Tuesday, June 08, 2010

TUESDAY POEM 8 June 2010
Mary McCallum reports in:


The Tuesday Poem this week is The Blue and White Tablecloth by Dunedin poet Carolyn McCurdie.  A fine domestic love song to an enduring relationship, McCurdie’s poem is at the hub of the Tuesday Poem which also has a blog roll of 28 poets offering a range of Tuesday Poems to be read today or over the week to come.

In its ninth week, the NZ-based Tuesday Poem blog is now a humming community of writers from NZ, the Philippines, the US, Ireland and the UK, who not only post but critique and comment on poems in insightful and generous ways. As TP blog curator Mary McCallum says, the conversation between the poets’ blogs is one of the most interesting things about the Tuesday Poem project – the way the poems themselves speak to each other and the way the poets discuss and comment on what has been posted.

NZ poet Helen Lehndorf riffs on the imperative voice in poetry and posts a fierce poem by new poetry star Sarah Broom called Not Yet, Not Now. Joanna Preston posts Wordsworth, Helen Lowe posts Sappho – both poems that celebrate the divinity inherent in nature and by implication the divinity in poetry. The celebration of woman as poet that comes through the Sappho poem is picked up in a powerful Chicana poem posted by UK writer Belinda Hollyer. And what it means to marry a poet is explored with gentle humour by S L Corsua from the Philippines.

Nature and its fragility are developed in Margaret Atwood’s Elegy for the Giant Tortoises whereas nature and its wondrous good health are celebrated in the deliciously equine Horse Trading by UK poet Kathleen Jones. The many faces of love are explored in Saradha Koirala’s North American Haiku, Mary McCallum’s Pink T-shirt, Kay McKenzie Cooke’s some time, Dimitrova’s Deserts posted by US poet Miriam Levine, and Humbert’s Poem from Lolita by Nabokov – the latter given the usual fine analysis by epic poet Zireaux.

There is playfulness too - NZ poet and publisher Helen Rickerby and NZ poet Harvey Molloy do a swap this week posting a poem by each other – Molloy’s is about a ghost at the St James Theatre and Rickerby’s calls on the myth of Orpheus. Jeffrey Paparoa Holman posts a poem about teeth and Fifi Colston about pegs. Lynn Davidson plays rather marvellously with the word Foolscap on Helen Heath’s blog. Then there’s the wackiness of Lewis Carroll posted by Janis Freegard.

MM


Tuesday Poem

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