Helen Hagemann

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Poetic Graphic for the Day

Poem for the Day - The Green Wall

The Green Wall

From my window
I see a green wall.
A quiet space with only the sounds
of shoes passing by.
In Sendai, one thousand two hundred
people have lost their shoes.
They float by windows
like tiny boats sailing
on a splintered sea.

In the time I've been visiting
this grove
I've never noticed
the green wall
never known the faces
of the shoes
passing by.

I've never known so many people
losing their shoes
in one day's
drowning holocaust.

So many taken in a quake of 8.9

Poem for the Day - Sand Dunes

Sand Dunes

Close to the ocean
lying on a slope
we hugged towels into sand.
At the back, in the holiday house we rented,
my mother distributed fairy bread.
A tiny pebbled meal.
On the beach, we ran green
with salt and spray.
Half way up the dunes
under a sackful of clouds
we bombed our candied mouths
into the dune’s caress. Three kids stomping
to the tune of the grand old Duke of York
marched to the top of the hill.
We were neither up, nor down. Myself, and my
brother aged nine, his arm pulling the day
from my legs; pushed me forward to tumble
like Spinifex. I rolled with the custom,
down into the loft of a thousand grains,
sand in my hair and teeth.
My cousin stayed up there,
crumpling her skin into laughter.
Until she too was pushed, headlong
into the bug-eyed stare
of olive lovers.
We ran home,
gritty with shell-flint,
our bright grins, ready to spill.

Poetic Graphic for the Day - Poetry Slam

Poem for the Day - The Monroes

The Monroes

Back in the 50s I grew up
with the Monroes.
There were so many children
in the family you lost count.

I remember Billy, the eldest,
Bobby, Jane and Susy, then there were
two sets of twins. Later, more

babies, a boy, a girl, another girl
as in Cheaper by the Dozen.
Most of all, I remember Rex,
and their bare feet swinging

on the front gate. How different
they were in glamour to the buxom
lady in Some Like it Hot.

They didn't own shoes. During summer
their dresses holed, and their denim
overalls frayed and fringed
like water over sea anemones.

They hardly said a word. They didn't
laugh, or smile, or cry, but performed
tricks for us kids and the neighbours.

After several handstands, bodies piled
high like a pyramid they gobbled fairy
bread, or our grandmother's hot scones
bubbly hot from the oven.

Next, it was Rex who called for their
Saturday lunch. Back on all fours
and with a cue from the boys,

the dog would howl the rising octaves
of a Tarzan call. It was more a wild
jungle call, like the big man
pounding his chest amongst the vines,

and more memorable than Marilyn's
rippled skirt on a vent. We criticized
those scrawny, unkempt kids and never
did see the poverty above the laughter.

Ways to the Metaphor

Back in 2010, I conducted a workshop called "Ways to the Metaphor". I used a model by Patrick Lane, a Canadian Poet, (partner to Lorna Crozier).

The Metaphor Model by Patrick Lane

You want you to compare each member of your family. If you have five brothers and sisters of course that is too many, but make a choice & stick to your smaller family of mother, father and at least two siblings. eg.

My oldest brother is a wasp, cleaning his body on a bulrush above the pond’s still water. He is almost ready to take flight.

My sister is a small white stone in the clay pot by the kitchen fire. She is so still only the dark can find her.

My youngest brother is the first leaf on the wisteria vine in spring. Already he is thinking of winter the yellow he will become before he falls.

My father is the window box in winter. Everything is waiting for the first flowers to bloom in his wide hands, but where are the seeds, where are the spring rains?

Eventually you will have a poem, especially when you answer, in lines, what they think of you! Finally you write your own personal reply.

More to come...

Metaphors!

Poem for the Day - One Size Fits All

One Size Fits All

You know when you bring
your garment home
it isn't going to fit.
It fits your youngest daughter
of which you have one.
You take it back to the store.
Ask for a blouse, extra large.
They have one, in grey.
You want to write to China.
Tell them your measurements,
that you have never bathed
in the Yangtze, worked in
the paddy fields or
owned a rickshaw.

W.S. Merwin, US Poet Laureate 2010-2011

Friday, January 21, 2011

(Acknowledgement - from Ron Silliman's Blog)

A conversation with W.S. Merwin
with David Lynn & David Baker
of the Kenyon Review

The House and the Garden:
The Emergence of a Dream

Labels: W.S. Merwin

Link -

Helen Hagemann's Hike Up Blackwall Mountain, November 2010

Steep path up Blackwall Mountain

I rested on occasions before the massive climb!

This time, drinkies!

I made it to the top, what a view!

View over Ettalong to Broken Bay

On the way down was cool

These granite outcrops could kill you if they broke!

Ah, Blackwall, the massive mountain I conquered

Amazing Bird Life on the Central Coast, NSW Holiday November 2010

Rainbow Lorikeet in the Grevilleas, Entrance shops

Feeding Pelicans at The Entrance, 3.30pm

All male pelicans - one female

Cormorant drying wings at Tuggerah Lake

Black & White Cormorant about to take flight!

Pied Oystercatchers bedding down for the night, Tuggerah Lake

Duck & Eleven Ducklings in Town!

Ducks live in the streets of Ettalong

Ducks & Pheasant Pidgon side-by-side

Pelicans waiting for a feed, Woy Woy

Puddle Duck! Blackwall Mountain, Ettalong

Pelican, Woy Woy baths

Lone Pelican, Ettalong Beach

Wagstaffe behind Pelican

Rotary feeds the birds

Happy, happy holidays!

OOTA WRITERS take over Westerly's Pages of Volume 55: 2, 2010

Check out all the West Australian poets & writers in this latest Westerly Spring Issue Volume 55. No 2, 2010. Most of the poets, FOURTEEN!! all told, are from OOTA WRITERS!
Westerly Magazine

Why not join OOTA WRITERS? We rock!
oota writers

Poetic Graphic of the Day - Cow Poem

Poem for the Day - After John Ashbery

When you Pass Go, Collect $200

After John Ashbery

How little we know of someone’s brain,
and not that we want to!
Too much static going on.

Who was it who said, “We had macaroni each day,
except Sunday. Wait! I know who wrote that!
It was….

Never mind, the bottlebrushes are blooming
at my window. Geraldton Wax flairs pink.
I envy the spring, signs of new life each year,
while I’m getting older.

Soon, I have to take up riding.
It will be body fat on centre leather. Yet there's
a certain stillness where you push your legs through,
pathways of gum nuts, acacia pollen that backs up
with the breeze, joggers in white headbands.

Whether or not I make it, it will be fun,
nostrils aflare, track suit flapping. I’ll have to
squander spring before the summer comes, thinking
about Sunday lunch, the heat of the two emerging
into walls.

What do I make of walls?

They have freedom when someone’s gone.
I can’t wait to shuffle back into mine, touch
the emptiness. Two relaxed feet under the desk
will be mine, the cat on my lap, too.

When I come up for air, I’ll pass go.
Collect $200.

Poem for the Day - a found poem "Picnic"

Picnic

Live blue spray kicks against the mountain.
There is a lesson here at the creek, boys
& girls like handfuls of gladiolas arrange

a camp fire, rummaging in the bush for flint,
paper, kindling to smoke out Apache. Geronimo!
The Lone Ranger, high-ho Silver, away!

Roundup time. Cowboy suits flash, arrest the sun.
White shoes hang in trees like cockatoos
nibbling seed pods. Frogs serenade from the

bank, their voices deeper than night. The boys
heighten noise playing bandits. Stagecoach.
Kids playing shotgun in this watery world,

scooping up miniature forts in river mud, until
the myth becomes cannonball fodder. Cazzam!
Shoot the enemy. No enemy, no feathers dancing

only people on the shore, waggy dogs, blue boys
playing tag, shovelfulls of laughter. Hello,
goodbye whisks across the water like smoke.

Cartoon for the Day - The Wrecking Ball

Acknowledgement: Eureka Street, 1st October 2010

Poem for the Day - Marble Tornedo

Marble Tornedo

My girlfriend Heather experienced a
weather adventure. The havoc she caused
upset the boys squatting at marbles.
She had several hundred of her own, shoulder-
slung in a string bag, betting everyone.
As the storm bullied clouds off Barrenjoey,
she joined their game with forty of their
Tom Bowlers, Cat’s-eyes and Peewees in the rink.
At the line, the wind lifted her skirt, her plaits
like marionette strings. The Big Bonker she fired
carried itself nicely to a suitable distance
inside the circle, shooting glass for miles.
Strangely, though she collected all their marbles,
she wasn’t injured by their hailstones,
and remained intact.

Graphic for the Day: I'm Such a Feminist!

John Ashbery on PBS News

John Ashbery on PBS News

A Perfect Hat

I forget what it is I would rather be doing.
Floral and verbal, I am in the thick
of what I would rather be doing, jumping off a cliff,
rousing subordinates. There are just so many things
one would rather be caught out doing, like measuring the tree,
the swift shadow of which menaces us and bluebirds.
Oh the mill sang of many things but its wheel
was always rolling whether you noticed it or not.
The wheel that is still today but much larger.

It cautioned us to leave but we slept
the exact duration of the idea that never leaves us now.

And this is the perfect poem after teaching Personification on Saturday 11th September, so I thought I would post Ashbery's poem here. During class, we had a long discussion about 'pathetic fallacy' and the difference between this kind of trope and personification. I felt that if we were to worry about such terminology as 'pathetic fallacy' this might stifle our creativity while writing personification. Eventually, we reasoned, that we could attribute human feelings to a poem. Here Ashbery attributes "thinking" (or is it some kind of annoyance for the poet?) to the voice of the hat. Rainer Maria Rilke attributes the emotion of 'loss of freedom' in his poem, The Panther.