Poetry with Limits

For readwritepoem
The prompt this week was to write poetry with a limited word set, for example using the words at Shufflewords.

Since I have several sets of magnetic poetry that I never get around to playing with much, I thought I would use real magnetic poetry rather than virtual magnetic poetry.

Usually my poems start with an idea. This time I decided to just select words that I liked the sound of, and play with sounds more than trying to make sense. As I said, I'm not very practised with magnetic poetry. Usually I get diverted enough sorting the words into alphabetic lists of words of the same length that I run out of time to actually use them!

Here is the result:

Christmas Trees and Birthday Candles

It was the end of an era as we celebrated my youngest son's 21st birthday. All my five children are now officially adults, which makes me feel rather old. Or at least, I still feel the same age I always felt, so how did it happen exactly?

Of course several of them still live at home, they know where it is cheapest!

We had a party with buffet dinner at our home last weekend, which meant Thursday and Friday evenings and most of Saturday were spent cooking casseroles, desserts, birthday cake, a roast leg of lamb and vegetables. We also tidied up a bit. We even put the Christmas tree away. Yes that's right, the Christmas tree. Only six months late. (It was suggested that we leave it up to celebrate "mid-winter Christmas" which is quite popular in these parts, however the birthday boy wanted it put away). We don't use the large front room all that much and I am a champion procrastinator. In fact last year I got as far as putting away the decorations, but the tree itself stayed up all year, which is something of a record.

We used to have a real tree which of course did get disposed of after a couple of weeks, but these days we have a synthetic one. There's only one thing more forlorn than a Christmas tree past it's best and that's a used birthday candle. The tree at least went off with our green waste to be mulched and made into fertiliser for people's gardens. (Very good of the City Council to charge us for green waste so they can mulch it and sell it back to us).

But what do you do with a used birthday candle? Sometimes we re-use them, but you can't really get away with that more than once, it would just look cheap to put a stub of a candle on the cake. Someone should start a business collecting up and recycling used birthday candles - you could melt them down and make new candles from them, or turn them into biofuel, or use the wax for batik, or melt them into weird statues, or something. Maybe I could melt them down and make little floating tea-lights.

I was one of those conventional old-fashioned mothers who stayed at home until the children were all at school, then found the work world didn't really want me any more. It took a while, but I think I've managed to re-invent myself and find a place in the world. I think the Christmas trees and birthday candles deserve that too.

We managed to spin out the celebrations and have a family dinner as well on the actual date which was Friday. Tomorrow he's off to Paris for a week and a half. It's too late at night for me to bother to link to the previous post, which had the link to the news article which explains why he's off to Paris. In fact I think it is high time I got to bed.

A Shameless Plug

I'm not sure if this can be heard outside Christchurch, but I will be on local access radio this Saturday morning.
The link is to the current program, but after this week I guess it won't be mentioning me any more, so be in quick:
Women on Air

Awards Time Again

I bought a number of poetry books last year, because several of my favourite New Zealand poets brought out new collections. I thought it was a great year for New Zealand poetry, and that I was fairly familiar with all the new offerings.

I was surprised, then, when the shortlist was announced for the Montana New Zealand book awards. Of the three poetry finalists, I had read one but don't own it. (I borrowed it from the library). The other two weren't known to me at all. I guess I will have to get reading.

The judges commented that it was an especially fine year for poetry, and they could easily have chosen five. It set me wondering what the criteria are. There is a separate award for the best first book (although there is no shortlist this year, unlike in previous years, so I'm not sure how it will be chosen). So, do the judges favour mid-career poets? The two I own which I thought would make the shortlist for sure are both by very experienced poets who have won before - Bernadette Hall's "The Ponies" and Vincent O'Sullivan's "Blame Vermeer". Do the judges decide that it is time someone else had a chance? Or are the finalists chosen entirely on merit - did they feel that these two weren't up to the writers' previous standard? I can't see it myself, though as I haven't read the ones that were chosen, I can't really compare yet.

One of the three finalists, Johanna Aitchison's "A Long Girl Ago" , is a debut collection. Will the "best first book" be chosen from the main category finalists? If so, she would seem to be a shoo-in.

According to a book shop newsletter I received today, "the judging panel takes into account enduring literary merit and
overall authorship; quality of illustration and graphic presentation; production values; general design; the standard of editing and the impact of the book on the community.

I'll be very interested to find out the winners in July

Here is One I Prepared Earlier...

Since I spent the weekend alternately coughing and sniffling, and sometimes both at once, the idea of heading for a bit of land sticking out into the Pacific Ocean, coated with a layer of snow dumped by winds straight from the Antarctic, wasn't very appealing. Not even to run around looking for orange and white flags (also known as "orienteering").

So I stayed home wrapped in snuggly quilts and watched TV.

Instead I thought I'd post these photos I took on a walk the previous Saturday, before the cold bug hit. This small enclosure has been decorated with prayer flags for quite some time. I'm not sure if the fence was put there just for the prayer flags, or if it serves some other purpose - maybe sheltering some rare native plant? Nothing inside the fence looks particularly unusual though, apart from the flags.

I'm trying to prove to myself that with a bit of imagination, I can visit any country I want without leaving home. So - do these look like Tibet? (If you have been there, don't disillusion me too much!)

Feeling Like a Tomato

A few weeks ago we had an early snowfall which hit our tomato plant. Up till then it had been rather prolific, but the tomatoes started falling off, so we gathered them up and set them on the kitchen windowsill to finish ripening.

The tomatoes looked fine. But they didn't ripen. Instead they started to ooze puddles of brownish liquid.

For the last week I've been feeling very much like one of those tomatoes. But, I haven't entirely finished a box of tissues yet, so I guess that's OK. I took the whole week off work, one day at a time. And I'm trying to convince myself that I'm fit to head back tomorrow, because sitting at home coughing is getting boring.

We had snow again last night. The hills looked very pretty this morning, but the air didn't feel so pretty. I'm contemplating the depressing warnings that if we don't cut peak time power use, power cuts are likely in about four weeks time.

Don't they know that most of us don't actually get up in the morning thinking "Wouldn't it be fun to waste some electricity today?" Because really, we have better things to do with our money than waste it. (Like buying poetry books. Or food.)

Every year, the power companies give us clever ideas to save power. And I roll my eyes and think "Don't they realise we've been doing that for twenty years or so already?"

Sigh. Thank goodness for our open wood fire, which we are not supposed to use because of air pollution, and our new gas cooktop.

More Quarry Photos

More photos from last week's outing to Halswell Quarry. I took these round the abandoned quarry workers' buildings, after I had completed my orienteering course.

A group of young women were filming a video. They had a large stuffed dummy, which apparently they threw over the edge of the cliff, but I missed the action.

I'm not sure what it was in aid of - perhaps a school or university assignment. It wasn't for the 48 hour Fast and Furious Film Festival , which took place the previous weekend.

Imaginary Worlds

On a hill track near here, a sign warns walkers to watch for "underrunners". These are actually underground passages carved by rain in the clay soil, but the word intrigues me and makes me imagine strange creatures living down there.

This poem is very much a first draft so be kind!

Underrunners

Once they knew the sun. The earth betrayed them,
gave way beneath their feet. You may hear them howling
but you will not see them. They gnaw roots,
snatch at the occasional pale insect.
They wander passages where pale fungi bloom,
running, always running, they keep in time
with the footsteps of those above.

For more imaginary worlds, visit readwritepoem

Why Yes I Do Still Have Legs - Why Do You Ask?

I haven't been orienteering in ages. But all club members are supposed to serve as helpers a few times a year, and I was phoned earlier in the week and asked to help at today's event.

So I stood/sat near this bridge for an hour and a half, writing finish times on clip cards



It was fine when I took the photo, but not for long. Rain did it's best to put a dampener on things...
The garden looks harmless enough here, but this is the flat part. You can see the cliff wall of an old quarry in the background. The bridge is a memorial to the Korean War, I think.

After I'd been relieved of finish duties, I summoned up enough energy to go out on a course myself. Which is quite a different proposition from walking to work a couple of times a week. Safety hazards were described as "pits are deeper than they look, rabbit holes, slippery wet grass and rocks, the quarry edge, cars on the access road" and probably a few more I've forgotten. And yes, it was very slippery. Trying to follow tracks as much as possible didn't help all that much given they were mostly mud churned up by the feet of the dozens of orienteers who went before me.

I stopped at this spot, after fruitlessly searching up and down the hill for the control flag, and photographed the view while I gave my brain a rest.



This is the view across the plains, from the same spot as the previous photo, just aiming the camera higher.



Then I found the control I was looking for, and continued round the course. Further on, I had a choice between going round the top of the quarry and going round the bottom. I think round the bottom was probably a much shorter route. But I hate going down then up, much prefer up then down. And besides, visiting the quarry without walking round the top of it is just not done.

Fantastic views, but I didn't take photos as I thought I should aim to finish before the course closed. Maybe another day.

Who Says Poetry Doesn't Pay?

According to this newspaper story, a Washington College graduate won a $US67,000 prize for her poem about New Zealand's Franz Josef glacier. (You can read it if you click on the link).

Actually, reading the story carefully, I think they may have it wrong. It seems to me that she actually won the award for a portfolio of work, not just one poem. But either way, it's more than most poets will receive for their efforts in a lifetime.

Autumn Inspirations

At one stage I was trying to publish a daily photo. It got too boring, as some days I had little opportunity to find new things to photograph, given that I leave home just after light in winter and come back at dusk, always by the same route.
I'm sure though, that I can manage a photo expedition once a week or so.

On Mondays I switch jobs at lunchtime, which gives me the perfect opportunity to stop somewhere interesting on the way and snap a few shots.

It's almost too late to be taking autumn photos. I've never figured out the best time, because some trees are still stubbornly clinging to their green, while others are completely bare.

This is the Avon River, near the Christchurch Botanic Gardens (although we are never very far from a river anywhere in Christchurch)



and this is the Antigua Boatsheds, much featured on calendars. Tourists have been hiring canoes from here since the late 1800s.

You Don't Know How Lucky You Are

A few days ago the price of petrol went up - again - and our local newspaper published a list of prices from different countries.

In NZ dollars per litre (I have no idea how that works out as US dollars per gallon, but I assume the conversion is accurate):

United States $1.33
Australia $1.80
New Zealand $1.94
Britain $2.84
Netherlands $3.23

I will admit that Europe probably has much better public transport than the United States. But it is interesting that most of the complaints I've seen on blogs about high fuel prices come from the US. The Brits don't seem to complain about it at all.

Edited to add:
Maybe I should have converted those figures to prices per gallon. One US gallon is 3.78454 litres so by my calculations, taking the exchange rate into account , it comes out at $1.28 per litre in NZ dollars. A little lower than I said. And since our price has gone up nearly 10 cents a litre in the last week, we are now at $1.97 a litre for regular, over $2.00 for high octane.
I do realise that many Americans have to commute long distances with no suitable public transport, the whole lifestyle is built around cheap fuel. On the other hand, salaries are quite a lot higher in the USA or Australia (or just about anywhere) than in New Zealand.

(End of edit).

I'm trying (without a lot of success) to get up early enough to take photos before I leave for work, the light is lovely at this time of year. This is down by the river, I'm hoping to get back on a colder morning. When it is frosty, the mist rises from the river and the early sun shines through.

On Not Blogging

I feel as if I'm getting my life in order - more or less.

By keeping a household task or two in mind, I get them done as soon as I get home from work, which keeps things more or less under control. You just have to remember, as the late Peg Bracken once said, not to start in the same place every time.

(And if you want more handy housekeeping hints, she also said "If it's loose, pick it up, if it's not, dust it, if it moves, feed it")

Somehow my one or two daily tasks, as well as eating dinner, and keeping up with a favourite TV show or two (usually while I do the ironing at the same time) seems to fill my evening.

So now all I have to figure out is how to find time to keep blogging, writing poems, and giving myself the occasional treat outing.

I did get some more of the quilt done over the weekend. It's flagging a bit though, as I desperately want more fabrics. I think I need to reconnect with the quilt group I used to belong to, and find some other quilters to swap fabrics with. It wouldn't do my budget much good to get too carried away in the fabric stores (besides, the fabric stores here suck).

I also had a very pleasant evening on Sunday, as my eldest daughter invited us for dinner - presumably in honour of Mother's Day. And my middle daughter phoned from Wellington.

That's about the sum of the excitement around here at the moment.

I had hoped to have a poem ready for readwritepoem, but I'm running late. We'll see if I manage it before the end of the week.

Getting Reacquainted

Well, I set myself goals for the year, and promptly lost interest in them. I'm not beating myself up about it. I realised that I have certain obligations, and I don't need to make further obligations out of activities that I choose for myself.

I've been working full time for over a year and contributing a large part of the family budget. While I don't do so much of the meal preparation any more, I do most of the housework (as much as any housework gets done, that is) and I do all the laundry. I have commitments to the administration of Takahe magazine.

As for the family history, poetry, orienteering etc, I do it because I want to. And if I don't, I don't have to.

Here is what I am up to at the moment instead of pursuing the goals I announced earlier:



You can see my sewing machine manual on the left hand side of the photo, because it was so long since I had used the machine, I found I had forgotten how to turn it on. (In my defense, it was a fairly new sewing machine when I last used it. I can still remember how to turn my old machine on, the one I had for twenty years or more).

I also couldn't find the switch for the light. After searching the manual for a while, I found that the light should come on automatically. It doesn't. Or at least, it does sometimes. When I twitch my nose properly, or when the wind is in the east, or something. Grrr! I can still sew though, with a carefully placed lamp.

The idea was to make a quilt with fabrics on hand. There are two black and white fabrics and twelve coloured strips in each block of this quilt. I've made eight blocks so far - ninety six coloured pieces. Despite starting with a big stack of purple, turquoise and pink fabrics, I still find myself wanting more variety. I'm trying to resist the urge to buy too many more (besides, the ones in our local quilt shops all seem to look the same).

I'll show the quilt again as it progresses, and tell you more about it.

Meanwhile, there has been a little excitement in our household. One of the young people in this news story is someone rather closely related to me...

Catching Up...

I came home from work on Tuesday to find a sign on the street corner a couple of blocks from my house. The riverside street was going to be closed the next day for tree felling.

Since our little cul de sac leads off this street, with no other entrance and exit, I wondered if I would be able to get out the next morning. As it turned out, the sign was a block further up than the part that was actually closed, and although I had to slalom through traffic cones, I was able to leave without any trouble.

I'm not sure if I was relieved or disappointed. A day at home would have been nice. But I'd probably have felt obliged to go to work anyway, which would mean a tedious and complicated bus ride.

You'd think they'd find a better way to notify the residents than a sign on the corner the night before.

I had an errand to do on the way home (collect accounts for a small literary magazine from the auditor), which left me running late for the final session of the Canterbury Poets Collective autumn readings. However the first half is open mic, and the second half is the guest readers, so I didn't mind too much missing the first two or three. There were some fine open mic readers and a guest reader I was really looking forward to - Rhian Gallagher. Rhian is not very well-known in New Zealand as she lived in the UK for quite a few years, where her collection Salt Water Creek was short-listed for the Forward Prize for best first collection. I first came across her work on the Poetry Daily website (no link as their archive only lasts a year).

Unfortunately I was rather tired and found myself dozing off. In my waking moments I confirmed that I really did like her work, and I also enjoyed the final guest poet Tony Beyer. I think I'll be looking for their books to study more.

Overall I'm beginning to think that I don't really take in all that much at readings. What I come away with mostly is an overall impression of the sound of a poem. And what I am interested in is: does it sound like a poem? What makes it a poem? Much of what I hear, especially from the open mic readers, sounds like prose. On the page it may look like a poem, but on reading it aloud, the line breaks seem to be lost. And some of the open mic poems had really, really long sentences. Beautiful pieces of prose, but prose none the less.

I listen for rhythm and cadence. Some of my favourites were those that didn't contain complete sentences -lists and fragments. It reminds me to experiment more with grammatical constructions in my own writing.

I do have some reports and links on some of the guest poets from earlier sessions, but i'll keep them for another post.

Mists and Mellow Fruitfulness

I went out to our backyard to pick grapes this morning and was greeted by a beautiful dew-hung spiderweb



It's quite hard to get all those little raindrops perfectly in focus!

Forty Years On

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the Wahine disaster. The house where I grew up overlooked the harbour where this took place.

April 10th 1968

Every year we made the journey
stood on deck watching the wake
draw a thread between islands
north and south where grandparents, aunts
uncles and cousins mirrored each other like
left and right sides of a garment

Back home we watched the ferries pass
morning and evening as sure as
sunrise and tide fall,
tide rise and sunset
Maori, Rangatira, Wahine

That stormy day we watched the broken ship
drift onto rocks, list
the fleet of small craft weaving back and forth
trying to darn the hole in the harbour,
trying to stitch the ship to shore

On Sport and Writing

I've never thought of myself as athletic, but there are certain sporting events that capture my imagination. No, not the rugby. I'm just not a true Kiwi in that regard - I have no interest whatsoever. But one event that usually has me checking the results is the annual Coast to Coast adventure race.

Over two days - or one, for the really ambitious - New Zealand's top adventure racers (and some from overseas) cycle, run, and paddle their way from one side of the South Island to the other, across the mountains and the plains to finish at Sumner Beach not far from here. Some are there to try to win, others just to say they did it.

There are usually a number of people I know among the competitors, often fellow members of my orienteering club. It's the sort of event I could imagine myself competing in - but only in my imagination, never in real life!

First, the attraction. I grew up spending a lot of time outside - climbing trees, swimming in the sea, clambering over rocks, making hideouts in the bushes. I think of myself as an outdoors person, but in a rather dreamy contemplative kind of way, not in terms of "further, higher, faster". When I think about the sports I find interesting, though, they are the ones that take place in natural settings - climbing, sea kayaking, adventure racing etc.

The hitch is, of course, the deadline. Those people who do the Coast to Coast just for the sake of doing it? They are still a whole lot faster than I'll ever be. If you don't finish the mountain run by a certain time, you are not allowed to complete the course. The fastest people in our orienteering club do courses more than twice as long as the ones I do, in less than half the time. The fastest ever runner of the Coast to Coast did it in ten hours or so. The slowest ever, twenty four hours. The maths doesn't stack up.

Do you believe that you can do anything you want to do? I don't. That is, I do believe that if I wanted to cross the island by foot, mountain bike and kayak, I could do it. Given a week or so. (But the safety infrastructure wouldn't be there at other times of the year, so I'd be unlikely to try it).

Given enough time, we can probably all do way more than we imagine. But some of us are always going to take longer than others. Fortunately, writing isn't a timed activity. Some poets write a poem a day (I did myself, for a month last April. Most of them were rubbish, but the experience was exhilarating). Other poets spend years perfecting each poem. In the end, it doesn't matter how many attempts and rewrites you make - what matters is the poem itself, the end result.

On the other hand, if you need to leap across a ravine, it has to be in one leap. If it takes you more than one, you're in trouble!

Readwritepoem: Clothing

For readwritepoem, where the prompt this week was clothing:

(Note: the original of this poem is laid out in a wave formation. I'm lacking the time to put all the tabs in. Might come back and do it later. I haven't written anything new for a while, so this is "one I prepared earlier")

Girl in a Ballgown

For your final school
ball you choose shot
satin, woven at cross-
purposes, the warp and weft
of it, purple of a ripe berry,
green of a new leaf.
I cut and pin and stitch
because this is one thing
I can do for you these
difficult years –
make you a skin that
fits. When you walk
you are sunshine on green
seas, you are purple cloud
shadows shifting on the waves.

You stand high-heeled on the table.
Your level-eyed father
pins the hem straight.
And suddenly you are fainting,
falling head first in a shimmer
of green waves, tumbling
ocean
ocean
ocean
until he,
playing Daedalus to your
Icarus, catches you just in time,
rewriting the old myths

Catching Up...

A whole month into the year, and when I review progress I find I haven't done much towards my goals. The one thing I have done is to increase my level of exercise. I figure that if I manage one thing each month, I will get there in the end.

This weekend, anyway, may be different. I plan on tackling the first chapter of the family history, and I may even tackle a poem for readwritepoem, for the first time in a while. Mostly, I've been using the summer weekends for lawn mowing and gardening. This weekend that's off the agenda, because I made a visit to the doctor, and I have stitches in my back, so no heavy lifting or pushing for a couple of weeks.

I visited the doctor a week or so ago for some asthma medication, and she noticed a suspicious spot on my back which was why I went back to have it removed. When I was a child, it was quite normal to spend all summer on the beach, wih regular doses of sunburn. I recall peeling great strips of skin off with great glee! So I always figured this was going to come sooner or later, and it doesn't appear to be too serious - she thinks it may be a BCC (basal cell carcinoma) which is very slow-growing, but still not something you invite to stay for a long visit.

The trip for the asthma medication was overdue too, but the ongoing saga of the waterbed prompted me to visit - I'll save that one for another post.

In the meantime, here are some photos of the walking track I discovered while orienteering last week. We had another event this week, which was quite different - among flat suburbs with waterways and wetlands interspersed - lots of reeds, waterbirds etc. These Wednesday evening events are a series we have every summer around local streets and parks, and then for the rest of the year we mostly have Sunday events when we get out into the country more.

The track passes the bottom of a garden:



The view from the top:



I have a fascination with roots and rocks: