ruby cabinet tray₆

Core

Considering my core relationship with poetry I'm getting back to beginnings: the lyrics and vocals of songs. St Paul's College, Ponsonby 1967 on I made lists of Top10 hits, favourites listening on my transistor, watching bands on C'mon. 1969, fifth form (a Geraets. J. in Form 4A) class mate K/A. Maharaj brought in the Beatles White Album. Next our Lewis Eady gramophone blaring, I'm beyond excitement scouring the fold-out lyrics poster singing. 

Mid-1970 Let it Be the movie delirium in the dark, Beatles on that Saville Row rooftop. Yes, I'd start a band, write songs. The folder has almost 300 to December 1979. Some have endured beyond juvenilia. Californian Fantasies (No. 47 30/01/1972) is ruby-relevant. I'd heard this song California by a Joni Mitchell. Was I a little peeved? Soon The World of Joni Mitchell was spinning. This was different. Heartbroken at the time, her songs of heart and mind, gliding voice and poetry lifted me. My muse, always.

1972 diary 25/02 LED ZEPPLIN (Western Springs) AND HOW!
                 02/03 James K Baxter w Revell at Newman Hall
UoA English Lit major BA+MA six years. Full immersion poetry and six hand-written books, songs and poems. Example titles: going down for air and 365 Obsession Drive. Revisiting these I see the songs became more like their companion poems: longer, less verse/chorus. 

Early 1980s a friend gifted me his dad's jazz 45s for my jukebox. The Great American Songbook, The Divine One Sarah Vaughan, my listening and singing changed forever in the luscious reverie of her voice. Mid-90s a band! Michael Giacon and the Mood Swings. I created shows that included my poetry and songs sometimes performed by my alter ego Ms Fancy Stitchin'. 

2015 AUT Creative Writing MA/Poetry. A song lyric introduces each section theme and the exegesis expands on much of the above. The MA led to my book undressing in slow motion (May 2024) with lyrics fitting seamlessly into the whole. And recently I was at a PRIDE poetry event on a roof top on Dominion Rd rain threatening. Get Back, Get Back 

michael giacon                                                             westmere / tāmaki auckland

o

Definitely probably

approaching the poem is a reminder to carry out a stocktake of edges — bleeding, undefined & elusive — those grey areas hedging all bets — in first-year English I was lectured about what exists in the liminal — so I’ve made space for all possibilities — believing that I am the poem until the poem decides to abandon me for another threshold — & then? — those edges fray even further — traditional borders falter — no more identification by sight — by touch — by the sound of words dissolving —  images drift in & out of focus — I learn to embrace the fuzziness — & spend hours wondering whether clarity is a false alarm — therefore: no such thing as a useless word — day after day — I conjure & dispel — build a case for merging accidental poetry & capital-P Poetry — I think twice about sending text messages with unintentional rhyme — (poet & I know it!) — I suppose everything is an echo of something true — every path crossed finds a way to carry on — in search of other travellers — to speak the world into new forms — to spread songs & revelations — I can only hold so much before release is inevitable — completing the landslide within — & then — I wait for the poem to return to me — like Newton’s apple waits for gravity — like glass waits for light to transform it — the world is fluid in its attention to detail — meanwhile time simmers in its supernatural simplicity — & I — caught in the elusive — think of the word & hope the word thinks of me

chris tse                                                           wellington / te whanganui-a-tara

o

‘Ruby Anniversary’: thoughts on a poem in progress

When John Geraets called for contributions to his ‘ruby cabinet’, I was up to perhaps the tenth draft of a poem whose central image is a pair of clip-on earrings my sister gave me in 2025; earrings that were once our paternal grandmother’s. Some time ago, our aunt handed the pair on to my sister, saying that she thought the gemstones might be rubies, and that possibly our grandfather gave them to Gran for a wedding anniversary present. My sister didn’t think they suited her, and so she sent them to me to try.

When the earrings first tumbled out of the small tissue paper burrito, I was transfixed. Shadows of our grandparents, too, might have slipped out of the crumpled, crepe-papery folds and into daylight.

 I toyed with the earrings, tried the clasps. I already felt a poem stirring.

When I try, now, to lean down into what happens when an urge to communicate through a poem arises, the round-cut ruby, with its 58 facets, initially seems an apt objective correlative. Yet the ruby analogy only goes so far; perhaps I need something more malleable? The internal shift is something like an engine warming, the pull towards some destination. This time, it’s a stirring in mind and body that mingles curiosity, expectation, desire, melancholy, loss, and also grit, obsession, determination.

When I felt the energy of the poem, ‘Ruby Anniversary’, crackle and wake, I didn’t want to just let the currents of memory, partial family anecdote, and my personal response to the physical object meet in the estuary of language. I also wanted to carry out a little factual verification. I visited several high street jewellers to get a valuation of the earrings. They sent me to a side street goldsmith. This tetchy, plum-faced man took one look, spat out ‘costume jewellery’, spun on his heel, and snatched up papers from near the till with a theatrical irritation.

Of course, the jeweller’s appraisal took a red blade to the early draft of my poem: slash, slash, through some of the family’s initial suppositions about the loving gift from husband to wife. It meant that other possibilities surfaced, though. Had someone swindled Gramps back in 2005, which would have been the year of their ruby wedding anniversary? Did he believe he was buying precious gems? Did he fib to Gran, telling her, as her memory unravelled in her eighties, that the stones were rubies? The latter was one ‘maybe’ that I discarded almost as soon as I’d thought it. Did Gran, in her late life confusion, mislead my aunt? Or did Gran buy these inexpensive, trifling trinkets for a particular occasion, calling them her rubies in a private game, being a thrifty magpie of happiness and ‘self-care’, before that phrase was common?

The family mysteries have given the drafting process oxygen. The pretty tat of the earrings tremble under lamplight, and the shiver induces a kind of trance. If a poem is a ruby and a jeweller’s loupe, it is also the slippery play of light, the elusive dance of fact, feeling, call, response, and memory; and even more fugitive, the memory of others’ memories.

emma neale                                                                              ōtepoti / dunedin

o

Why poetry 

stay hearty as/to push an ear to the hive’s low humming/to let myself be earnest/to find a place put down some of this yearning/to stop reaching for my phone/to plant bulbs in the warming soil/to hold it to the light/to let her know we make it/to blow out birthday candles like rainbow wax prayers/to write us all together in the dark

aimee-jane anderson-o’connor                                                            kirikiriroa 

o

A gem, if successful—

hot rushing red—

a cascading footfall—		        a litany—		     choreography—
							                        fluidity—

							                        I want

the whole world in a handspan—

as a pop song—
as a music video—
as an executed vision—
as a short film—				             or a book of them—
		
the creation of a disproportionate impact—
striking right to the heart—			

							                        I want

	saturated light and colour and sound—
	to see you cut to the chase—	      even if you do it slowly—

							                        I want

	concept made sensation—			        made crystal—
							                        made compact—

	distilled to its core—				        and exploded again—
		
	the hurtling—
	the barrelling—
	and giving in to what’s coursing through you—
			            that which it’s unbearable not to let out—

							                        I want
	
the reaching—
the grasping—
the cosmic heat in the distance between the hands of Adam and God—

							                        I want

a newfound inevitability—
an articulation of recognisable truth—

the magic of that truth found through the mouth of another person—

the unique and the knowable in every carved facet—

							                        I want

anguish and fervour—
absolution and relief—	
		
							                        I want

something that is as purely yours as anything can ever be—

something cleaved from the rock—
something flowing like water—
something unafraid to run—
something set, at heart, to jolt—
	
that upends what you know—
                that brings your hands to it tighter—

							                        I want
	
to descend the perfectly crafted staircase
	
		to find the final step’s gone only too late

tate fountain                                                                                       london / uk

o

Mckays road

kirsty mckay                                                                                              halkett

o

Thinking with sense

Poetry is disrupted speech. It is not usual to speak in poetry, rather to use ‘everyday’ speech. Poetry disrupts this speech. Poetry is disruptive speech. It is the friction between words and thought.

Poetry is solid. Consider Rachel Whiteread’s long removed sculptural work ‘House’. Not necessarily likeable, but interesting, if exhausting. Consisting of a cast of the interior surfaces of a building, it makes space present. That presence is special, detailed. It remains in memories, in histories. Poetry gives words this presence and hints at the spacetimes which gives poetry a reality.

Poetry is sound. Take a reader echoing texts in an auditorium, or a choir chanting through a cathedral. The language may be difficult to discern because of reverberations and resonances. Yet, although it is formed within the containment of air in the lungs and building, the sound will spread and dissipate, becoming simultaneously engulfing and ephemeral.

Poetry is the creator of models. Poetry is purposeful in many ways. It interrogates meaning and the gaps between meanings. Like a set of mathematical equations, it describes by fixing what ‘is’ through symbols we call words, but breathes possibilities through thought. It provides structures which can, perhaps should, be broken.  It searches peculiar realities, it uses the conventions we see every day, but it sits in the gaps between.

Poetry is crystalline. It can act as a set of reductive forms, shrinking everything into structures and laws. It can break into expansive transformations, modelling what is measured into something that insists on the making of universes. Poetry considers words in structure, the beyond and the within, and the boundaries between. This notional universe may be smooth or granular, but it contains the uncertainty between the thinking and the word.

martin porter                                                                 jersey /whangārei / wells