Tuesday Poem – like a question

She said, “it sounds like courting”
when you took me to the beach,
the wind blew my eyes to streaming,
we tried to stay on the hill.

He said “a poem is like a question:
neither true nor false”
I whispered “poetry is truth”
but I’d misunderstood.

I said “it shouldn’t be possible
to describe anyone in one sentence.”
You said “there isn’t much time,
try.”

I said “Outside my window a shimmering boy
carries his shoes, a jacket
and smokes, while I sweep sand
from beneath my pillow.”

© Saradha Koirala 2010

Why we write – part 2

Here are some quotes from my Creative Writing class expressing what we love about writing – inspiring stuff!

When life gets you down, write your way back up.

Words are your mind; your mind is whatever you wish.

Getting stuck sometimes gives you the best ideas.

An idea for a story is like an unexpected visitor: you don’t want it to leave, but where shall you put it?

The challenge of being an author is making the make-believe seem real.

Poetry is just the end of the road – it’s what you discover on the journey that counts.

Your life is a story – write it!

Poetry is like a light leading you to the full story.

Writing is like something I can’t explain – the rush of pen across paper creating magical new places and characters or portraying your feelings is something you should not miss.

If you can’t eat, sleep or talk, write.

Tuesday Poem – Butterflies from Moths

She wakes me in the night
an angry voice in the hallway
heels on a wooden floor.

She comes out while I’m on the deck
leaning forward in the folding chair
turning pages eagerly.

She says Hi.
I say how are you?
Hung-over.

She pauses and I follow her gaze.
Is that a moth or a butterfly?
I say it’s a butterfly

you can tell because it rests with its wings up
not spread.
She says it looks like it’s dying.

and recedes indoors.
I think of the child’s view
that all creatures have an opposite

frogs have toads
mice have rats
and there are tricks to telling them apart.

© Saradha Koirala first published in Hue & Cry issue 4: Champion This! 2010 – out now

The Winter Vault – Anne Michaels

This is such a remarkable book. The poetic nature of the writing means the novel is driven by ideas and stories but not narrative.

In Egypt, 1964 the temple at Abu Simbel is being dismantled and reconstructed away from rising waters, under the supervision of Avery. This sets the theme of preservation and memory, which continues through each character telling their stories and eventually realising that we can’t recreate or reinvent the past but must retell and retell. Avery’s wife Jean shows us this after her baby is still born and she takes to planting things everywhere – digging into the earth at night – not so much to leave a mark or lay claim but perhaps to create and recreate life where life hasn’t been.

I found this a fascinating novel where I felt challenged to reflect and reread passages but also to learn from the characters’ own reflections on the past. I loved the way talking and sharing stories kept everything alive and the amount of information from engineering to botany, from history to art, meant I felt I was really absorbing facts as well as ideas. The ending pulled all these ideas together into such a satisfying single phrase that sums-up how we must treat the past and our collective memories.

Why we write

I am compiling a list of inspirational quotes for my Creative Writing students. Their task will be to try and write their own or sum-up why they love to write.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. – Gilbert K. Chesterton

The only thing that can save the world is reclaiming the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.– Allen Ginsberg.

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.– Leonard Cohen

A fact is not a truth until you love it.– John Keats

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.~Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
~Samuel Johnson

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
– Joan Didion

Tuesday Poem – Queens Road

In my last year of school
we made a shift to higher ground.

Our family was the two of us,
we chose a house on the port hills.

In the company of fruit trees
and a kitchen of polished wood

we became reacquainted.
First my mother changed

the direction of the staircase,
hammered it into shape

and carpeted it smooth,
then she painted each room

lavender blossom, garnet symphony,
peppermint beach and buttercup fool.

Winter was dinner on our laps
sitting close by the fire

summer was breakfast under the plum tree
as it grew shady with leaves.

When she drove me down
to start university

she came back to a full crop
of dark omega plums

and moved the living room
to the front of the house.

Tuesday poem – Wellington

Everywhere I go people keep saying
It’s no big deal
and shrugging away.

Like the time my chain fell off
and I had to carry my bike
up the Allenby Steps.

Or when I bit my tongue
trying to laugh
and chew and swallow.

Someone plays handmade flutes
on Manners Mall
while my students smoke cigarettes.

They call out to each other
across the paved space
and the pigeons.

People act rueful
in the face of devastation
but say Whatever though, eh?

The pink beret
does not warrant your poesy
and that’s not a real question.

A real question would be
Are you sure?
I mean sure sure?

Frost – The figure a poem makes

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Rilke – Letters to a young poet

…. save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty – describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and of your memory.

Tuesday Poem – North American haiku

Like melting snow
my landscape changes
with constant warmth

Morning malaize
that lasts
until sunset

Your vibrations of sleep
lull me
to a safer place

In coastal forest
a golden light
ascends

Too much depends
on the way you look at me
how you respond

And then it snowed
and it felt okay
to be so cold

Like sparks from a new years’ bonfire
I’ll glow, rise
vanish