Tuesday, June 15, 2010

TUESDAY POEM

Tuesday Poem has Bill Manhire at its hub this week with a poem called Nuptials from his recent collection The Victims of Lightning (VUP).
The poem begins

Take back your heart,
that tattooed star. Take back
take back: your this and that, your pale guitar.

Tuesday Poem curator Mary McCallum is the editor this week. She was one of Bill’s under-graduate creative writing students once upon a time and tells the story of the naked horse….

Thirty years ago, Bill was my tutor in one of his early under-grad creative writing classes. I will never forget a poem he published back then called Declining the Naked Horse. It made us laugh, we who lived in cold Aro St flats and debated oxymorons and knew our Coleridge from our Plath. We repeated Bill's poem in the Student Union cafe over hotdogs and chips. Was this a poem?  Really? Really?

Once Tuesday Poem readers have read Nuptials – there are 30 poets from NZ, the US, the UK, Ireland and the Philippines posting poems by themselves and poets they admire – it takes just a click on the live blog roll in the sidebar to sample poems by poets from Wallace Stevens to Amy Brown, from Christina Rossetti to Harvey Molloy, from Thomas Hardy to Helen Rickerby.

What the blog reader accesses in the Tuesday Poem is a generous and inclusive community of poets that comment on each other’s choices and published work or work-in-progress – offering both support and suggestions. It’s a lively read and worth a visit.

Go to http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com/

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