the red room

For the next few months I may be posting infrequently on this blog. The reason: Samuel Leo Harry Rastall, who was born in the middle of July. He’s our sweetheart, so I’m off to take care of him.

Yesterday I was meant to go to a master class with American musician and poet, Joy Harjo, but unfortunately was stuck at home because of the weather (I wasn’t ready to take a four-week-old out in the snow and sleet). I thought I would share her amazing and unique poetry on my blog. The poem “My House is the Red Earth” (this version is on the Poetry Foundation website), is one of my favourites. I also have put a link to what must be her most anthologised poem, the powerful “She Had Some Horses”.

“My House is the Red Earth” by Joy Harjo
“She Had Some Horses” by Joy Harjo

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.

While waiting for Sam to arrive I went a little craft mad. My favourite project was making a felt wreath (top image) from a tutorial at The Purl Bee. As it is a Christmas decoration it should probably have been a more summery wreath. Among other things, the project taught me how to sew a French knot, which is tricksy, at least for me. I also found it hard to buy quality felt in Wellington, so maybe I need to learn how to make my own. My wreath is slightly different from the Purl Bee tutorial as I wanted it to be round so added a card backing. I still want to add another three or four flowers and a little more colour. Anyway, this was a fun if not labour-intensive project (no pun intended).

The second picture is a travel kit for my Mother. I made her a sleep/eye mask out of fabric from a Japanese robe that I never wore. The sweet, cherry blossom pattern didn’t deserve to moulder in my wardrobe. I can’t remember which pattern I used (there are a many free patterns online), but I did line the mask with polar-fleece for comfort. The laundry bag I made out of cotton duck and a green, cotton umbrella print (I didn’t use a pattern as it’s a basic drawstring bag). If you’re anything like me, you use a plastic bag to put your delicates in while on holiday. I think there is an extra-holidayness about having a nice bag to hang from your hotel room door, and I really enjoy the mix of patterns and colour.

Greece

The wide estuary mouth is lazy. Spun with silt and clay,
unseen eddies ripple in from the ocean floor.

Into the lull a horse trips, submerged to his white splashed
throat – he is beautiful, dappled chestnut coat dark with sweat,

bulbous eyes like ripe, black mulberries
his knees pop the sea’s surface,
YYYYYYYYYYYhooves hurry for ground,
ears a tensile line along his neck. He lurches
YYYYYYYYYYYsucked under
out to open ocean, to surge – to surface, limbs
bolt and quiver, mane a beating wing,
pupils a blossoming cactus,
YYYYYYYYYYYhe tries to learn his sea-bound body
from memory born in muscle; the propeller kick
and pumping head are not yet his. As a child I heard
of sea eels, their larva leaves of flesh dispersed like seeds
of an idea. Transparent, they were a mystery to people, so unlike
eels they were.YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYFlowing for years
with the gulf stream, the glasseels filtered
beneath the Baltic sea, migrating on lucid currents to the Mediterranean.
They scrambled into the mouths of rivers
ten thousand slivers
YYYYYYYYYYYas fluent as water
over stones and between the detritus of branches,
they encountered, for the first time, sand and burrowing
through to higher inlets, gills and hearts
now visible, they pigmented
into the eels they did not know they were.

Look! people yelled, pointing down to the blue, clear ocean,
a horse swims.

My last three Tuesday Poems have all featured horses, so I thought I would post a poem of my own that features a horse. I wrote this poem in 2008, at a time when I was interested in how to create or represent movement in poetry. It was first published in Brief 39.

For more Tuesday Poems, check out the hub.

Horse Story

The thinnest horse of my life stood in a paddock
by Lake Tekapo. It was white and its ribs
a drying rack for skin, its body an in-drawn breath.
You walked ahead to take a photograph of two kayakers on the lake,
our car parked precariously by the side of the highway.
Naturally I thought about desire and its various manifestations.
For example, there was a story someone told me once about a horse.
A joke, really. Something about a farmer trying to save on feed.
It will come to me. The horse in that paddock by the lake was,
miraculously, eating. Grass, I guess; I don’t know much about horses.
Its head bobbed, down below the fence line, then back into the air.
While you pulled out your camera—I’m assuming, as I couldn’t discern
detail from that distance—I stood before that paddock and wondered
what color life might be if emptied of all memory. No yearning
would be its corollary, which would wipe this horse from existence,
were it merely symbol. Or perhaps only yearning. I don’t know.
In the joke, the farmer feeds his horse a little bit less each day,
one of those barely discernable differences that is cumulative,
until you decide you notice, that it is not your imagination,
like the silvering of your own hair or a distance emerging between,
say, the two kayaks on the lake as I turned from the horse
to see what was keeping you. You had started back towards me,
growing larger and larger, like a much-anticipated square on the calendar
that felt once like it would never arrive. When you did, I tried to talk
to you about the horse, but it no longer stood in the paddock.
Are you sure, you asked, that it was really there? Look,
no one breaks into blossom. Here’s how it ends:
The farmer had the horse eating nearly nothing, but it died.

“Horse Story” is from Walpert’s collection of poems, Etymology (Cinnamon Press). What strikes me about Walpert’s poem is the way it conveys the different worlds we inhabit. The woman in the poem is interested in the “two kayakers on the lake,” whereas the poet stops at the horse. The poem not only talks to the world of the present, but that of memory and desire, which is different for all of us. I also enjoy the inconclusiveness of the poem. “I don’t know,” says the poet, because of course, we can’t.

Bryan Walpert is also the author of A History of Glass (Stephen F. Austin State UP, forthcoming October), and Ephraim’s Eyes (Pewter Rose Press), named a Best Book of 2010; and a scholarly monograph, Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, forthcoming October). His work has been published widely in journals or anthologies in NZ, the UK, and his native U.S., and has received a number of awards, most recently the James Wright Poetry Award from the Mid-American Review. He teaches creative writing at Massey University’s School of English & Media Studies in Palmerston North. Bryan is also my doctoral supervisor, so I am extremely lucky.

For more information, visit http://bryanwalpert.com.

For other Tuesday Poems, check out the hub.

A short post today to share my recent adventures into craft. While heavily pregnant I found it difficult to do sewing projects that needed the fabric to be cut out on the floor. So during my final month of pregnancy I started to knit and hand sew instead. One of my projects is a set of new Christmas decorations that are less commercial and wintery. They are loosely based on the traditional and New Zealand versions of Twelve Days of Christmas. At the moment I only have moreporks and pears, but I hope to make French hens, turtle doves, and women in piupiu. They are based on designs by Lil Fish Studios. Most of the felt was purchased from Nancys in Wellington, but some of it also came from Spotlight.

In other news I gave birth to our son, Samuel Leo Harry Rastall on Friday. Welcome to an amazing world, Sammy!

Smells

I love . . .
The smell of the rain on the warm footpath,
the smell of our baby all clean from her bath,
the smell of clean sheets when Mum makes
XXmy bed,
and the smell in the kitchen when Dad’s
XXmaking bread.

I love . . .
the smell of the sea, all sharp, fresh and briny,
the smell of our Christmas tree, pungent and piny,
the smell of sweet peas climbing over the wall.
But the warm smell of horses I love best of all . . .

This sweet and nostalgic poem by Jane Buxton comes from the book 100 New Zealand Poems for Children (Random House, 1999), edited by Jo Noble and illustrated by David Elliot. Jane Buxton is a New Zealand children’s author who was born in Otaki, but currently lives in North Canterbury.

I bought 100 New Zealand Poems for Children a few month ago because I am trying to build up a library for (my son) Sam of children’s writing about New Zealand. I want at least some of the books he reads to be about the place he lives. And because a PhD is inescapable, being able to read about your home relates to my doctoral research on Robert Hass, who is known for writing about his home, California. In conversation with Claire Miller from GRIST magazine, Hass talks about the connection between understanding the history of a place, and our careful treatment of the land:

It felt to me then that American culture existed in a kind of dream of itself, not particularly connected to reality. One of the qualities of that dream in California was this absence of any real and fixed sense of history. It was in the 1960s that some developers out in Contra Costa county decided to name a new subdivision San Diablo, turning the devil into a saint. The historical roots of language were so shallow here. That seemed to me a symptom of our carelessness in the way we treat the American land. (Miller, par. 12)

It seems that Hass’ poetry tries to engage with “our carelessness” by writing about the natural and cultural history of California. I think that the subject allows him to represent the landscape of his home. He goes on to say: “Since most books in my childhood were published on the East Coast … my nature wasn’t represented in the world. And so one of the pleasures of writing about California and reading the few writers who were writing about California was that this world was represented” (Miller, par. 21).

I think it is important that our nature and identity are represented in the world, and for me Buxton’s poem reminds me of Christmas in Christchurch, summer sun showers, and riding my friend’s horse on Banks Peninsula. I tried to get permission to use the poem, but found it impossible to track down Buxton. In the unlikely chance that her publisher reads my blog, I ask for forgiveness in lieu of permission.

For other Tuesday Poems check out the hub.

When I was a little girl I looked forward to Christmas because I got to wrap up the gifts. My mother had an entire top cupboard (reached only by dragging through the wooden chair from the small bedroom) dedicated to storing boxes of pre-used ribbons and paper. Even now, after unwrapping a gift, she carefully folds each sheet of tissue and wrap. There’s no unsightly tearing or pulling in my family. Opening a gift is a little like playing Operation.

As a child I also made my own cards. Cats were a common feature as well as hearts, pressed flowers, and the occasional lopsided cross stitch. Nice. Now I have my own wrapping stash that is reminiscent of my mother’s. I’ve started to make my own upcycled gift tags from old cards, paper and art catalogues, and to stamp my own wrapping paper. My friend Joan (a lovely woman, poet and Buddhist) just found out her collection of poetry will be published by VUP later this year. I took the opportunity to make her something crafty, and to try out some homemade wrapping paper. Here are the results.

To the left: the gift, a cushion upcycled from wool blankets. To the right: the newly stamped wrapping paper. Eventually I want to make my own stamps (I’ve been inspired by the ones on tiny happy and Geninne’s Art Blog, but the ones I used were bought from Iko Iko in Wellington (for quite a low cost).

To the left: one handmade gift tag. The image was cut out of a Crown Lynn catalogue that I took home from the recent City Gallery exhibition. Small note – make sure the ribbon is long enough to wrap around the tag. I tried to use one of these on another gift and discovered it wasn’t! To the right: the finished present. Overall, I am quite pleased. Maybe this is the start of my wrapping empire.

The following clip is my presentation for the ASLE Conference that was held at Indiana University, US, from June 21-26, 2011 (ASLE stands for the Association for the Study of Literature & Environment).

The presentation was part of a paper-jam panel titled From Home to the World: International Ecopoetries. The session featured five poets: Amir Hussain, Michelle Menting, Trey Moody, Bill Hemminger, and myself. Each presentation (and therefore my video) was eight minutes long. In my clip the text of my poems scroll as I read out the poems, which apparently helped people understand my kiwi accent!

Check out other Tuesday Poems on the hub.

I can’t say enough about the Wellington-based arts journal, Hue & Cry. They are the cool, new kid on the block of NZ literature. What I like about Hue & Cry is the strong editorial direction. Not only do you get to read new and challenging NZ writing, but the curation of the journal presents writing in intriguing ways. For example, Issue 4 (pictured above) featured a section that riffed the question, “what is biography?”

The journal’s production is sexy-geek, or as the editors say, “offset printed, we take a curatorial approach to contributions as a whole, organising the journal as an aesthetic space.” You can pre-order their latest issue right here.