Tuesday Poem: Prove You Are Not A Robot, by P. S. Cottier

Prove that you are not a robot.
Affirm android is what you're not.
Prick a digit, we'll watch the blood flow
(though nanovamps may swim, and grow).
Indicate a lack of chips embedded -
that you are only fleshy headed,
with just the right amount of brain
to reason, love and feel all pain.
Now fill in the code that we select -
words unknown to mortal intellect.
Quickly, for we're losing time -
our batteries run down at nine.

Credit Note: This is an original poem by P. S. Cottier and is published here by permission of the author - and if you have not already done so, you should check out her blog.

Tim Says: The first time I saw the command to "Prove that you are not a robot", I suffered a prolonged period of existential dread. Might I, in fact, be a robot? Might there be telltale signs? How could I prove I wasn't?

P. S. Cottier did something more useful. She wrote a poem - and here it is. I really like it.

The Tuesday Poem: One does not simply walk into The Tuesday Poem. One clicks.

Voting Now Open: Vote Takahe for Bird of the Year 2012

It's on! Forest and Bird's 2012 Bird of the Year competition is now open - and this means that you can Vote Takahe right now, and encourage all your friends (and enemies) to do likewise!

Here is where you can vote: http://www.birdoftheyear.org.nz/

While most of you will understand that the takahe is just naturally cooler, sexier, and more electable than any other bird, there might be a few people who are wondering what's in it for them. Read Friday's announcement of the takahe campaign below and you'll have your answer - and if you're still a swinging voter, check back later in the week for a Vote Takahe FAQ that will answer questions you didn't even know you wanted asked.

Friday's announcement

What: Every year, the excellent conservation organisation Forest and Bird holds its Bird of the Year competition. The 2012 competition opens on Monday 10 September. And this year, I am the campaign manager for the rightful winner of that competition, the takahe.

Photo: Steve Attwood

Who: Yes, the takahe. There's one, right there, comin' at ya. It's the pukeko's bigger, cooler, rarer cousin. And the news that the pukeko won the 2011 competition? The takahe isn't taking that well at all.

Why: There are a lot of reasons why you should vote for the takahe, and I'll be telling you all about them over the next three weeks. Here are three to start with.

1) The takahe is a survivor. It was thought to be extinct for more than half a century - but it wasn't, and one determined naturalist, Dr Geoffrey Orbell, kept looking for it until he found it in the Murchison Mountains of Fiordland. When he clambered up the mountains and found them, the takahe just kept on going about their business. They didn't throw a big party or anything.

2) The takahe is beautiful. Just look at those gorgeous feathers!

3) If you don't Vote Takahe, it might peck you on the knee. True story: A takahe once pecked a photographer friend of mine on the knee as he was photographing it - this was in the days before the general public had access to takahe, as they do today, e.g. at Zealandia and on Kapiti Island. He kept taking photos. The takahe kept pecking his knee. And I lived to tell you the tale.

When: The competition opens on Monday 10 September and runs for three weeks.

How: You'll be able to vote for the takahe online from Monday onwards. Vote early. Vote often (am I allowed to say that?). Tell your friends to vote, and use social media to pimp out these important hashtags: #votetakahe and #birdoftheyear. I'll be tweeting like a bird that tweets - takahe don't tweet, because they're far too cool.

There'll be plenty more to come during the campaign, including a set of Frequently Asked Questions about the Takahe that I'm just about to make up. There will be more photos, some actual facts, and a comparison of the takahe with the honey badger. Keep checking this blog, keep voting, and keep watching the skies!*

*But not for takahe - they're flightless.

Vote Takahe for Bird of the Year 2012

What: Every year, the excellent conservation organisation Forest & Bird holds its Bird of the Year competition. The 2012 competition opens on Monday 10 September. And this year, I am the campaign manager for the rightful winner of that competition, the takahe.

Photo: Steve Attwood

Who: Yes, the takahe. There's one, right there, comin' at ya. It's the pukeko's bigger, cooler, rarer cousin. And the news that the pukeko won the 2011 competition? The takahe isn't taking that well at all.

Why: There are a lot of reasons why you should vote for the takahe, and I'll be telling you all about them over the next three weeks. Here are three to start with.

1) The takahe is a survivor. It was thought to be extinct for more than half a century - but it wasn't, and one determined naturalist, Dr Geoffrey Orbell, kept looking for it until he found it in the Murchison Mountains of Fiordland. When he clambered up the mountains and found them, the takahe just kept on going about their business. They didn't throw a big party or anything.

2) The takahe is beautiful. Just look at those gorgeous feathers!

3) If you don't Vote Takahe, it might peck you on the knee. True story: A takahe once pecked a photographer friend of mine on the knee as he was photographing it - this was in the days before the general public had access to takahe, as they do today, e.g. at Zealandia and on Kapiti Island. He kept taking photos. The takahe kept pecking his knee. And I lived to tell you the tale.

When: The competition opens on Monday 10 September and runs for three weeks.

How: You'll be able to vote for the takahe online from Monday onwards. Vote early. Vote often (am I allowed to say that?). Tell your friends to vote, and use social media to pimp out these important hashtags: #votetakahe and #birdoftheyear. I'll be tweeting like a bird that tweets - takahe don't tweet, because they're far too cool.

There'll be plenty more to come during the campaign, including a set of Frequently Asked Questions about the Takahe that I'm just about to make up. There will be more photos, some actual facts, and a comparison of the takahe with the honey badger. Keep checking this blog, keep voting, and keep watching the skies!*

*But not for takahe - they're flightless.

Tuesday Poem: And yet it moves, by Helen Heath

And yet it moves                                  Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

you say of the earth
      - not the sun around us.

You cannot close your eyes
to the view at the end

of the eyeglass. Faith
is not a veil. Eyes drawn

to the stars, the suns, again
and again for years until

they burn through your lenses
twin black holes, one for each eye.

The dark slowly spreads.
The inquisition judges heresy,

commands a recant, wants blind
allegiance from a man in the dark

so you recant, muttering
and yet it moves.

Credit note: "And yet it moves" was published in Helen Heath's collection Graft (VUP, 2012) and is reproduced here by permission of the author.

Tim says: I've just finished reading Graft, and while I enjoyed the whole collection, the highlight for me was a number of wonderful poems about science, scientists and the history of science - other include the prizewinning Making tea in the universe and Night's Magic. This poem about Galileo Galilei elegantly captures the great dilemma of his life.

The Tuesday Poem: You can read the hub Tuesday poem on the Tuesday Poem blog, and all the other Tuesday Poems are linked from the sidebar to the left.

An Interview With Sugu Pillay

Sugu Pillay is a poet and fiction writer who was born in Malaysia and now lives in Wellington. Her writing has appeared in journals, and online, and her first collection of short stories, The Chandrasekhar Limit and Other Stories, was published in 2002.

Sugu's first poetry collection, Flaubert's Drum, has just been published by IP. At the time of writing, Sugu and fellow poet Karen Zelas, with publisher and poet Dr David Reiter, are currently touring their new collections around New Zealand - look out for them at a poetry venue near you! I am looking forward to attending their Wellington launch event on Monday 3 September.

I ran the title poem of Sugu's collection as my Tuesday Poem this week, and Sugu was kind enough to answer the following five questions:

1. What is the significance of the title, Flaubert’s Drum?

As explained in the Notes at the back of the collection, it refers to Flaubert’s comment: “Human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat our tunes for bears to dance to when all the time we long to move the stars to pity”. Writers struggle with articulation, swinging on this pendulum from the drum of the cracked kettle to the desired Music of the Spheres!  The title poem on page 37 exemplifies this problem of articulation.

2. How is Flaubert’s Drum organised? Does the collection have an overarching theme, or will the readers recognise a number of themes within it?

Flaubert’s Drum was submitted for IP’s 2012 Best Poetry competition as a collection of mostly published poems written over a long period. Grouping the poems under suitable headings is the only “organising” they have undergone. However, I could say the theme of Loss and the problem of its articulation, runs through many of the poems. Loss can be death of a loved one, the loss of love, loss of meaning, the loss of one’s place in the world, a dislocation.

3. I know from reading some of the poems in literary magasines that your experience as an immigrant to this country has featured in your poetry. Is this also the case in Flaubert’s Drum?

The first section under the heading ‘From Mission Bay to St Heliers’, has nine poems which express “the poetics of migrancy” in the voice of an invented persona, an immigrant artist. Although each poem has its own raison d’ étre, together the poems explore “the narrative of assimilation”, an on-going negotiation with oneself and everything encountered in the new land. There is another section, ‘Who Said What’ which unlike ‘Mission Bay to St Heliers’ is a personal response to experiences in “this other Eden”. In a sense, all immigrants are on a pilgrim's progress from initial euphoria, depression and adjustment to acceptance of their chosen "other Eden".

4. Who are some of your favourite poets or poets who have influenced your own writing?

Favourites change with the times. I had a very British colonial education. I fell in love with poetry in the Fourth Form when I encountered Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, Byron. At the University of Malaya, we read the then pantheon of English poets from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot in the First Year, with in-depth study in the Second & Third Years. My favourites were the Metaphysical poets, especially Donne and Marvell.  Their inventiveness of metaphor and “conceits” still delight and inspire.

Stylistically I can’t claim a particular influence. I think every poet you read stays somewhere in your subconscious, surfacing unexpectedly in the midst of your writing, like Donne’s “Busy old fool, unruly Sun” (and Cat Steven’s “Morning is breaking”) ringing in my head as I write “here comes the sun of pop songs/ & metaphysical poets/breaking the morning /with its glare & demands/for purposeful activity”.

It was much later, that I read American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand poets. When I lived in Auckland for about two years, I was influenced by poets like Michele Leggott, Wystan Curnow and those who were regular contributors to A brief description of the whole world (now abbreviated to brief thankfully!). You would have noticed in my poems the use of borrowed lines in italics. I copied this from Michele Leggott. This was the period when I read voraciously on Post-Modern writing. I absolutely loved the intertextuality dense with references and cross-references. There’s an electricity in subtexts! However, I learnt to write in a variety of ways.

It seems to me while you use poetic devices in many ways to land your poems, you can decide whether you want to parachute to safety and make your poems very accessible to your readers, or you can parachute for sheer fun, use word play and verbal gymnastics creating poems which are fun to unpack. Or you can parachute to a secret destination, leaving no clear guide for the reader, making the poem a challenging “writerly” text inviting the reader’s active participation in the creative process. I hope I have written all three types in Flaubert’s Drum.

5. Finally, and if you don’t mind me asking, what are you working on at present?

I have three plays and a novel in the burner but they’ve been there for quite some time now! For poetry, I have a rather ambitious project, Voices. The inspiration comes from the Upanishads which are ancient Sanskrit texts going back to 800 BC. They are abstract philosophical speculations about Creation, the nature of the Self and Reality. About 14 Upanishads are said to exist but I’ve only read 10 of them in English translation. Here’s a tantalising bit from the Isa Upanishad : “They have put a golden stopper in the neck of the bottle. Pull it, Lord! Let out reality. I am full of longing”.   

Book availability details

Flaubert's Drum is available from IP, from a range of online sources including iTunes and Amazon.com, and through bookshops. The ISBN is ISBN 9781921869945.

Tuesday Poem: Flaubert's Drum, by Sugu Pillay

that harlequin tear again

its fall threatened in Keats’ time

her soapy slippery anguished palms

cup for the reflecting bell-jar

each drop

the world’s grammar

the Rosetta stone

plows wide furrows

meets with resistance

may or may not connect

never certain that it should

each known thing easily

becomes unknown

like that cracked kettle

of Flaubert’s

Credit note: This is the title poem of Sugu Pillay's debut poetry collection Flaubert's Drum, which has just been published by IP, who also published my collection Men Briefly Explained.

Tim says: Sugu and fellow poet Karen Zelas, with publisher and poet Dr David Reiter, are currently touring their new collections around New Zealand - look out for them at a poetry venue near you! I am looking forward to attending their Wellington launch event on Monday 3 September.

Watch out for my interview with Sugu Pillay, which should appear here on Thursday.

The Tuesday Poem: You can find links to this and all the other Tuesday Poems on the left of the Tuesday Poem blog, where you will also find the hub poem for the week.

Mansfield with Monsters: An Interview With Matt And Debbie Cowens

Matt and Debbie Cowens are both high school teachers who live and work on the Kapiti Coast. They’ve each had a number of short stories published online and in anthologies. Mansfield with Monsters is their first collaborative collection of short stories – collaborating with each other and with New Zealand’s most iconic writer of short fiction, Katherine Mansfield.

Tim adds: Mansfield with Monsters is the second book published by Steam Press, a new New Zealand science fiction publisher which has made quite an impact since it was set up.

Why Mansfield, and why with monsters?

We’re both fans of the science fiction and horror genres, and we’re very familiar with Mansfield’s work as we’ve taught her stories in high school. The opportunity to build a bridge between the two was too tempting to pass up. It created a lot of pressure to do justice to both Mansfield, as New Zealand’s most iconic writer, and to the speculative genre we love, but it was enormously satisfying to weave the two together.

Did you look at other works in the mash-up genre, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, when planning Mansfield with Monsters?

Debbie had read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which blazed a trail in the concept of reworking classic fiction which is in the public domain, but we wanted to take Mansfield with Monsters in a slightly different direction. It was important to us to have the supernatural or otherworldly elements work with the source material on a thematic as well as a literal level. Of course we also had the luxury of working with multiple stories, exploring different kinds of creatures and mythologies, and how they could fit into the lives of Katherine Mansfield’s characters, which kept the project fresh and makes it a little different to other mashups.

Katherine Mansfield’s writing is not usually plot-heavy.  Did that cause a problem for you when you came to rework these stories, and if so, what strategies did you use to get around it?

Mansfield’s stories are quite varied, so we tackled each one a little differently. A story like The Doll’s House follows a clear sequence of events to reveal the injustice of prejudice and the class system. We took that concept and pushed it to a darker place, filling in little details along the way to twist the story into a tale of witchcraft, murder, possession and insanity – borne out of prejudice and the injustice of the class system. Other stories were more stream-of-consciousness and we had to be more bold in our reshaping. It was a delight to sit down with each story and deconstruct it, probe it for areas where the supernatural could worm its way in, or turn it upside down and give it a good shaking to see what the bones of the story were and whether we could arrange those bones into a different but coherent shape, like literary archaeologists building their own ‘Tyrannosaurus Mansfield’.

On the other hand, of course, there is a Gothic – and New Zealand Gothic – flavour to a number of Mansfield’s stories. You start the collection with your version of “The Woman at the Store” – was it that story’s pre-existing atmosphere of menace that made you decide to start the collection with it?

Our wonderful editor Stephen Minchin decided the final order of the stories. The Woman at the Store is a story which already bordered on horror, and cast New Zealand in an interesting Wild West, frontier light. Twisting it to include a Pet Cemetery vibe maintained the dark sense of menace of the previously published version whilst referencing a classic of modern horror. It signals to the reader that the collection is less tongue-in-cheek than something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We asked Stephen why it was first up in the anthology and his sagely answer was that the stories are chronological in terms of first publication.

It may seem odd to ask about a story you haven’t included, but when I opened the book I was looking forward to reading your version of “At the Bay” – yet I see that you haven’t included it. Did you know from an early stage what stories you would include, or did you experiment with more stories than made it to the published collection?

We read a wide range of Mansfield’s stories and explored the copyright laws of various countries. Mansfield’s death in 1923 placed her early works in the public domain in all the countries we wanted to reach, but some of her posthumously published stories are still owned by American publishers. We looked for stories which sparked our imaginations, stories which gave us opportunities to write a range of speculative adaptations. We were guided by intuition, by inspiration, and by legal constraints. At the Bay was tempting as we both love it, but it was structurally difficult and the idea of how to make to work without excising enormous tracts of text never quite clicked into place.

Has working with a number of her stories “from the inside” changed your opinion of Katherine Mansfield and her writing?

Mansfield’s place in New Zealand’s literary pantheon is well deserved – this process served to reinforce that view for us. Her writing is diverse and crafted and bleak and funny and relevant and historical – it’s incredibly powerful and moving. We each became more intimately acquainted with Mansfield’s stories and in working with her learned a great deal about the power of words, of inflection and suggestion. It was a delight and lead us to read Mansfield more widely – something we hope it will do for others too.

When I first heard of this project, I thought to myself that it would be very interesting to see how the literary community reacted to it: would there be guardians of the temple of New Zealand literature who would disapprove of the project? My impression is that reaction, overall has been very positive. Is that your experience too?

We’ve been very happy with the reception the novel has received so far. It was a risky proposition but people have been very open to the idea, from the Katherine Mansfield society to academics to devoted fans.  For younger readers Mansfield is definitely a historical figure, someone from a distant time whose life and work can have a degree of remoteness. It was part of our aim to reach out to a more modern audience with these stories. It’s a collection written out of love for Mansfield’s work and for the horror and science fiction elements we blended with them. It’s a tribute to a great writer, and so far it has been received as such.

You are both school teachers. Do you plan to, or could you see yourselves, using Mansfield with Monsters as a teaching tool?

Definitely. We know of a couple of schools where the stories have already been used and the feedback from students and teachers has been really positive. We’re working on some activities to help teachers use Mansfield with Monsters and other literary mash-up works as a point of comparison with their source material. 

If you don’t mind me asking, what other literary projects do you have on the go?

We’re both working on our own individual novels at present. Debbie is working on a young adult novel set in a Steampunk Victorian academy for aspiring villains, while Matt is reworking a manuscript dealing with ghosts, secret societies and arcane science in nineteenth century New Zealand. The collaborative process was wonderful and went very smoothly, so we may well return to a joint writing project in the future. For now we are savouring the success of Mansfield with Monsters.

How to buy Mansfield with Monsters

Mansfield with Monsters is currently available online at www.steampress.co.nz and www.amazon.com as well as in Unity Books and Arty Bee’s in Wellington, and Paper Plus, Whitcoulls and independent bookstores throughout New Zealand.