Torriano Meeting House Reading

I visited the Torriano Meeting House last night to hear Katherine Gallagher and Clare Crossman read. I also read "The Travails of the Wise Trainer" from the floor.

Floaters

Floaters

“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace” – Amelia Earhart

Sometimes she dreamed she was flying,
And sometimes she was flying,

Navigating the journey with a sextant
While floating in thin air,

Sinking to the beckoning seas
Without expectation of end.

It takes one mirror,
One fleck of glinting silvered glass,

To catch the sun and send a ray of light
Down the dusty hollow of a dark hallway

Catching each dancing mote in the path
Of confused locations.

And she was not.
Lost in a peculiar eternity, hopeful

In anticipation of foreverness,
Dreaming over the empty ocean,

Not sitting outside a mediocrity
Of boarding houses and noon-time darknesses.

© Martin Porter 2012

Innominate Group and other Travels

I will be visiting the innominate poetry group in Jersey on Friday February 3rd.
I will be reading "Floaters", a yet unpublished poem.

I will be travelling to the UK, Rome and Canada soon after.

Sealed Tombs - notes on negativity

Sealed Tombs is a poem of negatives, not a negative poem. It maintains a positive description by defining subject matter through a set of boundary conditions. The confinement of possibilities gives opportunity for the reader or listener to interact and create their own image, making the experience a potentially positive experience. It also adds an element of risk, making the reader work harder to create their own vision of the subject.


The poem is not entirely consistent. The vocabulary becomes increasingly positive as the poem progresses, offering development from imagination to substance. The poem climaxes with the most clearly defined positive, the ironic negative action of gasping their curses.

Even so, there is still plenty of space for the reader to use the imagination by the use of ambiguity, for example “no spectres/ rattle the bones” offers the possibility that the bones are not rattled or that “no spectres” are doing the rattling. Now, I’m not sure what that means, but the possibilities have kept me thinking. Certainly, bones seem to be disturbed in most excavated tombs, either by natural actions such as earth movement, or by collapse of the framework that holds them in position or even internal decay.

Floating

Gently lifting with the ocean,
Sweeping slowly up the shore,
She is resting on the boundary
Somewhere between air and more
Substantial fluids on her body
Offer her to turquoise light
Looking down from cloud free heavens
Looking to the Sun which might
One day drift from daily motion
Sinking into nightly rest
Glowing dim in richest crimson
Falling sea-ward in the west
Where wheeling terns once congregated
Against a foaming faded moon
Suspended in the paling sunshine
Framed by marram stubbled dune
Salt spray seasoned sea-sage sweetened
Breeze blown clean of vraic and sand
Swept branches stick black fingers upward
Urging gulls to leave the land
And forge out from their earthy havens
Venture forth without a notion
Of where to go or where to settle
Gently lifting with the ocean.

© Martin Porter 2000

Floating is a single stanza poem structured around metre and rhyme. It explores the understanding of boundaries, in this case the boundary between sea and sky. The metre is semi-regular and is based more on rhythms of speech than any formal metric. The forward motion of the poem is maintained by not adhering to a regular or strict metre and this is also meant to reflect the semi-regular movement of waves on the sea.


Floating is also published on Take Flight Whangarei.

Sealed Tombs

Breathe no moisture,
Are bone dry to the touch,

Have no dust
suspended in their corridors,

No heat, nor cool,
No shade, no bright sunlight,

No footfall to be heard,
No echo,

Do not interrogate the darkness
or finger the flesh,

Unconscious,
Without conscience

they walk our worst dreams,
Sleep by day,

and by night no spectres
rattle the bones,

But, when their guts are revealed,
gasp their curses.

© Martin Porter 2006

Lunch in Marco's Kitchen - Working to a recipe?

Lunch in Marco’s kitchen with the artists and fine food

In Marco’s kitchen
Dali’s Christ of St John stares down
From the wooden walls.
The wood fired stove has been burning
All morning
Mixing the sounds of sparks and effervescent knots
With the torrential rain.

The damp smell mixes
With the scent of chopped garlic cloves
Not crushed,
Like some porcini mushroom dish.

As Lina plunges pasta into her
History browned, oil encrusted pot
Marco grasps a fist of octopus
To toss with wilted spinach,
Nettles and plum toms from his back yard,
And anchovy in spiteful superheated oil. This is a
Jackson Pollack of a dish,

Or, more like, Warhol’s Marilyns,
Elegant, always the same
Never identical.
Marco hides his aproned pasta paunch
Behind the shadows of the fire, and

Lina drains spaghetti, throws it on the pan
And tips it onto three plain terracotta plates.
This is lunch
In Marco’s kitchen, with Lina
And fine food.

© Martin Porter 2007

Can a document like a scientific paper, a guide to filling a form or a recipe be converted into a poem? That was the workshop challenge that eventually created "Lunch in Marco's kitchen...". The poem was written well after the workshop and is based on an imaginary recipe that actually works, much to my surprise.

To fix the recipe into a poem, I have tried to place it in a cultural location, hence the references to the artists. As for the location in time and space, Marco's kitchen is explicit enough - it could be Italy, it could be the US or Australia - and lunch time is about as precise as the poem needs. The important feature I wanted to experess is the casual but high quality of living that results in a satisfied Marco.