Entries by Jennifer Liston

This morning I was going through a book called The Poetics of Indeterminacy by Marjorie Perloff. One of the chapters was called '"The Space of a Door": Beckett and the Poetry of Absence'.

I wrote the following few lines: 'The space of a door / displaces me / frames a no, / a yes, / a maybe...' and then I left it to finish later.

This evening I went to a most moving launch of a book written by one of my very talented uni colleagues, Kristina Olsson. The extraordinary story is called Boy, Lost; Kristina’s mother lost her baby boy, Peter, when he was snatched by his father from her arms as she sat in a train waiting to leave Cairns. I was privileged to hear Kristina, her sister Sharon and their lost – now found – brother Peter, speak so eloquently and bravely about the secrets, the heartache and ultimately the healing.

Then I came home and finished the poem.

boy, found

(I)

The space of a train door
displaces him
frames a no,
a yes,
a maybe,
faces her towards
a terrible symmetry;
safety for them both
was for her
pinned here
on the nearer side of there,
was for her stolen infant
there
on the further side of her(e).

(II)

Decades of tight-lipped memories,
secret sibling absence
a haunting presence
in the hearts of innocents,
waiting patiently.

(III)

A lifetime.
A searching.
A file.
A family found.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Today I was reading some poems by Jack Spicer. His 'Letter to Gary Bottone' captivated me.

So I replied using his vocabulary.

Letter to Jack Spicer

Dear Jack,

although I cannot see you either
I can still love you.
I have love enough for us both.
I remember when I walked
reluctantly
into my own dreadful, wonderful Bohemia.
I'm still navigating the hellish corridors,
eyes not yet open,
not yet despairing,
but I trust I will soon see windows into heaven
and expect to blast a few myself
through the rocks of hell.
I haven't yet paid
the price you paid
but I hope you're there,
all the same,
waiting for me
with open arms.
For now,
these poems will go on
and I will continue
to love you
by letter
from an alien world.

Love,
Jennifer

Posted by Jennifer Liston

For a writing exercise in our poetry group, we had to take a foreign-language poem and translate it.

I chose Jacques Prévert's 'Pour toi mon amour' from his collection Paroles.

Here is the original poem followed by my translation.

Pour toi mon amour

Je suis allé au marché aux oiseaux
Et j'ai acheté des oiseaux
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis allé au marché aux fleurs
Et j'ai acheté des fleurs
Pour toi
mon amour
Je suis allé au marché à la ferraille
Et j'ai acheté des chaînes
De lourdes chaînes
Pour toi
mon amour
Et puis je suis allé au marché aux esclaves
Et je t'ai cherchée
Mais je ne t'ai pas trouvée
mon amour.


For you my love

I went to the bird market
And I bought birds
For you
my love
I went to the flower market
And I bought flowers
For you
my love
I went to the scrap iron market
And I bought chains
Heavy chains
For you
my love
And then I went to the slave market
And I looked for you
But I didn't find you
my love.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

I usually rescue a poem from prose texts (read here about my rescue process).

Today, however, I thought I'd rescue a poem from two poems, each called 'The Fish'. One is by Marianne Moore and the other is by Elizabeth Bishop.

I read Elizabeth Bishop's poem once, quite some time ago, and I still haven't read Marianne Moore's poem, so I am not yet familiar with the content of either poem.

The surprise with the poem I rescued is that it's not about fish at all.

I love surprises, and I love this rescue process.

old

terrible things
in an ancient, sun-cracked face
age burns like hatchet sun
its swiftness, weapon-like:
                marks not mine are mine.
orange crimped feathers
white lilies
big spread rainbow of shiny glass
are rusted tinfoil.
                marks not mine are mine.
crisp yellowed stare
from my eyes like medals –
not medals,
like barnacles,
like sea stars;
my grim wisdom, grunting,
lip down, sullen,
shafts of fight
abuse my aching jaw,
rainbow strokes the turquoise water
rainbow shapes speckled jelly-fish
rainbow keeps fish of youth submerged.
                marks not mine are mine.
everything is here:
my strips of tarnished skin
are rust-brown evidence
of a shiny edifice
shifted;
tremendous heavier flesh
attached to tiny little bones.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

In his poem 'Lamia' John Keats used the phrases 'cold philosophy' and 'unweave a rainbow' to lament science's cold deconstruction of a rainbow into seven colours.

According to Richard Dawkins, however, when discussing his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder , the opposite is true: solved mysteries reveal deeper beauty and as such, science can be the inspiration for great poetry.


Night wonder

She asks a question
about the halo of ice crystals
around Adelaide's half moon tonight
and the conversation flickers
around reflected light
and lunar bows,
a rainbow's shyer sibling,
its darker moonlit twin.

Cold philosophy
may have unweaved rainbows
but has yet
to whet its blade
on moonbows,
long abandoned by leprechauns
with pots of gold in tow.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

I wrote today's poem after reading a prompt suggested by Robert Lee Brewer two days ago at Writers' Digest over here. The prompt: to write an impossible poem.

The whisper

You cannot write an impossible poem,
'they' say.
(Why do I refer to faceless, nameless experts
to underpin arguments,
to reinforce doubts,
to underscore futility?
'They' often get their way
and in my way).

Every impossible poem whispers 'I'm possible'
and if I hear it
I write it,
therefore only possible poems exist.

I find that the probable poems
are most unlikely.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Today, day 17, I played with randomness.

I wrote a phrase, 'The empty basket of wonder'. Then, I wrote lists, independently, of close rhymes for 'empty', 'basket' and 'wonder'. After that I ordered each list alphabetically.

Today's poem is a list of those phrases, with the first phrase being the 'control'.

I love interesting and unexpected results!

Random 17 wonders

The empty basket of wonder.
The angry anklet of blunder.
The bendy bandit of comfort.
The brandy banquet of drunkard.
The cranky biscuit of hunger.
The friendly blanket of jumper.
The handy classic of monster.
The manky credit of number.
The phlegmy dammit of puncture.
The plenty elastic of runner.
The randy facet of slumber.
The sandy gadget of songster.
The scanty hamlet of summer.
The swanky magnet of sunder.
The testy palette of thunder.
The trendy plastic of tumbler.
The twenty respite of under.
The zesty tablet of youngster.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Today I spent some time researching mind mapping software.

Oh hello, poem number 16.

I might develop this idea further.

Cartographer

Like a spidery weather pattern
my ideas are mapped on screen;
coloured lines like isobars
associate words,
connect concepts.

My ideas,
precipitated by incessant rainstorms
and erupting volcanoes of my thinking systems.
How do I map these internal topographies?

Over time, I have felt
my coastlines of conviction erode,
my oceans of hope evaporate,
fissure vents rupture my meadows of joy.
Every day I witness
climate change.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Today's poem is probably half the size it could be due to it being half-way to the end of this poem-a-day project.

Are we there yet?

Half way,
where the distance ahead
equals the distance travelled:
there to there divided by two.

You and I measure our closeness in silence.

Half way,
the middle ground
for optimists and pessimists.

Here we ramble, you and I.

Half way,
where a fence-sitter perches
before making a decision.

Our fences are flimsy.

Half way,
signalling the end of a beginning
and the imminence of finish.

You and I are our better halves.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Day 14's poem.

Left

You never know what you will find
in an op shop;
discarded trash
becomes your treasure;
someone's boredom
with their wardrobe
yields designer brands
and other riches
at recycle prices.
Sometimes, like Russian nested dolls,
you might uncover treasure within treasure:
I have found a five-dollar note
in the pocket of pristine Esprit jeans ($15),
an Italian business card case
zipped into a Kenneth Cole handbag ($6),
a first edition of Seamus Heaney's North
with his signature on the title page ($5),
and once,
tucked into the lining of a blue Yves St Laurent jacket (₤35),
a crumpled, black-inked note
from 'Jean-Pierre' to 'Rose'
confessing several affairs and
wishing her all the best.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Lovely and talented Irish poet Eleanor Hooker posted a link on Facebook to linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky delivering a lecture in Dublin. He discusses the fundamental nature of language and what it is designed for. He opened by defining language as 'sound with meaning'.

Irish clergyman Edward Hincks (born in 1792) was one of the decipherers of Mesopotamian cuneiform (cuneiform script is one of the earliest known systems of writing).

And so, today’s poem.

Decipherment

Language may be
sound with meaning
or meaning with sound
but I've been fumbling with wording,
mumbling in ears
for years;
my blunt reed
scores cuneiform script
that no-one can read
on clay tablets
that bake
then break.
I say things I don't mean,
say mean things,
or mean things, but don't say them.
You are my Edward Hincks.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

It's strange, what happens, when you don't know what you're going to write, but start writing anyway. I was running out of time/ideas/inspiration this afternoon, then the first three lines of this poem came to me.

The biblical image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle has always fascinated me, so I looked here for common phrases that originated from the Bible.

And thus today's poem came to be.

In the end, there's no word

I have no sand to stand on:
it's quick, and disappearing,
like the love in an old lover's eyes;
like the rebel camel passing
through a needle's eye;
like the stubborn, now dead, fly
in the ointment of the apothecary;
like the flesh, thorned,
weak despite a willing spirit.

Let my clay feet
run me far away
from the fat of lands,
run me far away
from pigs playing with pearls
to the ends of the salted earth,
return me to ash and dust
at the foot of mountains
moved by faith.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

The pinhole camera or camera obscura has been known to scholars since the time of Aristotle and Chinese philosopher Mozi (470 to 390 BCE). Mozi referred to the device as a 'collecting plate' or 'locked treasure room'. (Read more here.)

camera obscura

A vision:
rapidfire mind
clickety click click click click click
remembers ancient secrets
of a locked treasure room,
frames the answer
for public viewing.
Without strain
the honest among us
see truths;
without pride
the kind among us
capture the greatness
of small miracles;
without prejudice
the fair among us
correct distortions
and with each fine grain of good
our divine future tilts
towards a pinhole of light.

Posted by Jennifer Liston

Today we lost four days of entries on our (several) websites due to hardware failure of our server. Our in-house techno-guru aka Robert has been working hard all day and evening to nurse the server back to health and recover what we can.

I had to re-enter the last four poems plus my commentary (luckily I had them in Word documents). Sadly, however, it means I've lost the many lovely comments that had been posted.

I'm so sorry about that, especially as you took the trouble to not only visit and read the poems, but to write and load those comments (and type the ole anti-spammy-majig).

I hope it won't put you off commenting on the remaining 20 poems that I will be writing for the month!

Jxo

Posted by Jennifer Liston

I read yesterday (over here) that the body of Chilean poet and senator, Pablo Neruda, was exhumed on Monday to establish the exact cause of his death in 1973. He was reported to have died of heart failure when suffering from pancreatic cancer. His driver, however, has long claimed that Neruda was poisoned by the Pinochet regime just two weeks after the coup in Chile during which Neruda's friend, Salvador Allende, was murdered.

So I wrote a poem, using a selection of approximate poem and book titles from this much-loved Nobel Prize winner.

On exhuming Pablo Neruda

On the blue shore of silence –
calm as if absent –
the briny soil yields broken things:
crushed mud and light,
unquiet stones,
your socks,
salt, tomatoes and wine,
mermaids and drunks,
a carnal apple and a burning hot moon,
a full woman
and a rose, separate,
fleas (that interested you so much),
a book of questions
and songs of despair with the saddest lines,
a lemon absence,
a yellow heart,
a clenched soul in a continent of hope.
A gentleman, alone.

Posted by Jennifer Liston