ruby cabinet tray2
Ruby (literally)
There are seasons in girls’ names: flowers, jewels: Rose, Lily, Amber, Sapphire. When my only granddaughter, Ruby, was born it was the jewel season. I christened her Ruby Duby Du and Roger Hickin’s Cold Hub Press published a suite of 28 poems in 2013.
Some names attract songs, and some don’t.
Ruby, everything’s fine in the music line.
But I am not a diarist or a chronologer; I like to be surprised by an image and besides I didn’t wish to intrude. Ruby, at fourteen, is sitting at a table, practising applying eyeliner and mascara. The movement of life is faster than any poem. ‘Choosing a Book for Ruby’ (let her stay in the lovely poise of ten for a whole year); ‘Ruby approaches a cello’ (a cellist at an orchestra concert allows a group of admirers to touch his cello). I nearly fall off my seat at the symbolism: thoughts of sidesaddles and Jacqueline du Pré.
A poem must not give advice: the grandmother had better stay in a cupboard. ‘Open field’ is a long-forgotten term but it still applies: open the end. Something Thomas Hardy is very good at.
There are five Ruby poems in The Interview Rose (AUP, 2026) some of which Ruby has already outgrown. Is a poem really a person? Nonsense. Keats was right to imagine himself a leaf on a tree. In ‘The Tux Boys and the Bare Girls’ I am leaping ahead to her cousin’s high school graduation: the girls, voluptuous and shivering in strapless dresses, the boys in comfortable tuxes. In ‘A Wedding Dress for Guy Fawkes Night’ Ruby has bought an op shop wedding dress with satin panels to door knock with a rabble of ghouls, witches and skeletons.
I promise not to write too many Ruby poems: intermittent love but a perennial love of poetry.
elizabeth smither spotswood / new plymouth
o
Shadbolt Maurice Blanchot
Séance
Where in a work lies the beginning of the moment when the words become stronger than their meaning and the meaning more physical than the word? M.B…
Death communicates to life the direction in which its plot unfolds and gives it unity and definition. M.S.
Sur, sir, surname, surface of eight letters, I think I remember beneath a glassy sea of words, apparitions : time : memory : silence returning as tide, sinew, the little muddy language, shore, voice of broken persona : I : yes, you, space and song, swept out to the Tasman, more that I can’t recall, through the Heads to Èze-Village : all afloat there the ‘t’ gently bobbing like a small ship at anchor, mast at the junction of crossed time, sailing nowhere, stilled and alphabetical, now here, like a lighthouse atop the Manukau Heads.
sam sampson little muddy creek / waitākere ranges
o
Something very close to love
If I could raise rivers, I’d raise them
Across the mantle of your past: old headwaters
Stolen, oxbows high and dry while new ones form,
A sediment of history rearranged.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a bigger ‘if’, as in: you’re likely driving to wreck on the sharp rocks of assumption there friend. Considerations of likelihood hardly seem the point. No, this is an altogether different scale of conditional. The first line, if we were just to leave it there, almost collapses into tautology for God’s sake. And yet the opening gambit knocks my breath out so hard that suddenly everything seems possible.
If I could unlock
The lakes, I’d spill their volume over the till
I know you cultivate: full accumulations swept away,
The habit of prairies turned to mud. If I had glaciers,
I’d carve at the stony cliffs of your belief:
Logical mountains lowered notch by notch, erratics
Dropped for you to stumble on.
It’s hard to imagine what reception Douglas Crase’s book The Revisionist—whose first poem we’re tumbling through—could have had when it was published in Boston in 1981 by Little, Brown and Company in a wrapped paperback of 85 pages. Not even a jacket quote from the great gymnast Ashbery could poster over the gulf between this dazzlingly geophysical earnestness and the time’s devoutly post-modern irony. The title, far from any knowing nod to destabilising narratives, houses one of the last poetic attempts at that utterly sweeping tradition which then must have bordered on being entirely impossible to read.
Earthquakes, and I’d
Seize your experience at its weakest edge: leveled
Along a fault of memories. Sunspots, I’d cloud
Your common sense; tides, and I’d drown its outlines
With a weight of water they could never bear.
This poem—and indeed the rest of the book—continues through a catalogue and collage of topographical and historical material of a kind familiar to those who frequent such totalising (American) poetic projects from the 20th Century onwards. To be honest I could take or leave most of it. But these first two-or-so pages, with their cascading counterfactuals of both force and tenderness, are to me among the most important words in existence.
If I had hurricanes, I’d worry your beaches
Into ambiguity: barrier islands to collect them
In one spot and in another the sudden gut
That sucks them loose to revolve in dispersion with
The waves. If I had frost, I’d shatter the backbone
Of your thought: an avalanche of gravel, a storm
Of dust.
How could such heights of sincerity be reached with only the provisional—the ‘iffy’—as material? The Revisionist was out of print before the end of the decade in which it was published, and remained that way until finally reissued (as it were) by Carcanet in 2019: ‘To fit the space where / it always might have been’.
If I could unroll a winter of time
When these were done, I’d lay around your feet
In endless fields where you could enter and belong,
A place returning and a place to turn to whole.
chris holdaway ohakune / ruapehu district
o
Ruby
Experiences are dirty windows. I press my nose up against them and look into the building, and I only see shadows and angles and old tin cans. But in the moment that an experience leaves my body and becomes letters and words I see right through it. I am addicted to this moment as if it were a street drug. And then there is the beauty of the words themselves. The beauty is for the audience.
Every person is a whole world. When I read poetry or listen to it, I am listening for what other people say about their world. Recently I was invited to the launch of a book where everyone who submitted a poem or a story had their work accepted for the book. At the launch people read or sang and the audience cheered because they wanted to hear about each person’s world. A poem is a self-portrait even when it is about trees or ships.
Poetry is not a commodity. It’s almost impossible to earn a living from it, or for others to make money from it. That makes poetry valueless, and I value it for that. Poetry is old, perhaps as old as spoken language. When I listen to someone reading the Torah in Hebrew, I hear four-thousand-year-old heart beats and people talking around a campfire about something important. Sometimes what people say is so important that they will risk their lives to say it and others will risk their lives to hear it.
lynn jenner waipapa
o
Experimental poetics—Haptik poems
I’m not the kind of poet who grabs hold of labels, or joins schools of similar thought. I don’t think I’d make a very useful candidate on any forum to discuss the term ‘experimental poetics’. Experimental writing shouldn’t be governed by years or time slots. Artists should always be experimenting with words, images, pictures or whatever genre they are sold on. My work is experimental, will always be… it’s an ongoing pursuit striving for that originality of thought, action, idea etc. And rules are to be broken, shattered, reconstructed, made better, for we humans like to see difference, be different. You know, I could categorise myself as a surrealist, an abstract expressionist, an imagist and so on. But I like to think of my poetics as experimental because I’m forever changing my poems, revising, revising, panel beating the things to make them better. The best situation for me, I suppose, is that I am very much experimentally-orientated.
I could go on, but poetry is where I walk and breathe and it is simply that—to get to the truth of the matter—to expunge redundancies, influences, outside intrusions… it is all part of the creative gift, isn’t it?… for the poet to get it right, as far as he/she is concerned.
Thanks again—it is very important to discuss such subjects… like how one tries to define poetry. The talk will be endless, the definitions endless. We each have our points of view, our slants so incredibly diverse.
My ‘HAPTIK POEMS’ consist of many short ones written to highlight the imagery. My interpretation of the word ‘haptic’ means to be able to touch and then to come to some conclusion about the texture, the make, the general feel of an object through manipulation. The poems meanings are secondary to the actual images the readers are touching with their eyes. Each poem should have a number of images which the reader is meant to react to first—to give life to—by feeling them as if they’re in their hands. Besides the term, ‘Haptik Poems’, I like to call this Spoken Imagery as well. My most recently published pamphlet (Uncertain Densities) has been written with this concept in mind. On their own, the poems are individualistic and experimental, if not somewhat surreal in places.
iain britton wellington / te whanganui-a-tara