The NZ-based international poetry site Tuesday Poem
is back - and into its second week of 2013 - with They Could Have Stayed Forever by Joan Fleming, a haunting prose poem
posted by Orchid Tierney. Joan Fleming is currently living and working in
Dunedin, as is Tierney who explains,
This poem was written to accompany an exhibition of photography by Kate Van
Der Drift, made up of large scale, high-key outdoor
scenes of abandoned holiday places. These quietly still, beautifully eerie
photographs, taken near Israel's dead sea, convey a sense of migration,
emptiness, and change.
The
poem begins...
There’s a free beach somewhere close to here,
where everyone’s covered in sand. And everyone knows that sand is time, or time
is sandy, and all the barriers are striped, red and white, like Christmas
candy. But no-one’s there. They couldn’t find the rhyme for fun hiding in their
pocket money.
For more (who could resist? follow the link
above.)
Last week, Tuesday Poem hosted a poem from
another poet living in the deep south -- the Robert Burns fellow 2013 David
Howard. It's called Always
almost, never quite and was posted by Claire Beynon who hauled in a
bunch of fellow poets to quiz Howard on the poem -- the result is a fascinating
and wide-ranging discussion. Here's an extract:
For most of us it will be winter
Three
seasons out of four.
Marylinn Kelly: Are you saying that
(for most us) time is 3/4 not about producing, growing, flowering, emerging but
rather existing in a dormant state? Is that wasteful or desirable?
David: While my daily experience is that most of us are dormant most of
the time (we often call it ‘being busy’), which I find wasteful rather than
desirable, I also own the problem - logical and psychological - of becoming.
It’s a contradictory matter; it often seems to me that ‘contradictory’ and
‘matter’ belong in the same sentence. As a child I intuitively subscribed to
Parmenides’ notion of block time. Its most prominent adherent is Einstein, who
was taken to task by Popper for a view that reduces change to the status of an
illusion. While I am intellectually uncertain about essentialism I write from
the imaginative position that what is, is; everything already exists, and for
always.
Nothing comes from nothing,
The
universe is eternal, like first love.
It is hungry work, returning.
Yes, so why not grab a bite of eternity at Tuesday Poem? - once you've read
the hub poems check out the sidebar with 30 poets from NZ, Australia, the UK,
US and Italy who post a Tuesday Poem every week.
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