Friday is National Poetry Day but poets up and down the country like to make a week of it – Tuesday Poem is no exception. The usual Tuesday Poem is up today and on Friday the blog will host poems by the NZ Post Poetry finalists, and in the live blog roll the Tuesday Poets will post poems with a NZ theme or, for the overseas poets, poems about the joys of writing poetry.
Up today on Tuesday Poem is an extract from ‘Sab’ by Maria McMillan, a Wellington poet who has gone underneath the literary radar in this country. And yet the comments at the bottom of the post suggest that this will not be the case from now on.
Maria McMillan says about the poem:
“This excerpt is from Sab, a series of persona poems spanning many generations of a fictional Pakeha family. I'm interested in how people explain huge things to themselves in not many words - like leaving your home country and never seeing your family again, or war, or the spirit-stripping recession of the 1980s. I wonder if grief that's never dealt with is passed on like eye-colour or strange shaped thumbs.”
And after being blasted by ‘Sab’ – the blog reader is invited to visit the 30 Tuesday Poets in the live blog roll. The poems include one by Katherine Mansfield posted by Kathleen Jones who has just published a KM biography with Penguin. And this is part of a huge range of glorious poetry from the audio poem by young Aucklander Sam Sampson to Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Common Things to the Anglo-Saxon poem Wulf and Earwacer to links to the Best NZ Poems 2009.
If you don’t read poetry the rest of the year you must read it this week and Tuesday Poem is a great way to start. For other events on National Poetry Day check out Tuesday Poem’s sidebar.
No comments:
Post a Comment