broadsheet new new zealand poetry

Issue No. 8, November 2011

Editor: Mark Pirie

THE NIGHT PRESS WELLINGTON

/ 1 Poems copyright 2011, in the names of the individual contributors

Published by The Night Press

Cover photo of John Gallas “in happy Uzbek hat”

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ISSN 1178-7805 (Print) ISSN 1178-7813 (Online)

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2 / Contents

PREFACE / 5

CRAIG CLIFF / 6

MICHAEL DUFFETT / 8

JOHN GALLAS / 9

ROGER HICKIN / 17

REX HUNTER / 18

CAMERON LA FOLLETTE / 20

CHRIS MCCABE / 21

MARY MCCALLUM / 25

MICHAEL O’LEARY / 26

HARRY RICKETTS / 28

LAURA SOLOMON / 29

YILMA TAFERE TASEW / 31

PAUL WOLFFRAM / 33

F W N WRIGHT / 37

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS / 40

/ 3 Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors and publishers of the following collections and magazines where the poems in this issue first appeared:

Michael Duffett: ‘Sonnets Holy and Unholy’ first appeared as a poem postcard printed by the author.

Rex Hunter: ‘Cleopatra’ first appeared in And Tomorrow Comes (Steen Hinrichsen: Copenhagen and Chicago, 1924; Warren House Press: Norfolk, UK, 1982).

Cameron La Follette: ‘Border Guardians’ from Beyond the Painted Hills (Original Books: Wellington, 2011).

Chris McCabe: ‘George Orwell’ first appeared in The Manhattan Review and ‘Kingfisher’ first appeared in The Rialto and is republished in The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt Publishing: London, UK, 2011).

Michael O’Leary: ‘The Last 48 Seconds of Kurt Cobain’ first appeared as part of an artwork in the Kurt Cobain tribute book, Blue Eyed Son, compiled by Benedict Quilter (Independent Woman Records: Wellington, 2010).

Harry Ricketts: ‘Cricket coach Bob Woolmer...’ first appeared on the Tingling Catch blog, 20 March 2011.

Yilma Tafere Tasew: ‘Eroded’ first appeared in Thank You, Thank You!: Volume 1 (Steele Roberts: Wellington, 2010).

F W N (Nielsen) Wright: ‘Patch Up’, ‘Showcase Canzonet’ and ‘Incessant’ from Post Alexandrian Poems (781-832); ‘Newspaper Man’ from Post Alexandrian Poems (833-884); ‘Sestet’ and ‘Staying Alive II’ from Post Alexandrian Poems (885-936) (all Cultural and Political Booklets: Wellington, 2011).

4 / Preface

This issue features John Gallas, a New Zealand poet who has been living in the UK since 1972 where he went to study Old Icelandic, and whose collections are all published by prestigious small press Carcanet in Manchester. I first came across Gallas’s work when I was in London in 2005. A friend had shown me the astonishing global poetry anthology Gallas edited, The Song Atlas (2002). I looked up his name in Foyle’s Bookshop, thinking he was a UK poet. They had some of Gallas’s books there, including his first collection Practical Anarchy (1989). Reading his bio closely I discovered he was born in Wellington in 1950. I bought the book immediately and subsequently now have all of his collections. I enjoy Gallas’s sense of the absurd. His surreal and fantastical humour and anarchic wit appeal to me along with his control of traditional forms (the ballad, the sonnet) and the more modernist/postmodernist structures in his recent work. Yet Gallas doesn’t appear in Oxford’s 1997 An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English (despite appearing in Landfall in the 1980s) and not all of his books are held by the National Library of New Zealand. However, his first work was published here: A different drum, or, How to blow your own trumpet in twelve easy to read pages, with Robin Murray (printed at the University of Otago Bibliography Room, 1971). In recent years, poet and academic Bill Manhire has done much to rectify this. Gallas was included in Manhire’s 121 New Zealand Poems and Gallas’s work has been in Sport and in the IIML’s Best New Zealand Poems series online. This year Gallas also published a three volume trilogy of chapbooks, F***ing Poets, through Roger Hickin’s stylish Cold Hub Press in the South Island, with funds from the sale given to help the Canterbury earthquake recovery. It’s great to be able to feature Gallas in broadsheet 8 and help further recognise his work in New Zealand. Through my own work on Gallas, the Poetry Archive of New Zealand Aotearoa (PANZA) now has a full collection of his books in their online catalogue. Elsewhere I’ve continued broadsheet’s eclectic policy of inviting different poets to appear in each issue. Mary McCallum, Chris McCabe, Cameron La Follette, Roger Hickin, Yilma Tafere Tasew and Craig Cliff appear here for the first time along with a poem by the late Rex Hunter. Hunter (1888-1960), a writer and journalist (who left New Zealand as a young man), had a reputation overseas in the States and so far has mostly fallen through the radar here despite an attempt to remedy this in the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998). It’s hoped Hunter’s poetry will become more widely known in New Zealand in the future.

Mark Pirie Wellington, November 2011 / 5 Craig Cliff

T H E L I N K A R C A D E

1. I was not there when my father acted out to Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ at his work Christmas party in the Link Arcade. I was probably asleep at my grandparents’ house in the bed he slept in as a child. If not asleep, then reading a Munch Bunch picture book: Dick Turnip saving Suzie Celery from an oncoming greengrocer’s truck.

But my mother told me the story the next morning and now whenever I hear that song I think of the scene with my father climbing onto the handrail of the mezzanine – part arena rocker, part suicide-to-be – shaking his non-existent locks and mouthing: ‘Go ahead and jump!’ to the shocked faces of his colleagues who thought he might / the uneasy conversations after he climbed down and didn’t sound the slightest bit drunk.

Which he wasn’t. Not my dad. Apart from a photo from his buck’s night (Andrew ‘Undies’ Cliff tied to a clothesline in singlet and undies, a sloshed St Sebastian) I can’t remember seeing him drunk.

6 / Indeed, when I was approaching an age where I might be offered a beer at family barbeques he sat me down and extolled the virtues of drinking from a can: ‘You can drink as slow as you like, set your own pace, and no one can tell how much you’ve had.’

2. Everything from that first stanza is now defunct, deceased, or rebranded: my father, Van Halen, the Link Arcade.

Though there was a decade between his daredevil David Lee Roth and his death, this reconstructed scene seems to me – another decade later – the point at which my father wandered off into the ultramarine glow of the afterlife, and if I could just get back inside that arcade between Main Street and Broadway he’d meet me there for the conversation where I say everything I’ve bottled up and he listens and nods and smiles, ever-sipping from a can that never empties.

/ 7 Michael Duffett

S O N N E T S H O L Y A N D U N H O L Y

Grace

I imagine the movements of the master As never awkward, no clumsy gap Between the thought and bend of limb. Faster, More efficient moves could be but the sap That lubricates the body with the mind, The holy transition between head and hand Was unclouded by the salt of doubt, lined Inside with no gritty particles of sand. His footsteps never faltered, no grimace Indicating doubt or calculation Marred his mouth; he sat and rose with ease. His time was spent as well with saints as sinners And peace was brought to every situation That he blessed by bending to his knees.

Jesus at the Border

Carpenter, you say? Get a haircut, shave And a real job before we let you in. You’ll need to fill your purse with money, save A few bucks so as not to ruin Our social security system. What! You’re penniless? Got no place to lay your head? You don’t honestly think we would blot Our government forms to provide you a bed. Get back to where you’re from, wherever that May be. We’ve got no place for you here. You’ve got no transportation, no car, You say? Can you see that great big fat Donkey over there? Ride him, get him near To starving and he from here will take you far.

8 / John Gallas

P A C I F I C T I O N S

1. encounter with a Taniwha near Puponga Farm

The deed of a Taniwha does not take time: it is considered / done. The doing is not to be seen. He may put on his socks if he wishes by thinking how nice they will look when he does.

The Taniwha lives at the westernest end of the sand, and resembles a cave at all points. His face is a rock-face glour; his hair a bush all punga and flax; his breath by the pulmonous salt-lac’d wave.

You are restless already with objection. But the Taniwha is not Nature mistook or took, nor an eco nor logical soul. He is Here; not About. Come on. From his fuscous brow three chilly-lit water-threads spilled down on his tongue, where three plastic bottles sat like good ideas forgotten in an empty dream of noon.

A Taniwha does not dream: and I was sharp as August-shine, and rapt as three hours’ tramp, a nippy dawn, a glaucous beanie and a ruck’t sock could be.

/ 9 You are advancing tricks of light and mind: flying saucers, mermaids, psychic ducks, the Wurm. But Taniwhas do not misthink, and are not Themselves a Thought.

I put up two bottles beneath two tumbles. The third a little off When I turned back to behold my silly, slighting sport, the two – stood still, half-filled, far from their taps.

You snap that currents warpled in his hair; that fern or flax removed; that slump and slip blah blah. Ah, Nature’s changelings claim the world, but they do not move plastic bottles.

Which would be too much study to explain. Taniwhas may do this: why invent the Truth? I passed the cliffs, the clouds, the farm, and did not come to any harm.

*

2. the singing dream of Karamea

I sat at the back with a duck I did not know, in a Mexican blanket or two. Aside and before, whatever they were, they stood. And what they saw (but we could not) was a Shoman winding a sho. Inspired, we begot each a bass and brotherly note in Mongolian shape, AEI-UUUUUUU. Our neighbours turned and smiled. The duck and I held hands. We burned like festive puddings. I think we started to float. And our plainsong took off in a corkscrewed, muezzinish flight.

10 / The duck fell away. I gained elevation. Until I o’erpassed my own brain, and my soul became sunlit and still as it practised its living: more formal, more free, and more bright.

Perhaps this was my Art: well, let it be – Tradition kept in check by Ecstasy.

*

3. dancing naked round the grave of RLS, Mount Vaea, Samoa

I’m often at graves, with tepid awe, protesting love by my direction through the stones, like looking for Proust at a party.

Manners and meeting are otherwise now. A ten-ton god swarms on the verandah. The air is fog afire.

I hunt him up his hill. Steamers ant on the sea. The green is steam-filled sponges.

Now we will meet, where he was borne to a grave where I clothe with sweat. We hardly get on. What will I say?

But Need is a handy host, and will squeeze a courtesy for its pips for a high Well Met.

So I hung up my clothes to dry, and danced about and about this sleeper’s stone for the antic of memory.

*

/ 11 4. panning for gold at Fenian Creek, Oparara

There’s no one in the b-b-bush. Be still. If ghosts are th-th-thoughts then they are here. The river winks with gold. A fantail hither-whisks. It’s c-c-cold.

Who was the boy that was shot in his chair, Under his lovers’ exploding hearts? Jesus, return him to dreams. Far away here the water gleams.

I drop a flake from my f-f-fingers down into a little water-jar: it falls heavy, so. Cree-cree goes the tahou: I can’t go.

And I’ll go back to Tipperary, And buy the dancehall over the shore, And die in Dromineer, and, save us, God, not here, not here.

Another. F-f-flake. F-f-falls. Amberglass twixt silent spars of manuka, the creek glickles with gold. Just one more hour for luck. It’s c-c-cold.

O they are gone as far as the world may be. They are gone where the land is gentle and free. God’s luck over the cold, cold sea. And gold in the green of a fair country.

I drop a f-f-flake from my finger down into the little water-jar: it falls heavy, so. Keer-keer goes the tui: I can’t g-g-go.

* 12 / 5. the lesson of the Paul Gauguin Museum, Papeari, Tahiti

I took the turquoisest tracks of the sea, Fauai’s shot mad-modest hair, ‘uru leaves o’er-lamped with light, and sometimes people, lost with tawn-dead thoughts. but no blue I knew, or yellow I know: no tinct new nor scarlet Now: and these shall be my photos, that are already me. The more my lens seeks savagery, the more my home-made piety.

And thuswise too I see Monsieur in a storm of sight, a giant striding backwards, coat-sailed in retreat from every sophist-civil shade, and shod with islands, across the Pacific thundering: who treads upon the thousand hotel rooms of Bora Bora, to Tuamotu’s fair-heeled last resorts, to toe in Hiva ‘Oa, where I must sail and dine and dive for pearls of Art’s invented colour.

Shall we condemn the last imagined innocents to boredom, fish and traipsing rags, fat feet and beauty for the passing pictures of our itched, uneasy souls, for lust of what is lost, in fiction’s frame?

/ 13 Water falls in tingled foil. Buscars thudder. Blue is blue is blue. Weather tears on Moorea. This is the lesson of Monsieur’s museum:

Run for your Life: It is here.

*

6. waiting with a boxing champion at a bus stop, O Tahiti ! at a place where a bus stop he bounce four times he say four times he say four times he say four times he say box box jab jab he go jab jab jab the blue blue air jab jab the hot hot rain bounce bounce

14 / and a little moustache splash sprout like a little rooftop garden in the rain green bus pass be we are waiting orange he say bounce bounce jab jab sprout sprout green bus pass but we are waiting orange he say flip flop flap he go jab jab jab jab bounce bounce bounce splash splash and orange bus stop for us he say for us O Tahiti !

* / 15 7. at the remains of the penal settlement, Kingston, Norfolk Island

Man’s cruelty to Man is out of fashion: moral sense and sensibility have come to their arrangement. Boobys bleat on Deadman’s Pier. The fish dance slow. The heat makes holidays of hate, and history the graver reconstruction of some passion better spent in these, our better days. The Screaming Acres browse and brush with cows and chooks. But not the sea. But not the sea: whose dead, permitted fury shudders me like some loud, judgeless jury that allows all cruelty, all leave, all sway, always.

How small is my life sentence: brute and king, I clutch my little chains to me, and sing.

*

16 / Roger Hickin

W A I A N A K A R U A

No trains draw up to rest here now

where a poet’s gaze once brushed the land’s rough skin

no tall gums sift an off-sea breeze

brash traffic flashes over the newly widened

skew-arched little bridge beside Diehl’s mill

& the hills are slick with the pine trees’

eloquence.

/ 17 Rex Hunter

C L E O P A T R A

They say that Cleopatra was a pillar of lust an avid beast stalking men they do not know Cleopatra

Come closer and listen:

Cleopatra’s heart was not a turbid sea Cleopatra’s heart was a still pool in which Caesar and Antony plunged sending out ripples widening down to us

Come closer and listen:

Cleopatra was a groper a stumbler like me, like you. Cleopatra was a lonely child. What did she think of, what did she ponder when she woke in the night-time by the huge pro-consul’s side?

Come closer and listen:

18 / Cleopatra dreamed of playing with Ptolemy by the Nile in the dust of Egypt she dreamed of swimming in the hot days in the shade of the trees she dreamed of playing with a toy not of the hawk-faced gods.

Cleopatra was a lonely child

/ 19 Cameron La Follette

B O R D E R G U A R D I A N S

Unwinding the horn of courage, a silver call Slender white moon on the twilight and the nightfall; The bright steady fires of the dreaming, Calls of courage over the hill streaming.

A tangled spell branching to the sky, Souls fierce as falcons plunging as they cry; Over the border brave men striding, Over the border proud horses riding.

The song of the horn over mountain and glen, A rush of feet where unclean things have been; The battle-cry on the gleaming face, Gold fire running swiftly over the race.

A gate shimmering where there was no gate, Horses riding hard over a ruthless fate; Laughter as bright jewels falling, Horns of the night-wind calling.

The border fading under a steady hand, Calling and echoing of the faraway command; A silver blossom, the passing of the spell, And the mountain-horn’s faint farewell.

20 / Chris McCabe

G E O R G E O R W E L L

I thought the baby was George Orwell & that’s why I treated him so well. There was all ways a sense of the sado-masochist about this, as I once saw a sign ALL JAZZ NOW £2 & went to the desk to insist I paid more. I thought I still had ten minutes left for the ONE HOUR GALLERY but the artists were in the back drinking bottles at Polish-strength. This pushed me mainstream as I started to see the question-marked shaped tumbleweeds. Whenever I allow someone to be served before me two things can happen: a) the wine bottle runs dry & I wait for the decorking of another or b) the barman forgets my philanthopy and serves all new-comers. By the time the ATM device says CONSENT it feels like an arranged-marriage. God kills kittens when you think bad thoughts but sometimes it’s hopeless: she comes in topless from the grass with a grip on some shears, above her the Vs of swifts that never come-down. I said to her: the oggyoggyoggy is the last refuse of the untalented, she replied: your sense of humour is so dark you have your own apartheid. The boy had just graduated from the University of Snail (no career fast-track but at least you would own your own home) so we walked together the emblazoned afternoon, through the shower-room of tombstones

/ 21 T H E B O Y M A D E O F M A R B L E

Father’s Day 2009

The Boy Made of Marble leads us out (blue veins A-road his shoulderblades) through The Gates of Persecution (a new council initiative at the park entrance) through The Fields of Hope (Dagenham Central), a crow puppetshows the floodlights (The Boy Made of Marble blanks the corvus) the sun smashes the shrieking brick of the jay – there is not time for This Little Piggy – The warbler is a small bird with very large eyes past a jet black burnet moth festooned with red hearts like a Goth that does Valentines, Dagenham Road splits apart the marsh tracks The Boy Made of Marble leads us left down PUBLIC FOOTPATH No. 1 banked with shrub & gorse & ditch a wren loonies the branches The wren whose face is all body, body all face each twitch a ruse – there is no time for Round & Round the Garden – through the bark turnstile THE CHASE NATURE RESERVE we stop, The Boy Made of Marble allows me to pass water, dry froth umbilicals the bank into The Rom (the electric has cut out on kingfishers) The kingfisher’s New Wave made obsolete the mods (sparrows) & rockers (starlings) I carry The Boy Made of Marble along the bank above nettle, barb & snag, push his wheel-machine through the knee-length grass delirious with pollen,

22 / we arrive in the midst of an interzone, gingerbread estates close the woodland to a quadrant backing us onto a row of suburban detacheds (a far off icecream van jingles the sun to shreds) graffitoes scrawl the garage doors MORE SANE SOME BLASH 09 EDDIE HAS A SMALL DICK a man & woman, Mallorcan-tanned, & two small children are building their property into the reserve (the council will never find out about this) the path sodden with clay (The Boy Made of Marble laughs at the sight) we carry him across – his wheel-machine a floating throne – a dead dormouse in the tracks like a foetal keyring curled inside itself to lend an ear to the earth the YMCA now towering above us a pristine hope of white brick, three boys & a dog crawl from under the gargantuan industrial pipes and point us back to the green gates & alley to Rush Green Road – there is no time for Humpty Dumpty – The Boy Made of Marble leads us past the DANGER OF DEATH electrics’ box, the pub called THE TAVERN, the pillbox bus No. 128 to CLAYBURY BROADWAY (with an advert LOIRE VALLEY NATURE SANCTUARY) the police sign FATAL COLLISION 28th MAY the flag across The Three Travellers UNDER ‘OLD’ MANAGEMENT – SUE’S BACK! The streets beginning to sing the heat the kerbs ringing with happiness, the Boy looks skywards, smiling This is a Summer arrival (annual). I love you. Now observe things.

/ 23 K I N G F I S H E R

It is true, it does nest with the opening year, but not on the waters Charles Olson

How do you describe the blue you’ve never seen? I was fixing the biting muzzles of mitts to the Boy’s fingers you saw – the tail-less hologram shoot its bib of ore – I was holding the Boy from the lagoon-green underbreeze of the lake – the blue flex shook green its Atlantic dorsal – I was persuading the Boy that faces in puddles were not the only ones to understand him – the savage-buddha ball-bearing for digested fishbone – I was hauling the Boy’s knees from the altar of logpools – the blast of Bunsen make shrift its short fuel – I was kneading the yeast-kisses he tossed to Canada geese – an azure lizard shed January’s skin – I was searching a path for the Boy’s alchemy of chance in gold grass – the pixelated dash from Victorian taxidermists – I was pushing the Boy in euphorics towards the A-roads of futurist fire-services – the damsel-blue hunter thrust its mollusc-lance – (I read, that night, only the righteous see the kingfisher) hours later, the Boy asleep, his consciousness given back to dreams – a gale to the windchimes – his exhausted limbs lit by the trip-switch of pulse – the righteous one said, as I drifted to dark – said the one word – kingfisher – and I caught his blue – pulled back from the only place I’d ever seen him

24 / Mary McCallum

E L E M E N T

He slipped into it the way a man with ruddy cheeks and cupped hands can find himself with an orchard.

Henry Cavendish, whose only extant portrait is an ink sketch of him hurrying from the room, who hesitated in speech, and refused to meet a person’s eye, or to stand brilliant in the public gaze, made a name measuring the unseen.

As a man with broad back and steady eye sizes up a wall, the elusive Cavendish was in his element with factitious air. He measured with precision the constancy of the atmosphere, discovered hydrogen, put his finger on the freezing point of quicksilver and felt the pulse of gravity. He gauged the phenomena of electricity in a time of candles.

Then, out of thin air, this man who trod so lightly, who was – even in his own home – barely there, measured without fanfare the density of the Earth.

/ 25 Michael O’Leary

F R O M P . H . D . T O P h D

Once I was a P.H.D., a Pot Hole Digger Shifting one shovel-full at a time The more I dug, the hole got bigger Until it was nearing Smoko time

So I said to my working mates Who were smoking and biding time This hole I’m digging, it grates To work alone all the time

They all understood what I had said And they all pitched in, and it was fine We put down the metal ballast bed And together laid that railway line

Another time we carried bricks all night To build a walkway in the street of Queen Twenty-five kilos passing hand to hand Hardly noticing the weight that had been

And then we put down sewer pipes In the garden of the suburb of Eden Dangerous and heavy work, no time For wondering what might have been

Each of our lives depended on each other Doing whatever had to be done No room for judgement of error Or else we would be less one

Nowadays I’m digging holes of the mind To become a different kind of PhD I’m fixing a hole where the thoughts Enter, roaming, fomenting and free

26 / But from P.H.D. to PhD is not such A long way, the song remains the same If people help each other the work is lighter Yes, that is the name of the game

T H E L A S T 4 8 S E C O N D S O F K U R T C O B A I N

(a poemumentary)

Driving back from downtown Seattle I realise I’ve lost the battle To survive, the Love, the fame Has left me spiritually lame Even the booze and the dope Cannot help me cope I know I brought you all pleasure and pain Because that is what rhymes with my name But in the end they are both the same... Even my child could not hold me. So I sit here all alone In my million mansion home My life goes flying by I can’t even think, can’t even cry The name of our band gives a clue Of what I was trying to do But now heaven and hell Both ring the bell My final thought is from a Leonard Cohen song “I took my gun and vanished...”

/ 27 Harry Ricketts

C R I C K E T C O A C H B O B W O O L M E R , W H O D I E D M Y S T E R I O U S L Y I N A J A M A I C A H O T E L R O O M , C O A C H E D W H I C H N A T I O N A L S I D E ?

Here you are in today’s five-minute quiz. Pakistan’s the answer, but what about

South Africa? Which would also be correct, wouldn’t it, in the scorebook, plus at least

one other mysterious death? Well, no more declarations, no more referrals now.

Who’d have imagined all that in summer 1961? Captain of our First XI,

you weren’t popular, not one of the lads like Danby or Usher, but you were kind to me.

At wogger on the playground, we could never get you out however fast we bowled.

You never gave a catch (one hand, two bounces), never hit our tennis balls over

the gym roof, never seemed to get bored. Every innings you were batting for your life.

28 / Laura Solomon

R E S U R F A C I N G F R O M T H E W R E C K

Here I come, all clichés, a deep-sea diver resurfacing for air. It fills my lungs like heaven.

If I still had a tongue in my head I could tell you of what I saw down there.

The rusting ship, covered in barnacles, tangled in seaweed, a mermaid or two, drifting idly by, combing their hair as they swam.

The oysters I prised from the side of the ship; the gnarled pearls that I found.

The great white that flashed its fangs at me, and then, thankfully, swam away.

If I had half a mind to, if I still had eyes, I could tell you about, how close I came to blacking out, how I nearly got the bends, but recovered just in time, a good save, and saving myself, rose back up through the ocean depths, pearls in hand, donations, gifts, and then, removing my mask, lay on the deck of the ship, breathing in, breathing out, recovery mode, / 29 as you oohed and aahed about the pearls, without ever once bearing in mind, the price I paid for the jewels I found, how close I came to not making it, and drifting alone forever, across the ocean floor, a human fish, not living, yet alive – a spectacle for the other creatures who live down there to feast their eyes upon, an Ophelia of sorts, but I did rise, didn’t I you have the pearls as evidence – I have my blind eyes.

30 / Yilma Tafere Tasew

E R O D E D

What is left The bright sky of me across the of every time ocean heals by every day? mountains Like the pacific being stagnant erodes its at Wellington’s area waterfront surrounding waterfront unable harbour to bring me cities around visually I am the sky of my homeland eroded I am eroded My heart became tiny Unable to reducing blood find pumping even temporary to my relief vessels from homesickness little by little either unable vanishing to take me from immortality or to bring changing here my homeland my mood sky towards gloomy I am ‘calmness’ eroded numbness of horror Beyond expectations I am imagination eroded on my borrowed vision

/ 31 when I try to I enjoy assimilate being integrate surrounded look around by my misery me my sadness everyone is enjoying homesickness the breath my longing the view for the sky the waterfront of my homelands talking across mountains laughing oceans enjoying I am ‘sunny lovely days’ eroded I am eroded eroded eroded

I buried my face in my knees my heart crying loneliness feeling alone in the middle of everyone I am eroded

Without enjoying the surroundings nature beauty

32 / Paul Wolffram

From T H E S T R A N G E R W I T H I N : A N E T H N O G R A P H I C P O E M

Becoming Human

I In the hamlet recognition creases the dark faces of friends. Men shake my hand and women cry in descending cadences that sing my name as a repeated refrain.

An old man takes both my hands in his, he declares a son returned and I chew a gift of betel nut to the delight of onlookers.

Children in the bamboo bend and twist for a view anxious to see but too cautious to approach. A small child begins to cry and is hushed, “He’s not a white man, he’s of our clan, a small bird like you and me”. The child stops sobbing considers for a moment a world where a white man can be human too.

II The first week I spend listening to men recount tales of my extraordinary ineptitude and reminisce with them, while I carefully re-train my tongue to hold down glottal stops.

/ 33 In the week that follows I kill pigs, eat turtle from banana leaves, cut my leg with a machete, sleep in the men’s house, and give away razor blades. I confuse the local words for left and right, fall on a muddy jungle path and help to thatch the roof of my ‘brother’s’ house. I didn’t travel to this remote corner to thatch roofs or hone my skills with a machete. I will never enjoy suffocating pigs and have too few razors to give away but I am a ‘small bird’ and this is what humans do.

34 / From C H I N A T O W N

III

Feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, standing among the snake skin remedies watching a cowboy navigate the Chinese market, travelling West too far he’d happened upon a wilder East.

Says he’s looking for an ulcer tonic, his words are slow, carefully chewed and as thick as his heels.

The storekeeper shakes his head, “No English.”

The cowboy turns, eyes up the busy streets mutters under his moustache and strides off, on thick clicking syllables, in the direction of the Red Sun Restaurant.

/ 35 VIII Chinese Violin

The market street blooms Bunches of people In sorted colours And scattered in groups

Thick within the crowd A man plays alone Soft fiddle, distant As China itself

P O S T M O D E R N M O T O R C Y C L E M A I N T E N A N C E

Remove tank and faring to gain access to the engine*. Using the nine inch metaphor (under rear seat), hammer out all loose vowels until firing on all four syllables.

*Engine(e); remove ‘e’ for same performance** and sound with less weight (for racing).

**Performance; by ear tune and the pistons will soon fall, with practice and time into coupled rhyme.

36 / F W N Wright

I N C E S S A N T

Pop culture hears us: strum The same few ancient notes Incessant as a drum.

Pop culture hears us: strum Guitar strings; whose soft thrum Nonsense and sound unites.

Pop culture hears us: strum The same few ancient notes.

S T A Y I N G A L I V E I I

Of the four Bee Gees two are gone, So much for staying alive Mid commonplace catastrophes. Has music greater paragon Than were the Bee Gees? now forgone.

Death is at any stage In life the hardest stooge: to con.

Who live; take home such trophies; As status win of icon; Dead only their works leave. Of the four Bee Gees two are gone, So much for staying alive.

/ 37 P A T C H U P

The world is seen as white or black Depending on light or its lack; Light being understanding; Where things in time are tending. Only in secular history Is seen: the finished mystery.

S H O W C A S E C A N Z O N E T

A poem condensed to outline notes; Obscures; what it illuminates. Should I therefore expand a text: To give more detail to context?

In fact of small words just a couple It takes. Why go to greater trouble? Brevity is the salt of art. He best performs; who knows by heart.

On these two legs stands Shakespeare highest Among the Muse’s myriad host. My intention was to write a sonnet With lines; that tightly resonate.

The meaning crackles. The technique sparkles. So turns to stars; then every spangle In opaque glass perceived as speckles Under bright light at a crisp angle.

38 / N E W S P A P E R M A N

In thirty words hot off the press Divine the substance of my views. A sense of fun do I express In thirty words hot off the press.

No empty honours on me press. No accolades do I refuse. In thirty words hot off the press Divine the substance of my views.

S E S T E T

After Sam Hunt’s Chords: ‘I was carrying up the stairs’

Is none careful enough These days. A note I made: Poem in Latin mode; How up the stairs two logs, Of wine a bottle a knife In sheath I bore on legs.

/ 39 Notes on Contributors

CRAIG CLIFF is a Wellington writer, columnist and public servant. His collection of short stories, A Man Melting, won Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. MICHAEL DUFFETT is an internationally-published British poet who once visited New Zealand to lecture at Victoria University and is currently teaching graduate courses in poetry and literature at a university in California. JOHN GALLAS, born in Wellington, brought up in Richmond and St Arnaud. Now living in Coalville, Leicestershire. 8 books published by Carcanet, with more coming in 2012 and 2013. Website: www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk ROGER HICKIN is a visual artist and sometime poet whoseWaiting for the Transport was published by Kilmog Press in 2009. His own Cold Hub Press publishes books and chapbooks by NZ and international poets. REX HUNTER (1888-1960) was a distinguished New Zealand writer who worked as a journalist in the United States. He returned to New Zealand in 1949 and lived until his death in Dunedin. His works include poetry, plays and fiction. CAMERON LA FOLLETTE is an American poet. She has had one book of poetry, Anamchara, published in the US, and four booklets in New Zealand by Original Books. She works as an environmental activist in Oregon. CHRIS MCCABE is a UK poet and works as Joint Librarian for The Poetry Library, Southbank Centre, London. His collections include Zeppelins and The Hutton Inquiry published by Salt Publishing, England, and available on Amazon. MARY MCCALLUM is a Wellington poet and novelist whose awards include the inaugural Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2011. Mary founded the Tuesday Poem blog, tutors at Massey University, and freelances as a writer, reviewer and bookseller. MICHAEL O’LEARY is a poet, novelist, publisher, performer and bookshop proprietor. O’Leary recently completed a PhD at Victoria University on ‘Social and Literary Constraints on Women Writers in New Zealand 1945 to 1970’. HARRY RICKETTS is a Wellington academic, editor, poet and biographer. Latest collection is Your Secret Life (HeadworX). His fine biography of First World War poets, Strange Meetings, was recently published in the UK. LAURA SOLOMON is a poet and fiction writer. HeadworX published her debut poetry collection, In Vitro, this year. YILMA TAFERE TASEW, born in Ethiopia, is a writer and researcher based in Wellington. In 2011, he published Outcast: The Plight of Black African Refugees (Red Sea Press/Third World Press, New Jersey, USA). PAUL WOLFFRAM is a writer, ethnomusicologist and ethnographic film maker whose latest film Stori Tumbuna: Ancestors’ Tales premièred at the 2011 New Zealand International Film Festival and will screen in Paris in November this year. F W N (NIELSEN) WRIGHT is the author of the epic poem The Alexandrians in 120 books (published from 1961 to 2007). HeadworX published his selected poems, The Pop Artist’s Garland, in 2010. He lives in Wellington. 40 /