were science fiction, and some of mine were horror. Here are photos of the other three poets:
So busily engaged in going through massive numbers of poems with Tim meant that I was unable to engage with the Convention very much, but I also enjoyed the poetry workshop I went to, run by Harvey and Tim. I may post the poem I wrote in ten minutes for my Tuesday Poem next week. I also attended the Julius Vogel Awards, where Simon Petrie, who I had talked at at the airport in Sydney for hours, picked up a gong. Simon also has a story in the new collection Regeneration, as does Tim. I must admit I have read a couple of stories, thus compromising my vow to read no prose for a year, but after working through literally thousands of poems, I excused myself. Sometimes, when tired, prose is easier to read than poetry, being inferior and all. (The stories, however, are of a particularly high standard.)
I meant to take a group photo of Tuesday Poets drinking, but I forgot. Here is a nice photo of Mary, though.
I realised after uploading this just now that she is wearing a top that I had been eyeing off on Cuba Street for a few days and bought on my last day after another few hours tireless (I typed ‘fireless’ at first, which would certainly have pleased Tim) anthologising. It was so dark in the Library Bar where me met that I didn’t consciously note it was the garment I had been admiring. Mary is a trendsetter, so much so that it works at a subconscious level! I wish I could have talked to her more, and all the other poets.
I have no profound thoughts to offer about New Zealand or Wellington after my few days there (I am always suspicious of instant summaries of other countries by blow-ins) but it is a place in which I felt very comfortable. I think it is legitimate to make comparisons with Canberra, too, given that both Wellington and Canberra are smaller capital cities with larger cities within the same country.
The public service seems to dominate Wellington far less than it does Canberra. You just don’t see so many people wandering around with their security tags on lanyards around their necks, like besuited dogs from a Russian novel. Perhaps security is slacker? (Or stricter, given this open display of ID has always seemed a strange practice.) Perhaps I was in an area of Wellington entirely inhabited by web designers, small press publishers and the owners of interesting boutiques? But I also noticed that conversations that I overheard were not so much about the minutiae of policy or whinges about conditions in the public service. Or upcoming elections as they are in Canberra at the moment!
This may seem a slightly bizarre comment, but there are far fewer blonde or redheaded people in Wellington than in Canberra. (I am talking about people of European origin here, obviously.) I have no idea why this is the case, but it struck me that only one person in a cafe was a redhead. Perhaps it is illegal for redheads to frequent Cuba Street?
It would be so good to live somewhere where walking was the major means of getting around. On the other hand, Canberra is much better for bicycles, at least in the inner city.
I ate and drank far far too much during my stay, burning off the equivalent of about one glass of wine during a leisurely stroll around part of the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary. The takahe, a fat, flightless bird, spend their lives munching grass. The story of their rediscovery is quite moving. Such placid, helpless creatures.
Less reassuring were the warning signs about what to do in case of an earthquake; with profound ignorance I hadn’t realised that Wellington was particularly prone to earthquakes. Certainly that is not talked about in the guides to cool Wellington on the net!
I do hope to have a longer stay in New Zealand next time. Here I am looking a tad rugged up at the wildlife park.
Thank you to everyone for being so welcoming, and especially to Tim. I met so many people that it’s quite likely I forgot to include a name or two, so this may need a few edits…
VITAL UPDATE: According to the site Answers, 4% of Australians have red hair and about 2.5% of New Zealanders.
World tour of one part of New Zealand…
July 3, 2013
…one part of the North Island of New Zealand, in fact.
Yes, next week I’ll be popping over to our comparatively near neighbours and meeting other Tuesday Poets, and particularly Tim Jones, with whom I am editing The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry.
We will be making final selections for the anthology, from the approximately nine million on our two lists of ‘must haves’. I’m also one of four poets reading at Au Contraire, a science fiction convention in Wellington.
And I hope to sneak off from poetry duties long enough to see a dead Colossal Squid on display, and also to see some live, medium-sized birds.
I really can’t wait. (That is not sarcastic, for once, by the way.)
I have visited New Zealand once before when I was a teenager on a school trip, and have vague memories of an extremely racist bus driver, a wool museum (like Australians really don’t have enough wool and need to visit other people’s wool museums), and the smell of Rotorua.
I look forward to contrasting Canberra with Wellington. The populations of the two cities are about the same. That fact says a little more about Canberra, I think, than Wellington.
So busy have I been preparing Vast Lists of speculative poetry that I have no poem to post this week, and next week may be dodgy too, as I’ll be buying things for Wellington.
Wool things, mostly.
Tuesday Poem: (haiku) by P.S. Cottier
June 25, 2013
Gloves house hunger
moths make gaping mouths
finger tongues speak
Now that’s me, begloved in gloves which never had fingers, at the launch of Poetry in ACTION yesterday, in front of my poem, ‘April mornings’. ACTION stands for ACT Internal Omnibus Network, by the way. I bet you didn’t know that! (And it just occurred to me that some readers won’t know that ACT stands for Australian Capital Territory, which was set up so that Canberra wasn’t in either New South Wales or Victoria. Most of the ACT is national park.)
If you would like to read this poem properly, along with the other nine poems selected to appear on Canberra buses, please press this link, which will take you to a page within the Arts ACT site.
You can also see the short-listed poems, and children’s poems, if you navigate from that page.
It was beyond freezing in Canberra yesterday. Note the loverly weather outside the bus window in the photograph above. It may snow at the weekend, which is positively un-Australian. Next month, though, I am having a handful of days in sunny Wellington…
Click this feather for further poetry frisson from the tropical climes of New Zealand:
PS Cottier 