Janis Freegard's Blog, page 21

Deaf Jam

Went to see “Deaf Jam” this evening (and no, I don’t mean Def Jam), a documentary about a young Israeli woman, Aneta Brodski.  Aneta is deaf, lives in New York and makes poetry with American Sign Language.   Worth catching (if you’re in Wellington that is – more about the Documentary Film Festival here).  Seeing poetry performed as a visual language was very cool – all about making shapes and stories with your hands.  The film also shows her writing and performing in collaboration with a hearing Palestinian poet Tahani Salah.  Well worth getting along to (2 more shows in Wellies).  Local poets entertained us with a live reading  beforehand.

There are two other poetry-themed films in the festival: “We are Poets“, about young slam poets from Leeds in the UK who compete in the international slam poetry competition in the US, and “Lemon” about Lemon Anderson, a poet, actor and ex-con who grew up in New York, and was over here for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival recently.

In lieu of a Tuesday poem, here’s a link to Aneta Brodsky and Tahani Salah performing.

Tuesday Poem – Roses, by George Eliot

Roses, Vincent van Gogh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Roses

You love the roses – so do I.  I wish

The sky would rain down roses, as they rain

From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?

Then all the valley would be pink and white

And soft to tread on. They would fall as light

As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be

Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!

 

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

 

 

George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) was born in Warwickshire in England in 1819 and died in 1880.  She was  one of the leading writers of the Victorian era, well know as the author of seven novels (including The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner and Middlemarch) but less well known for her poetry.  She was also an editor and translator.

Her personal life was scandalous for the time.  She had a twenty year relationship with  George Henry Lewes, who was in an open marriage with another woman, and she later married a man twenty years her junior.  The marriage lasted only a few months before her death.

You can watch a strange animation of  her reading the poem on youtube.  Here is the link to the other Tuesday poems.

Foxton

Spent a lovely weekend in Foxton (many thanks to the Beatsons) with the poetry group I belong to.   The only downside was the early morning duck-shooters, but the spoonbills made up for it.

Sam Manzanza, who will be playing at the Metro on Sunday, and me

Couldn’t manage to upload the photos when I posted the notice about this event, so here they are now.

This is me. I will be the guest poet.

Those details again:

7 Lydney Place – Porirua

Sunday 6th May 4 – 6pm

Music, poetry, Open mic.

Poetry & Music at the Metro in May

MUSIC & POETRY AT THE METRO

7 Lydney Place – Porirua

Sunday 6th May 4 – 6pm

GUEST MUSICIAN

Sam Manzanza is a musician not to be missed.  He is the man who popularised traditional and modern African music in New Zealand.

A versatile instrumentalist, composer and singer, he plays blues harp, guitar and percussion, and sings in French, English and Lingala.

His fast paced blend of African rhythms, Ska, Hot, Spicy music and Afro Beat is always a hit with the audience.

OPEN MIC – come and perform your original material be it cover songs or home grown music, poetry, dance, magic, comedy.  All welcome.  First Sunday of every month.

GUEST POET

Janis Freegard is the author of Kingdom Animalia: the Escapades of Linnaeus  and co-author of AUP New Poets. She also writes fiction and is a past winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award.  Janis was born in South Shields , England and lived in South Africa and Australia before her family settled in New Zealand when she was twelve.  She lives in Wellington with an historian, a cat and various spiders.

Contact Teu at xtra.co.nz or Cell 0210379513 and check out the Facebook page called “Music at the Metro”

Tuesday Poem – Dirge, by Mary Ursula Bethell

Easter. And leaves falling.

Easter. And first autumn rains.

Easter. And dusk stealing

Our bright working daylight;

And cold night coming down

In which we may not work.

Easter. And morning bells

Chime in the late dark.

Soon those fluttering birds

Will seek a more genial clime.

Time has come to light fires

For lack of enlivening sun.

Summer’s arrow is spent,

Stored her last tribute.

So, now, we plant our bulbs

With assured vision,

And, now, we sow our seeds

Sagely for sure quickening.

So, purging our borders

We burn all rubbish up,

That all weak and waste growth,

That all unprofitable weeds,

All canker and corrosion,

May be consumed utterly.

These universal bonfires

Have a savour of sacrifice.

See how their clean smoke,

Ruddy and white whorls,

Rises to the still heavens

In plumy spirals.

You take me – yes, I know it –

Fresh from your vernal Lent.

These ashes I will now spread

For nutriment about the roses,

Dust unto fertile dust,

And say no word more.

From a Garden in the Antipodes (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1929)

More on Ursula Bethell at the nzepc

Don’t forget to check out the communal Tuesday Birthday Poem.

Tuesday Poem – The Dog-Headed Girl

The Dog-headed Girl, by Janis Freegard

(after a Lucy Casson sculpture)

The dog-headed girl

goes to the beach for a swim.  She splashes about in the

salty water barking her joy.  Woof! says the dog-headed

girl.  Woof, woof!  She dog-paddles out to meet the waves.

If you threw her a stick, she would fetch it for you.  When

she emerges from the water, she shakes herself frenetically,

flinging droplets across the sand until she's half-dry.

The dog-headed girl wears no shoes.

The dog-headed girl has a red dog.

The dog-headed girl plays the ukulele.

The dog-headed girl

goes to the bookshop to find a book she might like to read

(one that's not too dog-eared).  She roams up and down the

shelves trying to sniff out one that she'll enjoy.  Finally she

settles on a novel by Banana Yoshimoto.  It does not smell

of bananas.

The dog-headed girl chases seagulls.

The dog-headed girl does not like cats.

The dog-headed girl sometimes gets fleas.

The dog-headed girl

buys a hot-dog and chips from the takeaway bar on the

corner.  Her mouth waters when the shopkeeper hands her

the takeaway parcel wrapped in yellow paper.  The dog-

headed girl wolfs it all down as fast as she can.  She grins a

jowly grin: it's a good life being a bitch.

This was originally published in JAAM in 2002, and later reprinted in Viola Beadleton's Compendium.  (I've made one or two small changes since).  Lucy Casson is a UK artist who had work in a show at the Dowse in Lower Hutt in 2002 ("Reclaimed", about making art out of rubbish).  One of her sculptures was of a female figure with the head of a red dog, who was walking a red dog.  I still have the poster on my wall.

More Tuesday Poems here.

Alice Goes to America

I have news.  It concerns poetry and spiders.

When I was about eighteen, I started writing about the adventures of a character called Alice Spider.  And I kept on writing about her, on and off.  A couple of decades after I started, I realised all the little Alice fragments were part of a prose poem sequence.  Sections of Alice have since been published in Turbine, AUP New Poets 3, JAAM and US-based Anomalous Press.  And now Alice is getting her very own chapbook, courtesy of the wonderful folk at Anomalous.  And it's not just any old chapbook – it's 3 types of chapbook: a  limited edition of 26 handmade, letterpress-printed chapbooks with images by Jill Kambs (I've seen the proofs and the book looks beautiful), as well as a regular, offset-printed chapbook and an e-book.   Very exciting!

This would not have happened without Mary MacCallum's Tuesday Poem site – the Christmas before last, the Tuesday poets all had a "secret Santa" poem-swapping session, where we paired up with other Tuesday poets and posted each other's poems.  I was paired with US poet Melissa Green, who writes stunningly beautiful poetry.  Melissa graciously hosted Alice on her blog,  where she was spotted by Anomalous Press and invited to appear in their new journal, and now Alice is moving on to her next adventure.  Many thanks to Cat Parnell and Erica Mena of Anomalous Press for this opportunity and to Jill Kambs for making beautiful books.  I"ll post a photo when the books arrive.

Also, Anomalous Press has just announced its first chapbook competition.  Entry fees are $US15 and all submissions will be considered for publication in the Anomalous Press journal.  There is a separate category for translations.

Shopping is part of my DNA

The modern hunter-gatherer. Shopping trolley sculpture in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Tuesday Poem – The lover, by Aleksandra Lane

The lover

It is always in winter that he grows another hand. This new hand is

smaller, softer, but it is his nevertheless. The new hand keeps his old

hand warm, finger locked with finger, palm pressing palm. Then the

spring comes, his palms are sweaty again and he slowly sheds the

miraculous winter hand. First all the baby fat, then the skin sags off

and finally one day he finds himself clutching the bare bones, like a

handful of broken birch twigs.

Aleksandra Lane

Birds of Clay is Aleksandra Lane's first book in English, after two published in Serbian. Aleks moved to New Zealand in 1996, and completed her MA in Creative Writing at Victoria University's Institute of Modern Letters in 2010, receiving the Biggs Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in Jacket2, Sport, Turbine, Takahe, Snorkel, Side Stream and Swamp. She lives in Wellington and is studying for a PhD in English at Massey University.

I was lucky enough to be at the launch of 'Birds of Clay' a couple of weeks ago, which featured delicious Serbian delicacies, a very entertaining gypsy music duo from Melbourne and, of course, Aleks' wonderful poetry.   I very much enjoyed reading the book and I know I'll be going back to it.

Here's the link to more great Tuesday poems at the Tuesday poem blog, or you can click on the scroll to the left.