ruby cabinet tray₁

I told you

OR

Words that once loved me

Let me tell you here and now I have been known to cheat with words, more than once. But who hasn’t? I know Allan has. And although Tommo denies it, so has he. Probably the only person who hasn’t is the mute midget up around the corner. Mind you, there are nine billion people on the planet so if you had time, if you had the energy, sooner or later you are going to encounter at least one person who hasn’t. I would have thought.

I have no shame about any of this. No shame because the words are even better at cheating on me.

I don’t do nouns. Not anymore. Not since the nouns got the names wrong. I’ve had enough of nouns.

I’m reading this book—the Norton anthology Post-Modern American Poetry—all 982 pages of it. From what I gather—and I am perfectly happy to be corrected—American poets are now post-words, although the less radical amongst them are not yet post-grammar. Virtually everyone has a degree from a prestigious university, has won one or other poetry award, teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or is bound to be on a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation: that’s fine, but sometimes I wonder whether the words want to take a break or escape to another page.

Wonder whether the words would be happier coming out of the mouth of a plumber, a picture hanger, or indeed, the passing postman?

arthur fairley                                                                                    whangārei heads

0

Rubies are typically cut with 58 facets, losing 50% of their raw weight/mass—this is a 58-word/29-word ruby-shaped version of ‘ten glowing, faceted proverbs’ prompted in response to John’s invitation to participate.^[i]

Knowing  what  makes people tick 
is no excuse. Connection is paper-thin    beware 
paper. Celebrating cerebrating                           way more fun. 
Cut from sender and addressee               go on a bender or float free. 
Poems at dusk                                                   good for the guts.
When Orwell wakes up                   Kafka’s asleep.
Language is streets ahead         playing.
Words             seldom evaporate.
No fear no                drift. 
No                one 
leaves
.
.

vivian thonger                                                                                           kerikeri

0

The persistent imaginal. A field note on poetry

Poems that ask what it means, in the face of the absurdities and shadowy things thrown up by life, to ‘risk delight’. And what that might mean when we are looking out and listening-in for a language to say something about how mysterious we are to ourselves and to the world. Poems that are lyric moments of recognition of what happens when we stand up and speak in front of ourselves and others. You could say a way of being re-storied. A way of letting words dream again, so that making the invisible visible is at the heart of what I call the Persistent Imaginal. From this the poem springs. And there are poems that come calling on and celebrate the privilege of ordinary astonishments. So that one day a single original carrot shall be pregnant with revolution—an echo from the painter Cézanne. Poems that acknowledge and reflect on how it is that always the light lies down with the dark, however various the shuffling weathers of the heart turn up loss and death, time and memory, despair and delight; when forgetting is always about remembering.
And on those occasions that poems return to that inevitable and archetypal mystérion, what is it that love dares the self to do? A poetry that rests on and enacts the belief that we need to see the sounds and hear the words, so 'despite every dark thing there is in the world there will always be music’, the poet Jack Gilbert. When words sing poetry makes intimate that which it touches. There is always the distinct possibility of romance, and more. Naturally, poetry wants to go to the heart of the matter.

michael harlow                                                                                      alexandra

0

Becoming a black cat

Mesma forma que há dança dentro Antonio,
há nove vidas presas dentro do gato.
Gato não conhece a palavra tio,
por baixo palavra existe um artefato.

Beneath the surface of the word runs the world as below the surface of the world runs the word—this paradox is nothing to one that has spent any time hacking away at the thing, whatever 'the thing' may be, as long as, of course, 'the thing' is not one self, but a mask for or mirror of one self, one finding, after all that mining, that beneath the raw material there is always a shape that has been asking of one to unearth it in order to become, in some or other way, the newer, rawer material of the later monument, coming then to speak for itself—the discursive monument becoming then how the world speaks of one, but, if one gets this operation wrong, one may find themselves trapped, like Pinocchio, inside a monument which grows and grows toward a world one created yet can no longer access.

Just as there is dance within Antonio,
there are nine lives trapped within the cat.
This cat doesn’t know the word ‘uncle,’
beneath which word lies an artifact.

Mauri ora!

josiah morgan                                           ōtautahi christchurch / salvador, brazil 

o

A swarm of poets

A high concentration of poets has been discovered in West Auckland. Officials stumbled upon the enclave when attending a champagne supper launch of an Arts Initiative Fund Raiser at Te Uru: the poets were observed through the windows of a nearby hall engaged in reading poems to each other. Border Security has been informed and an eradication plan is being formulated. ‘We plan to cordon off the whole Titirangi area and anyone entering the cordon will be required to surrender poetry books or similar reading material. No reading material will be allowed to be taken out of the quarantined area’, a spokesperson said. Creative New Zealand says Border Security has their full support. ‘We don’t know where these poets are coming from, but they are not part of our development plan nor are swarms of poets included in our mission statement. Frankly we don’t want low-level, hedge-hopping poets writing bad poems about relationships and existential crises and rainbow utopias at a time when Eleanor Catton has won a prize that has put us on the world stage’. A New Lynn resident said that she saw ‘a straggly looking young person of uncertain ethnicity’ in the New Lynn Work and Income Office yesterday and that they appeared ‘to be scribbling lines of uneven length in an old school notebook’.  A Creative Writing Tutor at Auckland University said that this would not be connected to their programmes because a student nowadays would be likely to be using an I Pad or laptop. She did go on to say that, ‘In times of economic recession the number of poems being written tends to rise, so it might just be a seasonal thing with winter approaching’. Creative New Zealand said that they thought this was unlikely. However the spokesperson added: ‘It only takes one person to write a poem and someone else will want to do the same. This is the kind of thing that used to happen all the time, but in the modern Arts Industrial Complex these tendencies have largely been brought under control’. Border Control said that eliminating all poets from the steep gullies of the Titirangi suburban region could prove demanding.

murray edmond                                                       glen eden / tāmaki makarau

note: original invitation

[i]      You are invited to participate in poet’s ruby, a successor to broaches. 
          The chance is to consider your core relationship with poetry. 
          Your ruby take may be precious, redolent, feisty, hard-edged, entangled, a flamboyant showpiece or heirloom, rude, salubrious, a concealment, contentious, recondite, or the resolve of a moment or lifetime’s delectation. You are welcome to speak personally or in a public way, out of curiosity or fun or an abiding care for what must be held dear. We rally behind Emily Dickinson: ‘The credulous decoy / Enamoured of the Conjuror’. What does poetry give to life? 
          The word limit is 300 words, give or take. Feel welcome to display your particular wit, lustre, investment in prose or poetic text (or you may prefer a collaboration, or to include dialogue, image, or video)—it is not an essay competition! Progressive instalments will be released in the New Year, 2026.          
          ngā mihi, John