“Is a poem, which after all is only a literary construct within an imagined framework, a reasonable way to understand the world?”

 

Mary Oliver, Rules for the Dance, 1998

Highlights of the week

Following the posts and photos from the festival that Selina Tusitala Marsh, Karlo Mila and Daren Kamali are attending in Hawai’i. Wow! This is one amazing poet-rich event.

Bill Manhire asks where poems come from in the latest issue of North & South, and offers an eclectic response. He writes: “Several generations of school children have met Hughes’s [‘The Thought Fox’], and its assumptions have become commonplaces. Something magical happens when a poem is made. The poet is both powerful and powerless — shaman, summoner, inspired and chosen vehicle.” The most common question students of all ages ask me in schools is “where do you get your ideas from?” I don’t think my answer is ever exactly the same, but I riff on the idea that something drops in my head — like a feather, a snowflake, a leaf — and it might settle and grow into a bird or a snowball or a forest, or something altogether different. And it always surprises me. Both in its arrival and its growth.

Discovering a book, Flora Poetica, in my box of Wild Honey copies! An accidental gift? It assembles over 250 poems about trees, plants and flowers from eight centuries of writing in English. The collection is organised botanically, so you might find Louise Glück alongside Ted Hughes writing irises, or Allen Ginsberg, Robin Hyde, William Blake, Rita Dove writing the daisy family. Floral arrangements transporting us across the globe.

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

Louise Glück, from ‘Lamium’ 1992 (mint)

 

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

Seamus Heaney, from ‘mint’ 1996

 

Discovering Small Poems for Busy People in a box of books I hadn’t yet put on the poetry shelves.

Assembling a second suite of couplets because the first suite generated so much love. Will be posting near the end of the month.

Relaunching Poetry Box by deciding to review new children’s books that catch my attention, both local and international, any genre. At some point I want to get back to engaging children, teachers and librarians through various activities and challenges.

Rereading Tessa Keenan’s answers to ‘5 Questions’. Sublime.

Weekly posts

Monday: Monday poem – Frankie McMillan’s ‘Stripes’

Tuesday: review of A GOWN IS A GLACIER, RECEDING, Nina Mingya Powles

Wednesday: Winners of Given Words 2023 read their poems
New Writers Poetry Competition

Thursday: Rhian Gallagher on ‘Seeing You Asked’ by Vincent O’Sullivan
The House within – Fiona Kidman documentary

Friday: 5 Questions – Tessa Keenan

On Poetry Box

Review of The Grimmelings by Rachael King

A discovery

If I can Stop One Heart From Breaking

If I can stop one heart
from breaking
I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching
Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again

I shall not live in vain.

 

Emily Dickinson (c 1864)

Kim O’Keefe, the editor of Small Poems for Busy People (Cumulus, Whitcoulls, 2004) gathers a selection of smallish pieces to offer an oasis of calm, from across time and location, on love, friendship, sorrow, humour, family. Spotted a few old favourites: ‘Before You Go’ by Vincent O’Sullivan, ‘In Love’ by Jenny Bornholdt, ‘Whakapapa’ by Apirana Taylor, ‘Wild Daisies’ by Bub Bridger, ‘We Were Married’ by Gregory O’Brien, ‘For a Five-Year-Old’ by Fleur Adcock. I find this Emily Dickinson poem particularly resonant. Yet! The poem has appeared in multiple layouts, but curiously, for this small anthology, the editor omits the robin lines and adds in two unfamiliar to me. Strange. I got musing on how Vincent O’Sullivan kept faith with Ursula Bethell’s original versions when he edited her poetry. It feels like this is the time to be caring for our hearts, not just the hearts of others,but our own hearts. Today I am advocating self care. Poetry helps, as Tessa Keenan writes.