Looking Forward To The Ballroom Cafe With Madeleine Slavick This Sunday

 
I'm looking forward to spending two hours at the Ballroom Cafe in Newtown on Sunday from 4-6pm (cnr Riddiford St and Adelaide Rd). Madeleine Slavick is the guest poet, and she'll be performing a series of portraits of New Zealand poets. There will also be open mike poets - the open mike is of a high standard at the Ballroom - and musician Fraser Ross.

I'm looking forward to these two hours because I like Madeleine, like her poetry, and think this will be an intriguing session. I'm also looking forward to it because it will be two hours away from what has been an incredibly busy life of late: lots of travel, lots of interesting experiences, lots of preparation for important things coming up later in the year, lots and lots of answering emails, but alas, far too little writing, or even submitting what I have written.

I'm hoping things will settle down for the next month or so. I'm planning to get more writing done, and once that's underway, I hope I'll get back into the swing of commenting on blogs etc. I even have some new author interviews for this blog lined up - when I find time to write the questions!

So, if I seem a little absent, in either the mental of the physical sense, that's why. For two hours on Sunday, I plan to be present.

Full Of The Warm South*

 
As I reported in March, I was delighted to be invited to take part in the Readers And Writers Alive! Festival in Invercargill on Friday 29 and Saturday 30 April.

And the whole thing couldn't have gone better. The weather was fine and warm - I was wishing I had packed shorts and jandals, not long-sleeved shirts and jackets. The Festival organisers, and behind them the Dan Davin Literary Foundation and the Invercargill Licensing Trust, do a great job of looking after both presenters and participants, none more so than event organiser Rebecca Amundsen, backed up by Foundation chair Hamesh Wyatt and the helpful & friendly Invercargill Public Library staff.

Arriving just before lunch, I spent Friday afternoon walking the same paths I used to take as a child forty years ago, until the heat of the sun got too much for me and I retreated indoors for wi-fi and poetry preparation.

The Friday evening poetry reading involved four poets: in reading order, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Lynley Dear, myself and Joanna Preston.

The crowd was small, due to a triple threat of competing attractions, none of which had been scheduled when the workshop schedule was planned: the Royal Wedding, the Highlanders vs Blues game, and the Breakers' deciding final against the Taipans. But the audience appeared to enjoy it, just as I enjoyed hearing all the poets and taking a good number of my own Southland poems for a spin. Afterwards, we headed out to Waxy's for a highly entertaining dinner.

On Saturday the 30th, I ran a workshop called "Writing Different Worlds" with twenty participants, including Kay and Joanna, which covered the range of speculative fiction: science fiction, fantasy, horror, and those more elusive beasts such as fabulation, magical realism and metafiction. One participant came up with a great example of metafiction (fiction about fiction) as her response to a writing exercise. Participants ranged in age from 14 to a considerable number of multiples of 14.

Two things struck me about this workshop. The first was the talent and enthusiasm of the writers present, which shone through in the results of the two writing exercises I set and also in the many questions and comments that people made. Most people got the chance to read out the work they had done during the exercises. The overall quality of work was high, but even better, I twice had one of those intake-of-breath moments when, within a few sentences of hearing new work by a writer I'd never met before, I realised that they were - or had the potential to be - really, really good. That doesn't happen often, and it's a great feeling when it does.

The second thing was the sense of isolation many of the writers expressed. I remember feeling isolated when I lived in Dunedin and was just starting to take writing seriously; in Invercargill, three hours' further down the line, the feeling of being cut off from the "main centres" of New Zealand writing activity is even stronger. The Festival plays a valuable part in countering this tyranny of distance, but there is room for a lot more to be done.

Full many a rose is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air

... or so said Thomas Gray. There are roses indeed blooming in Southland; it would be a great pity if their sweetness went to waste.

Kay McKenzie Cooke and Joanna Preston have both blogged about the good time they had at the weekend (it was a pity I couldn't stay for Joanna's workshop: despite all the mischief she had threatened, she was an exemplary participant in mine!)

UPDATE

Workshop participant Claire has also posted her report of the workshop, and it sounds like she enjoyed it too.

*Tip o' the hat to John Keats for the title, via Dennis McEldowney.

Tuesday Poem: Getting By

 
I'm not
jumping from a burning building with my arms on fire
not
crawling in the rubble, looking for my hand.
Geography has been so kind.

But a simple wish
can turn a streetscape to a moonscape
turn pink flesh
to whitened ash and bone.

I'm sitting by the window
wind
lofting soundscapes through the heavy air.
Boy racers, parties, sirens — bang!
A bomb? Could that have been a bomb?

I listen harder.
There's no more sirens, no-one screams.
Just something falling, someone
hitting harder than they planned.

No bomb, no need to worry.
I'm writing
not exploding
getting by
not burning in a burning land.

Credit note: First published in All Blacks Kitchen Gardens.

Tim says: This jittery poem from the early years of the last decade seemed like an apposite one to post tonight.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog - the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week's other poems are linked from the right-hand column.

Book Review: In Pursuit..., by Joanna FitzPatrick

 
In Pursuit..., by Joanna FitzPatrick, is published by La Drôme Press and available from the author's website, and from Amazon as a Kindle ebook and paperback.

Joanna FitzPatrick sent me "In Pursuit..." for review after she had read my interview with Kathleen Jones, the author of the recent, and very well-received biography Katherine Mansfield: The Storyteller. "In Pursuit..." is a biographical novel rather than a biography, but it shares more in common with Kathleen Jones' biography than its subject. One of the notable features of "The Storyteller" is its non-linear time sequence, and "In Pursuit..." uses the same technique, although the time sequence becomes linear as the novel goes on.

I ended up enjoying "In Pursuit..." a lot, but I got off to a slightly rocky start with it. Part of that was circumstantial: having read "The Storyteller" so recently, I had a hard time resisting the urge to rush off to it every few pages to check whether the two books matched. Once I told myself firmly that this was a novel and that I should read it as such, those worries disappeared.

The novel is set in England and Europe apart from the appropriately-named Prelude, which is set in New Zealand in 1908, when Katherine was 19. This was the part of the novel I had the most trouble with, because, as someone who lives in Wellington, aspects of these scenes didn't quite ring true for me. I don't believe Katherine Mansfield would have said, or thought, "I'll go visit Julia" - that's still regarded as an American construction here over 100 years later. And I don't think - although I may be wrong - that KM would have been able to see from her house a ship leaving Wellington Harbour dwindling to a dot on the horizon.

(In saying this, I acknowledge that it is very difficult indeed for an author to get all the details right of a country she does not live in or regularly visit - though I didn't notice any problems of this sort in "The Storyteller". Also, I doubt these quibbles will mean anything to a reader who doesn't live in New Zealand.)

The good news is that, as soon as the story moved overseas and forward in time, I started to enjoy it. Joanna FitzPatrick acknowledges the editors of Katherine Mansfield's letters and diaries in her "Note on Sources", and it's clear that she has drawn on the letters in particular to flesh out a convincing portrait of Katherine and her circle.

I finished "The Storyteller" feeling considerable sympathy for both Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, but "In Pursuit..." is very much Katherine Mansfield's story. More than anything else, she struck me as a woman who was born before her time: someone whose talents might have flourished for much longer in an era when antibiotics could have dealt to her ailments and her desire for independence might have been better appreciated.

So, especially if you are interested in literary history in general or Katherine Mansfield in particular, I recommend that you get hold of a copy of "In Pursuit...".

P.S.: If you are interested in Katherine Mansfield, I also recommend that you check out the Katherine Mansfield Society, whose journal is currently calling for submissions for its forthcoming issue on "Katherine Mansfield and the Fantastic".

Tuesday Poem: Cynara, by Ernest Christopher Dowson

Non sum qualis eram bonæ sub Regno Cynaræ

['The days when Cynara was queen will not return for me.' - CATULLUS]


Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! Thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone, gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Credit note: First published in 1896.

Tim says: Ernest Dowson is a minor and largely forgotten poet, yet he gave the English language the phrases "gone with the wind" (third stanza above), "days of wine and roses" (from "Vitae Summa Brevis"), and, on a more prosaic level, is the first recorded user of the word "soccer".

Dowson's poetry is an example of the doomed, late-Victorian romanticism and decadence most closely associated with the more famous Algernon Swinburne. The excellent Horizon Review has recently published an article by Katy Evans-Bush about Dowson and his place in the transition from Victorian sentimentalism to modernism.

But away, dull care! Begone, literary history! I like this poem for its over-the-topness, for its self-pity, and for that silly, and yet marvellously musical, line:

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng...

"And My Axe!": The Further Adventures of Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli

 
Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli join the Fellowship of the Ring.

Aragorn: You have my sword.

Legolas: And you have my bow.

Gimli: And my axe.

Legolas: And my blade [He brandishes a dagger]

Gimli: And my adze.

Legolas: And my blunderbuss.

Gimli: And my arbalest.

Legolas: Arbalests haven't been invented yet.

Gimli: Neither has the blunderbuss, fool.

Aragorn: Boys —

Legolas: And my velocipede.

Gimli: And my velociraptor.

Aragorn: I'm not going to ride to Mordor on a fucking bicycle.

Gimli: Galadriel would.

Aragorn: And as for velociraptors ... what's a velociraptor?

Gimli: The velociraptor is a genus of dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that existed approximately 75 to 71 million years ago during the later part of the Cretaceous Period.

Legolas: Wikipedia hasn't been invented yet either.

Aragorn: These velociraptors - good in a fight?

Gimli: Dwarven armies used to ride them into battle.

Legolas: Ooh, they did not!

Gimli: Did too.

Legolas: Whatever. They're extinct.

Gimli: There are many things beneath the sun and the moon, friend Legolas, that you do not know. Mayhap in some dark glade or on some lonely mountaintop, beasts long forgotten by the world live on, waiting to play their part in the big battle at the end of the book.

Legolas: You looked ahead. That's cheating.

Aragorn: Screw this. Let's form a band instead - a power trio. I already have some drums.

Legolas: And you have my bass.

Gimli: And my axe!

Tuesday Poem: The Aliquot Brothers

 
Boys in men's shirts, the Aliquot Brothers
have come to town. They are

backing us into corners, mopping up
the fragments we leave behind.

They are the perfect combination.
The redhead paints his toes. The honey blond

streaks highlights through his hair.
They go café to café, dividing

to rule, smearing tablecloths
with froth and melted cheese. (The rest of us

confined to quarters, mumbling
over cold porridge and twice-strained tea.)

No use complaining: they'll leave
when they're good and ready,

with no remainder, nothing
but the hiss of their departure,

the closing door that splits
this world from its neighbour.


Credit note: "The Aliquot Brothers" was first published in Issue 14 of Interlitq, "A New Zealand Literary Showcase". This issue has stories and poems by a wide range of New Zealand writers - it is well worth checking out. It will also appear in my forthcoming poetry collection Men Briefly Explained, published by Interactive Press of Brisbane.

Tim says: An aliquot is a number that divides another number evenly and leaves no remainder. That'll be an NCEA Level 1 numeracy credit, please.

You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog - the featured poem is on the centre of the page, and the week's other poems are linked from the right-hand column. I'm very pleased to be this week's Tuesday Poem editor on the main blog.