Tuesday Poem: Queens Of Silk, Kings Of Velour

 
Queens of Silk, Kings Of Velour

A 70s party: disco, afros, flares and Abba.
I'm dancing with the women,
talking with the men.

Three songs up, strutting my stuff,
the only male dancer, bathed
in unprecedented female attention.

Three songs down, back on the sofa,
our gang of four likely lads
trading facts about the history of punk.

On the floor, I'm surrounded
by silk, smiles, the sensational
shimmying.

On the sofa, we've moved on to Yes.
I sing the chorus of "Close to the Edge"
with a man I don't even know.

This is what it means to be a man: not
the All Blacks, not power tools,
not fighting foreign wars,

but the ability to name
all the members and ex-members
of obscure seventies bands.

"Dance To The Music," Sly says,
and so I must obey.
But not without a caveat:

"Is this actually from the seventies?"
asks a couch-bound friend.
"From 1968," I say. "Let's dance!"

Tim says: This poem has just been published in JAAM 28: Dance Dance Dance, the 2010 issue of JAAM Magazine, edited by Clare Needham and Helen Rickerby.

JAAM 28 has a lovely cover and, from what I've read so far, is an excellent issue. It's definitely worth asking JAAM for the next dance.

You can find all the Tuesday Poems online at the Tuesday Poem blog.

The NZSA Janet Frame Memorial Award For Literature: A Nice Surprise!

I got a nice surprise on Monday: an email from Tina Shaw, Programme Manager of the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA), to say that I'd been selected as the 2010 recipient of the biennial Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature, first awarded in 2008 to poet, novelist and anthologist Emma Neale.

(It's important to note that this NZSA award is not the same as another, longer-established set of awards, the Janet Frame Literary Trust Awards.)

The award is open to authors of literary or imaginative fiction, as well as poetry, who are members of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Fortunately, it seems, I tick all those boxes!

I'm delighted to receive this award, not just because the money will come in handy to help me complete the short story collection I'm currently working on, but also because it's an honour to win an award associated with the name of Janet Frame.

Here's how Beatties Book Blog reported the news. Thanks, Graham, and thanks to the NZSA!

Tuesday Poem: Inheritance, by Jennifer Compton

Inheritance

1.

The country station was as good as deserted, the train was late.
The stationmaster was keeping to himself, as if he didn't exist.
Bored, beside myself, I kicked gravel, walked up and down.
It's always when I'm bored. As if it is not allowed.

My great-great-great grandfather stood up in my mind
as the sky came down and pinned me to the ground.

He was clothed in a book of about 20,000 words.
But sometimes a story won't become a book.
The book it could be roars through you, like a train
not stopping at a station, bucketing, as loud and brief
as a breath, pushing a turbulence before it, a great wind.

2.

The hobgoblins of local drama, the gossips, cobble
a likely story together – just for the hell of it – for free.
- There was one, who was seen going on a ship,
never seen again. He sailed away, left his kin.
Left his white kin and his black kin.

His father before him left his land, was shipped in chains,
or pressed, or, an illiterate man in a uniform, fetched up
on the island that hangs like a teardrop below the map.
To father him. To father me. Perhaps he made a choice.
He chose to leave the known world, a religious, a madman.

3.

And that man's son left. I'd like to think that a relative of mine
could see the way things were going, on the beach, scanning
the craft of summoning technology putting in and putting out.
- I'm out of here. I can pass for white in another country.
During the journey I will be reborn as someone else.
And he left his blackfella on the shore and boarded like a white man
with perhaps an Andalusian grandmother, or one of the dark Irish,
worked his passage suspecting there would be a place
that was not so (if he even knew the word) adamantine.

Or maybe destiny picked him up by the scruff of the neck
and put him on the ship. Scurvy had wrought havoc or
flogging had killed more than it cured. Or his curiosity
killed the cat as he checked out all this fabulous machinery,
the latest thing, a teenage boy keen to know the cutting edge,
and then he felt the new world lurch under his feet as it took off,
set sail and, perforce, took him too.

4.

Was he silent in later life, morose at the kitchen table,
as his wife set the bread to prove above the range in a
valley black with punga and fern, dripping, with speaking
water and puffs of mist like smoke and the sound of the trap
in the road and the grown children and their children arriving?
Did he rouse himself to their language he had given them
or did he nod and rise and go out the back to smoke,
did he go to the bottled spirit secreted in the thatch?
To speak with his own. Was there one, a little girl?
White as a toheroa shell on a midden, who always sought him out
and sat next to him speaking and not speaking, with that immemorial
electricity, the pulse, and another, a boy perhaps, who sat far off
and stared and saw it but was afraid. As it gathered around them.

Tim says: I've been reading Jennifer Compton's recent collection Barefoot over the past few days. There are many fine poems in it, but "Inheritance" really stood out for me, so I decided to ask Jennifer whether I could use it as a Tuesday Poem. Then I discovered that Jennifer has just been announced as the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award for 2010, so that made the request even more timely!

I hope you like this poem as much as I do.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

How To Buy My Books: Transported, Anarya's Secret, Voyagers

Welcome! You'll find my recent posts listed on the left-hand side of this blog. Since I'm between posts at the moment, here are some of my books, and how to buy them.

• My short story collection Transported, which was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, has recently become available for the Kindle.
• My fantasy novel Anarya's Secret is available in hardback, paperback or ebook format.
• Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, an anthology I co-edited with Mark Pirie, won the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work. You can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book, or buy it directly from the publisher at the Voyagers mini-site.

You'll also find my work in these recent anthologies:

• For a great sampler of NZ science fiction and fantasy, try A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, which includes my story "The Last Good Place".
• For the cricket fan, or the poetry fan, in your life: A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009, which includes my poem "Swing".

A Short List Of Greenlandic Placenames

Aasiaat (which means "Spiders")
Alluitsup Paa
Ilulissat
Ittoqqortoormiit
Kangerlussuatsiaq
Narsarsuaq
Nuuk (the capital)
Qaanaaq (where the Inuit people removed by the builders of Thule Air Base were relocated)
Qaqortoq
Sisimiut
Uummannaq ("Heart-Shaped", referring to the mountain behind the town)

A game of football in Uummannaq

From time to time, I develop obsessions with places - especially cold places. A couple of years ago, it was Svalbard. Now I've got Kalaallit Nunaat, aka Greenland, on the brain. It's a country I very much doubt I'll ever visit - it would be hard to find a justification for the greenhouse gas emissions entailed by doing so, especially given the effect that climate change is having on the country - but I have been poring over the Lonely Planet Guide to Greenland and the Arctic, and Gretel Ehrlich's fascinating memoir This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

The paradoxical effects of climate change on Greenland - the way in which it is simultaneously disrupting the Inuit hunting culture of the north and opening up farmland in the south; the way in which increased outflows from Greenland's vast central icecap are affecting land and sea alike; the Greenland administration's search for income from the very forces, such as oil exploration, that are helping to destabilise their environment - are both fascinating and disturbing. But that's a topic for another time: what I wanted to say here is that Greenlandic is a beautiful language that befits a beautiful country. Wouldn't you rather live in Aasiaat than Spiders?

Tuesday Poem: Echolalia, by Saradha Koirala

Echolalia

This morning’s northerly
throws death out in my path
a tiny carcass blown from a rubbish bag
a broken bird
at the bottom of a plate glass window.

A paper bag twists itself into the gutter
a butterfly has its wings torn off.

An old man walks into a bar
moving like shaking out a rug
he smells of wood-smoke and rain.
No
like wet logs burning.

I think of houses I’ve visited
with apple cores browning under beds

a cat licking the ends of breakfast
off a bowl in the sink
and the use of words I wasn’t allowed
words I wouldn’t dare use
and words I’d never heard before.

(First published in Moments in the Whirlwind, New Zealand Poetry Society, 2009)

Tim says: I posted this poem for three reasons: first, I love the word "Echolalia"; second, I love the poem that follows it as much as the word; and third, Saradha Koirala is the guest poet at November's "Poetry at the Ballroom Cafe" session, which will run from 4-6pm at the Ballroom Cafe, cnr Riddiford St & Adelaide Rd, Newtown, on Sunday 21 November. The session will start with an open mike, followed by musicians Josie & Mary Campbell, followed by Saradha's guest slot.

I understand that Saradha will read a mix of poems from her debut collection Wit of the Staircase and uncollected poems. I'm really looking forward to it.

You can check out all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.

Welcome To My Blog

Welcome! You'll find my recent posts listed on the left-hand side of this blog. Since I'm between posts at the moment, here are some of my books, and how to buy them.

• My short story collection Transported, which was longlisted for the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, has recently become available for the Kindle.
• My fantasy novel Anarya's Secret is available in hardback, paperback or ebook format.
• Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, an anthology I co-edited with Mark Pirie, won the 2010 Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Collected Work. You can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book, or buy it directly from the publisher at the Voyagers mini-site.

You'll also find my work in these recent anthologies:

• For a great sampler of NZ science fiction and fantasy, try A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, which includes my story "The Last Good Place".
• For the cricket fan, or the poetry fan, in your life: A Tingling Catch: A Century of New Zealand Cricket Poems 1864-2009, which includes my poem "Swing".