Tim Jones's Blog, page 51

NZ Poetry Day: Zoetropes, by Bill Manhire

Zoetropes



A starting. Words which begin

with Z alarm the heart:

the eye cuts down at once



then drifts across the page

to other disappointments.



*



Zenana: the women's

      apartments

in Indian or Persian houses.

Zero is nought, nothing,



nil - the quiet starting point

of any scale of measurement.



*



The land itself is only

smoke at anchor, drifting above

Antarctica's white flower,



tied by a thin red line

(5000 miles) to Valparaiso.



London 29.4.81



Reproduced by kind permission of the a...

An Interview With Kathleen Jones

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, poet and journalist based in the English Lake District. Her partner is a sculptor working in Italy, and several members of her family live in New Zealand, so she spends quite a lot of time travelling.



Kathleen started writing as a teenager, contributing to local papers and teenage magazines. She wrote a lot of bad poetry, married very young and went to live in the Middle East where she started working for the Qatar Broadcasting Corporation as a presenter and...

Tuesday Poem: If Looks Could Kill

If Looks Could Kill



When the woman gave me a look

back over her shoulder

I went and crossed the road



it was dark and poorly lit

I didn't want to scare her

and I didn't mean any harm



well, none of us do,

but we're clumsy

we break things and people



that's the way it is

that's the fact of the matter

look, we were made that way



and the most they do is look

but they'd have done with us long since

if looks could kill.



Tim says:I was very affected by Men, a powerful poem by Bert Stern which...

C. J. Cherryh's Chanur Series: Space Opera Done Right

I used to be a big fan of science fiction writer (Carolyn) J. Cherryh, and have read many of her books. Somewhere back in the mid 1990s, I stopped enjoying her work so much, and I had not read a book by her for many years until I decided to re-read her five-volume Chanur series, published in the late '80s and early '90s. And, to my surprise and pleasure, I enjoyed them at least as much this time around as I had the first time of reading.



The Chanur series consists of five books:



The Pride...

Tuesday Poem: North

North

On Ilkley Moor

I parked me red

Ford Laser hatchback

and gazed to the north.

Rain and smoke stood over Wharfedale.



It was all in its appointed place:

stone houses and stone smiles in Ilkley

the wind on the bleak

insalubrious bracken.



I was waiting for memory

to make the scene complete:

some flat-vowelled voice out of childhood

snatches of Northern song.



For memory read TV:

Tha've broken tha poor Mother's heart

It were only a bit of fun.

Bowl slower and hit bloody stumps.



Tha'll...

An Interview With Chris Bell

In 1976 Chris Bell was the youngest poet to have been published in Norman Hidden's British small press magazine 'Workshop New Poetry', which later championed British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, among others. His short stories have appeared in 'The Third Alternative' (UK); 'Grotesque' (Ireland); 'The Heidelberg Review' (Germany); 'Transversions' (Canada); 'Not One of Us'; 'Zahir' (US) and 'Takahe' (New Zealand), as well as on the internet. 'The Cruel Countess' was anthologised in The Year's B...

Tuesday Poem: Two Kinds of Time, by Meliors Simms

Two Kinds of Time



In some universes

time is experienced as linear.

Individuals move through their lives

cutting a track into their possibilities

and paving it into permanence behind them.

Aware only of the winding road they have chosen,

looking backwards down the line from now to birth

looking forward into the obscure thicket of the future

sometimes, peripherally aware of a bare hint

of what if's as what isn't.



In some universes

time is experienced as a plane.

Beings move around their...

A Foreign Country. A Poetry Archive. The Manhire Prize. Ecopoesis.

A Foreign Country



What with revising my novel and finishing my poetry collection manuscript, I haven't written many short stories lately — but I'm very pleased that a new story of mine is appearing in A Foreign Country: New Zealand Speculative Fiction, an anthology from Random Static Press that's being published in August and is available for pre-order now.



The lineup of authors is:





Philip Armstrong, Richard Barnes, Claire Brunette, Anna Caro, Matt Cowens, Bill Direen, Dale Elvy, J.C...

Tuesday Poem: The Wrong Horse

The Wrong Horse



The pleasures of the text are the pleasures of spring.

Halter tops, tanned skin, buttocks

sashaying past an open office door.

You pack your books away.



The self is conceived as a structure of signifiers.

Thirty years at the chalk-face,

a dozen published books,

twenty to life in the M.L.A.



The forms of nature order themselves in codes.

Wine and juice, finger food,

a bound edition of Baudrillard,

a speech from the Head of School.



To repeat excessively is to enter into loss.

...

Can Urban Foraging and Radical Self Help Kickstart the End of Capitalism? Douglas Lain Intends To Find Out

Douglas Lain is a US writer and podcaster with whom I collaborated on a petition against the US invasion of Iraq, though we have never quite got round to collaborating on a story. Doug's latest venture should be of interest to writers of all stripes, and to people interested in Transition Towns, community resilience, and urban foraging besides: he is "crowdsourcing" the funding of a radical self-help guide to urban foraging, and you can help by contributing up to the deadline of Wednesday 14 ...