A faultline of earthquake poems – NZ and US poets show solidarity

A faultline of earthquake poems runs through Tuesday Poem today. At the epicentre is The Year of the Elephants by former poet laureate Michele Leggott. This week’s TP editor, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, selected Michele’s poem “…because it is so timely, an earthquake poem set in Canterbury, circling around the great human tremor where we all begin. It speaks of birth, our entry point into these unstable elements of land sea and sky, earth air and fire. “

In the live blog roll on the Tuesday Poem site, there are another half dozen poems on the Canterbury quake or on earthquakes in general. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman posts September Quake on his own blog, Seattle Poet T Clear posts Earthquake, with Forty Pianos by Tom Porter, piano tuner; and Boston Poet Melissa Green posts Christchurch as seen from the Nortern Hemisphere. Wellington Poet Mary McCallum posts Earth which begins

it mobs us
leaves us
immobile

we are aghast and naked in the doorway

And there are other resonances too in the non-Earthquake poems such as Claire Beynon’s selection, Theodore Roethke’s Big Wind; Helen Rickerby’s Finding the Cracks, and the haiku chosen by Helen Lowe In the midst of the plain…

As Claire Beynon (TP’s co-curator) says about the way Tuesday Poem as come together this week: “Together, we find the words we need to make sense of our world. Today, it seems to me something new and different is unfolding... we're building a composite; a communal poem composed of many parts. What a privilege. Thank you all.”

Find Tuesday Poem here and the links to 30 poets from NZ, the UK, the US and Ireland. Check out the marvellous non-Earthquake poems, too.