Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Broadsheet 3/Voyagers



Broadsheet 3 arrive in the mailbox this week and along with my poem 'Ghosts of St James' there are poems by Riemke Ensing, Tim Jones, Wanjiku Kiarie, Richard Langston, Will Leadbeater, Rachel McAlpine, James Norcliffe, John O'Connor, Peter Olds, Jenny Powell, Laura Solomon, Barbara Strang, and Paul Wolfram. The issue features a reprint of a taped conversation between Alistair Paterson and Robert Creeley in New Mexico in 1982. It's great to hear Creeley's enthusiasm for Curnow's work (give that Curnow's sensibilities are far from Creeley's own). I love the clean simplicty of Broadsheet's design which really draws attention to the poetry.
Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand also arrived in a busy week of teaching by day and stage managing a school musical at night. Here are the contents of Voyagers taken from Tim Jones' Books in the Trees.

The general themes of the sections are: "Back to the Future" - time travel. "Apocalypse Now" - apocalypses, nuclear and otherwise. "Altered States" - robots and other non-human, or transformed, life forms. "ET" - aliens. "When Worlds Collide" - astronomy, and the beginning stages of space exploration. "The Final Frontier" - life and exploration in deep space.

Introduction

Back to the Future

Anna Rugis, the poetry of the future
Louis Johnson, To a Science-Fiction Writer
A.R.D. Fairburn, 2000 A.D.
Janet Charman, in your dreams
Bill Sewell, Utopia
Alistair Paterson, Time traveller
David Gregory, Einstein’s Theory Simply Explained
Jenny Powell with John Dolan, Note to the Aliens
Raewyn Alexander, in the future when we grow new brains
Alan Brunton, F/S
Harvey Molloy, Nanosphere (that's me, folks).
Meliors Simms, Two Kinds of Time
Jack Perkins, Out of Time
Jacqueline Crompton Ottaway, Black Hole
Tim Jones, Good Solid Work

Apocalypse Now

John Dolan, The Siege of Dunedin
David Eggleton, Overseasia
Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Looking at Kapiti
Bill Sewell, The World Catastrophe
Rachel McAlpine, Satellites
David Eggleton, 60-Second Warning
Meg Campbell, The End of the World
Vivienne Plumb, The Last Day of the World
Louis Johnson, Four Poems from the Strontium Age
Michael O’Leary, Nuclear Family – A Fragment
Ruth Gilbert, Still Centre
Fleur Adcock, Last Song
Rob Jackaman, from Lee: A Science Fiction Poem
Marilyn Duckworth, Thin Air
Fiona Kidman, An aftermath
Kevin Ireland, Instructions About Global Warming

Altered States

Iain Sharp, Karen Carpenter Calls Interplanetary Craft
Gordon Challis, The Thermostatic Man
Trevor Reeves, they’re keeping tabs
Mary Cresswell, Metastasis
Simon Williamson, Japan 2030
Tony Beyer, Kron
Louis Johnson, Love Among the Daleks
Seán McMahon, planet one
Janis Freegard, Beside the Laughing Kitchen
Thomas Mitchell, Rituals
Alan Brunton, Vis Imaginitiva
Harvey McQueen, After the Disaster
Jenny Argante, Space Age Lover
Chris Else, Hypnogogia
James Norcliffe, the ascent
Fleur Adcock, from "Gas"

ET

Vivienne Plumb, Signs of Activity
Michael Morrissey, UFOs in Autumn
Andrew Fagan, A Spaceship Has Landed Near Nuhaka
Dana Bryce, Dreams of Alien Love
Tracie McBride, Contact
Cliff Fell, In Truth or Consequences
Nelson Wattie, The Art of Translation
Phil Kawana, This machine kills aliens
Michael Morrissey, Are the Andromedans Like Us
Mark Pirie, Dan and His Amazing Cat
James Dignan, Great Minds
Cath Randle, The Purple fantastic, feels like elastic, spangled and plastic ray gun
Jane Matheson, An Alien’s Notes on first seeing a prunus-plum tree
Harvey McQueen, Return
Owen Marshall, Awakening
Peter Bland, An Old Man and Science Fiction

When Worlds Collide

Katherine Liddy, Crab Nebula
Anna Jackson, Death Star
Stephen Oliver, Manned Mission to the Green Planet
Hilaire Kirkland, Three Poems
Michael O’Leary, Hey man, Wow! [Jimi Hendrix]
Robin Fry, Lift-off
Tim Jones, Touchdown
Tim Jones, The First Artist on Mars
Puri Alvarez, Saturn’s Rings
Robert Sullivan, from Star Waka
Chris Pigott, 'We’re thinking of going into space'
Mark Pirie, Liam Going
Iain Britton, Departing Takaparawha
Bill Sewell, The Imaginary Voyage
Rachel Bush, Voyagers
Stephen Oliver, Letter to an Astronomer

The Final Frontier

Helen Rickerby, Tabloid Headlines
Sue Wootton, the verdigris critic
Richard von Sturmer, from "Mill Pond Poems"
Brian Turner, Earth Star
Gary Forrester, The Thirst That Can Never Be Slaked
David Kārena-Holmes, Your Being
John Dolan, In Which I Materialize, Horribly Maimed, in the Transporter Room of the Enterprise
Mark Pirie, The Rescue Mission
Tze Ming Mok, Lament of the imperfect copy of Ensign Harry Kim
Nic Hill, Somewhere Else
Tim Jones, The stars, Natasha
Mike Webber, My Personal Universe
Bill Sewell, Space & Time

You can buy Voyagers from Amazon.com as a paperback or Kindle e-book, or from Fishpond in New Zealand. You can also find out more about Voyagers, and buy it directly from the publisher, at the Voyagers mini-site.

posted by Harvey Molloy @ 11:04 PM 1 Comments

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Voyagers on Amazon

Work is especially hectic as I'm a stage manager for an ambitious school musical. I've had rehearsals after school and during the weekends. It's exhausting but also rewarding: it's great to start thinking as a stage manager ("get the wedding table on stage now!"). What I love about high school teaching, as opposed to working at university (which I also enjoyed) is the constant learning opportunities: where else would you be given a chance to learn how to be a stage manager? A colleague working on show said to me this week as he got into his soccer kit: "only in teaching do you teach a class, go and coach soccer, and then work as a sound engineer!" Our families may never see us again. My blogging's been a little slack as my spare time has been spent working on two poems and thinking about another short review for the Poetry Society newsletter.

Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (Paperback) edited by Tim Jones and Mark Pirie can now be bought from Amazon. My poem 'Nanosphere' appears in the anthology. Since 'Nanosphere' I've written two sf poems, yet unpublished, 'The next ten thousand years' and 'A protracted campaign'––both are modern Shakesperean sonnets. (I've also written one horror/gothic poem 'Ghosts of St. James' which should appear in the next issue of Mark Pirie's Broadsheet).


Glenn Colquhoun

I'm teaching a little in the Scholarship programme and I went with a small number of senior students to see Glenn Colquhoun––this year's visiting artist at Massey––read in the Old Museum Building at Massey University. Glenn, who is a master performer, quickly overcame the venue's limitations (the space is a little large, echoes, and the sound was far from perfect) and charmed the 100 plus crowd. The size of the audience confirmed my feeling that over the last year we've seen a steady rise in people attending poetry events. And what a treat to have catering: good on Massey for the sushi and salmon sandwhiches afterwards.

From Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letter's newsletter I've found Harvey McQueen's and Alan Loney's blogs. The newletter has a quirky sensibility: the last issue included a great link to all the Penguin SF covers.

A good friend of mine also put me on to New Scientist's coverage of Princeton University's 'Art of Science' competition. Fingers crossed for opening night. . .

Image source: Massey University.

posted by Harvey Molloy @ 9:43 AM 1 Comments

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

A Fine Line/Chris Price

My short article 'Six Tips for Introducing Students to Poetry' has been published in the May issue of the New Zealand Poetry Society's magazine A Fine Line. I sometimes struggle to follow my own tips, especially Tip 3 which involves ensuring that students regularly read or at least hear a poem (ideally at least once a fortnight) and Tip 4 ('Get a local well-known poet to visit your school'); for Tip 4 you really need an outsider to come in and I need to see if I can arrange this for my school this year. Now I'm working on some new poems and then onto another short review for NZPS. I wanted to attend the launch of issue three of Hue and Cry Three on Friday but was hammered by a cold so I stayed at home (I've heard it went swimmingly well). Tim Jones says that the Voyager anthology is on the way so that should be arriving in the letterbox soon.

The next Wellington meeting of New Zealand Poetry Society

Monday 18 May,
7.30pm
The Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave St
Guest Poet: Chris Price, poet, editor, and educator at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Chris's latest poetry collection, The Blind Singer, will be available for purchase. The meeting will begin with an open mic.

Ron Silliman writes a great blog on Carol Anne Duffy being announced the new UK Poet Laureate.

Poems for today: Two poems. Chris Price.

posted by Harvey Molloy @ 7:09 PM 1 Comments