As things turned out, I didn’t wind up with a Secret Santa partner for the Tuesday Poem – but no matter! Check out all the pairs of poets and poems, plus the hub poem by James Brown chosen by Sarah Jane Barnett, on the Tuesday Poem blog.
It’s been great to be part of the Tuesday Poem this year – so, big thanks to Mary McCallum for organising it. I’ll be back into it next year, until I completely run out of poems…
In no particular order, and with varying degrees of seriousness:
Turbine 2010 is now online: an impressive selection!
Wu Ming on translating Stephen King – into Italian
Aimee L Salter’s competition for bad poetry – the worse, the better! (Closes Christmas Eve)
The Government may be ignoring Parliament’s report into the imminence and consequences of Peak Oil, but at least Dunedin City Council is paying attention to the issue.
The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment lays out why digging up and burning Southland lignite is a very bad idea.
South Pacific Book Chat (aka #spbkchat) has its own blog.
There is no Zuul. There is only Lovelace & Babbage.
For drawing my attention to various of these, thanks to @modernletters, @wwborders, @AimeeLSalter, @ttnz, the whole #spbkchat team, and @sydneypadua
Accountant
He went up the Murrumbidgee for the GST
helping drovers, helping contractors
learn to welcome change.
North of Wagga Wagga
there was a woman. Her brothers,
big men all, found out
and ran him out of town.
Lost for words, he drifted west by north
until the desert took him in.
Six months later, caked in dust,
he hitched a ride from Hawker Gate.
He downed a beer
to wash the silence from his throat.
“Mate!” he said, and “Thanks.”
They dropped him off in Narromine
where drought drove farmers from the land.
He helped them straighten their affairs
then went to ground in Sydney
where he checks the weather daily,
watching the western horizon
for the tongues of fire and sand.
Tim says: “Accountant” was first published in Bravado Issue 7 (2006). Anyone who’s read “Rat Up A Drainpipe” in my short story collection “Transported” will recognise the basic storyline – this is how I treated it as poetry.
When Goods and Services Tax, referred to as “GST” in New Zealand and “the GST” in Australia, was introduced in Australia in 2000, it was reported that a number of New Zealand accountants, already familiar with its operation, crossed the Tasman to help Australian companies come to terms with it.
You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.
Welcome! Since I’m between blog posts at the moment, here are details about how to buy some of my books. You’ll find my recent posts listed on the left-hand side of this blog.
You’ll also find my work in these recent anthologies:
Immigrant Song
no, I will not hijack your life
though I climb every mountain
ford every river
cherish every taonga
this land holds sacred
no, I will not plant a bomb
on the banks of the Avon
though willows weep over waters
too shallow to drown
no, I will not bring Avian flu
to this fair far-flung land
though I flavour my food
with spices from Asia
no, I will not steal your thunder
though you rain on my parade
play political games
impale my tongue
no, I will not say
Canterbury, take my bones
no, not till I’ve seen
the fabled nor’west arch
streak across the sky
a new covenant
for this other Eden
Tim says: Sugu Pillay is a poet, playwright and short story writer. She’s currently focusing on writing plays, and I enjoyed her play “Serendipity”, which I saw at BATS last year.
“Immigrant Song” is one of three poems by Sugu that I included in JAAM 26, which I guest-edited. I too was an immigrant to Christchurch, although, as an immigrant with white skin (and, to be fair, a 2-year-old), my experience was somewhat different.
You can read all the Tuesday Poems at the Tuesday Poem blog.
My novel manuscript is with those who’ve kindly agreed to be its first readers. A potential publisher is taking a look at my poetry collection manuscript. So, for the first time in a long while, I have gone back to my first, and perhaps best, love: writing short stories.
It won’t be news to anyone who has followed this blog that I like to have a couple of projects on the go at once, but I don’t usually work on a couple of short stories at the same time. At the moment, though, I’m alternating between writing two stories. One’s long(ish), one’s short(ish). One’s light-hearted, one’s more severe. One’s science fiction, one’s literary/mainstream fiction.
And I’m here to tell you that the science fiction story is a lot harder to write than the mainstream story. This doesn’t mean that the science fiction story is better, or worse, or more valid, that the mainstream story. Both might be good – or both might be dreadful. But it’s certainly harder work to write.
Why? It’s because so much more has to be packed into the SF story – which is, admittedly, the shorter one – to make it work. A story set in the world with which most of its readership is familiar doesn’t have to spend a lot of time in scene-setting, in finding ways to make the world in which it is set clear to the reader without overburdening that self-same reader with exposition.
There are only so many words to go around in a short story, and the more that are spent cuing the reader in to what distinguishes the world of the story from the world they are familiar with, the less there are to delineate character and advance the action.
This won’t be news to speculative fiction writers, of course, but it may be to writers and readers of literary fiction. One of the criticisms often advanced of SF is that it suffers from poor characterisation. To the extent to which that is true, it may simply be because only the very finest writers of SF – the Ursula Le Guins, the Gene Wolfes – can show the reader a new or changed world, keep the story moving, and create memorable characters at the same time.
Queens of Silk, Kings Of Velour
A 70s party: disco, afros, flares and Abba.
I’m dancing with the women,
talking with the men.
Three songs up, strutting my stuff,
the only male dancer, bathed
in unprecedented female attention.
Three songs down, back on the sofa,
our gang of four likely lads
trading facts about the history of punk.
On the floor, I’m surrounded
by silk, smiles, the sensational
shimmying.
On the sofa, we’ve moved on to Yes.
I sing the chorus of “Close to the Edge”
with a man I don’t even know.
This is what it means to be a man: not
the All Blacks, not power tools,
not fighting foreign wars,
but the ability to name
all the members and ex-members
of obscure seventies bands.
“Dance To The Music,” Sly says,
and so I must obey.
But not without a caveat:
“Is this actually from the seventies?”
asks a couch-bound friend.
“From 1968,” I say. “Let’s dance!”
Tim says: This poem has just been published in JAAM 28: Dance Dance Dance, the 2010 issue of JAAM Magazine, edited by Clare Needham and Helen Rickerby.
JAAM 28 has a lovely cover and, from what I’ve read so far, is an excellent issue. It’s definitely worth asking JAAM for the next dance.
You can find all the Tuesday Poems online at the Tuesday Poem blog.
I got a nice surprise on Monday: an email from Tina Shaw, Programme Manager of the New Zealand Society of Authors (NZSA), to say that I’d been selected as the 2010 recipient of the biennial Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature, first awarded in 2008 to poet, novelist and anthologist Emma Neale.
(It’s important to note that this NZSA award is not the same as another, longer-established set of awards, the Janet Frame Literary Trust Awards.)
The award is open to authors of literary or imaginative fiction, as well as poetry, who are members of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Fortunately, it seems, I tick all those boxes!
I’m delighted to receive this award, not just because the money will come in handy to help me complete the short story collection I’m currently working on, but also because it’s an honour to win an award associated with the name of Janet Frame.
Here’s how Beatties Book Blog reported the news. Thanks, Graham, and thanks to the NZSA!
Inheritance
1.
The country station was as good as deserted, the train was late.
The stationmaster was keeping to himself, as if he didn’t exist.
Bored, beside myself, I kicked gravel, walked up and down.
It’s always when I’m bored. As if it is not allowed.
My great-great-great grandfather stood up in my mind
as the sky came down and pinned me to the ground.
He was clothed in a book of about 20,000 words.
But sometimes a story won’t become a book.
The book it could be roars through you, like a train
not stopping at a station, bucketing, as loud and brief
as a breath, pushing a turbulence before it, a great wind.
2.
The hobgoblins of local drama, the gossips, cobble
a likely story together – just for the hell of it – for free.
– There was one, who was seen going on a ship,
never seen again. He sailed away, left his kin.
Left his white kin and his black kin.
His father before him left his land, was shipped in chains,
or pressed, or, an illiterate man in a uniform, fetched up
on the island that hangs like a teardrop below the map.
To father him. To father me. Perhaps he made a choice.
He chose to leave the known world, a religious, a madman.
3.
And that man’s son left. I’d like to think that a relative of mine
could see the way things were going, on the beach, scanning
the craft of summoning technology putting in and putting out.
– I’m out of here. I can pass for white in another country.
During the journey I will be reborn as someone else.
And he left his blackfella on the shore and boarded like a white man
with perhaps an Andalusian grandmother, or one of the dark Irish,
worked his passage suspecting there would be a place
that was not so (if he even knew the word) adamantine.
Or maybe destiny picked him up by the scruff of the neck
and put him on the ship. Scurvy had wrought havoc or
flogging had killed more than it cured. Or his curiosity
killed the cat as he checked out all this fabulous machinery,
the latest thing, a teenage boy keen to know the cutting edge,
and then he felt the new world lurch under his feet as it took off,
set sail and, perforce, took him too.
4.
Was he silent in later life, morose at the kitchen table,
as his wife set the bread to prove above the range in a
valley black with punga and fern, dripping, with speaking
water and puffs of mist like smoke and the sound of the trap
in the road and the grown children and their children arriving?
Did he rouse himself to their language he had given them
or did he nod and rise and go out the back to smoke,
did he go to the bottled spirit secreted in the thatch?
To speak with his own. Was there one, a little girl?
White as a toheroa shell on a midden, who always sought him out
and sat next to him speaking and not speaking, with that immemorial
electricity, the pulse, and another, a boy perhaps, who sat far off
and stared and saw it but was afraid. As it gathered around them.
Tim says: I’ve been reading Jennifer Compton’s recent collection Barefoot over the past few days. There are many fine poems in it, but “Inheritance” really stood out for me, so I decided to ask Jennifer whether I could use it as a Tuesday Poem. Then I discovered that Jennifer has just been announced as the winner of the Kathleen Grattan Award for 2010, so that made the request even more timely!
I hope you like this poem as much as I do.
You can read all the Tuesday Poems on the Tuesday Poem blog.
Welcome! You’ll find my recent posts listed on the left-hand side of this blog. Since I’m between posts at the moment, here are some of my books, and how to buy them.
You’ll also find my work in these recent anthologies: