Posts by Lilith __
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Hard News: A Century Since, in reply to Sacha,
psychiatrist’s couch :)
I know! Quite.
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Hard News: A Century Since, in reply to recordari,
BTW, Jack, I have ONLY JUST REALISED that your gravatar is a switch and not a chaise longue! I must be cuckoo, I know. I used to wonder why you had a sofa. :-)
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Can I have a brief rave about Eileen Duggan, who I think is in danger of slipping into obscurity? Born in 1894, she was a little older than Curnow, but her best work is still fresh:
Night
You are the still caesura
That breaks a line in two;
A quiet leaf of darkness
Between two flowers of blueA little soft indrawing
Between two sighs;
A slender spit of silence
Between two seas of cries.She's sometimes anthologised, but I think all her books are now out of print. There are a couple more poems here, and you might find others dotted around the web.
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Hard News: A Century Since, in reply to recordari,
He was a clever little balloon man.
+1
Really dig this too:
I, Time, am all these, yet these exist
Among my mountainous fabrics like a mist, -
Re: commas, I've always loved this passage from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas :
Haweis and his wife, later Mina Loy were also in Florence. Their
home had been dismantled as they had had workmen in it but they put
it all in order to give us a delightful lunch. Both Haweis and Mina were
among the very earliest to be interested in the work of Gertrude Stein.
Haweis had been fascinated with what he had read in manuscript of
The Making of Americans. He did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic
and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas were
only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know
of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she
liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for
a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on re-
reading the manuscript she took the commas out.Mina Loy equally interested was able to understand without the
commas. She has always been able to understand.The addition of exactly 2 commas to The Making of Americans is remarkable, as the book runs to over 800 pages. :-)
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hard to go past Barry Cleavin for the witty bird references.
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- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which sayswe are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraphAnd death i think is no parenthesis
Not a NZ poet, but strong on punctuation.
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Ah, it was Philip Trusttum. And the only one of his mower paintings I can find online.
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Hard News: A Century Since, in reply to ChrisW,
MOWER: RUAPEKAPEKA
Burn! But brilliantly done. :-)
[can someone remind me of the name of that South Island painter who did a series of huge heroic paintings of his motor mower?]
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And just to lower the tone I think we have to have this too:
No moa, no moa
In old Ao-tea-roa.
Can't get 'em.
They've et 'em;
They've gone and there aint no moa!(popular New Zealand song, quoted in Trotter and McCulloch 1984)