The poem "The night vodka got into the compost" has been published on a free broadsheet available through the Take Flight Writing in Whangarei blog and on the Take Flight blog.
The broadsheet can also be downloaded from here.
The poem is largely a found poem, moulded around phrases or sentences found in the diaries of Franz Kafka 1910 - 1923.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Monday, June 27, 2011
unwritten language / unnamed places
>Language>Place Blog Carnival edition #7: unwritten language / unnamed places features the blog entry Place, Maps, Language as one of the exhibits. Please visit the carnival and browse the exhibits - they are worth every minute you spend there.
![]()
Friday, June 17, 2011
Place, Maps, Language
A map is its own language. Unspoken, it still manages to describe place, location and even scenery, often with an astonishing simplicity, but sometimes with a subtlety that can be quite breathtaking. A bright red line that illustrates a tarmac road, or a thin blue line meandering through a green background may describe a stream percolating through peaty watermeadows. Interestingly, a map with its two dimensional syntax has a sophistication that is denied writing along one dimensional lines. It is here that poetry often challenges the dimensional boundary with precise placement of words on a page. Just as I might spend considerable time appreciating the structure of a poem, so I have spent hours in front of a hostel fire with a pot of tea reading a map to discover its secrets.
![]()
1:25000 attempts to capture the mystery of map reading. It starts with a relatively ordinary line structure, with the usual vocabulary and punctuation, but as it explores the landscape it drifts away from a simple syntax towards a looser style that relies on placement, symmetry and wonderment.
![]()
1:25000
Only slightly lost, we find the paper
Folded in an inside pocket. We are there,
Somewhere, one to twenty-five thousand,
A mote of mobile imagining.
And a trickle of blue splits the landscape.
In the orange skein
We untangle a rolling surface pressed
Flat on the map, but filled with pebble,
Outcrop, blades of grass.
On close scrutiny of the stylised code
A shrubby plantation catches the eye
With its little lollipop trees
Springing from the rough green hummocks
Of a rough green pasture.
And a trickle of blue splits the paper.
On the ground
We find no deep black names.
No red carpets are laid on our tracks.
Hidden from the ink are the implicit sheep,
The thin, abstracted cry of a curlew’s mate,
The wide airy volume of the space
The loneliness
The unprintable emptiness of being there
© Martin Porter 1999
Shell is a piece written to explore the difference between the mechanisms (the map, the googling and the met report) we use to describe the world and the world itself. In some ways it shares the same properties as 1:25000, with a growing disorder in the punctuation, but in "shell" the contrast between the virtual and the visceral is further examined by the use of upper case characters. The only "reality" in the poem is the Single Fragment of Shell, all the other references are just exactly that, someone elses experiences referred forward.
![]()
shell
her father unfolded the concertina
map, laying it in dunes on the table
she googled it, name in box, click
of a button, eyes on the screen
and zoomed in to see
every grain of sand,
a hermit crab caught, mid-
scuttle,
the met report told them it was
comfortable yesterday
comfortable today and
it will be…
i gently rest my finger on the sand,
raise it to my face, observe
the Single Fragment of Shell adhered
and rub it, abrasively, across my open palm
© Martin Porter 2010
As an aside, but nevertheless important to note, is the play with the written language in 1:25000. I do not know how you read that particular string of characters, but the one to twenty-five thousand in the body of the poem probably reads the same, although the string of characters is very different.
1:25000 won 2nd prize in the Jersey Evening Post writing competition 1999
shell was published in the 52/250 blog 18 March 2011
1:25000 attempts to capture the mystery of map reading. It starts with a relatively ordinary line structure, with the usual vocabulary and punctuation, but as it explores the landscape it drifts away from a simple syntax towards a looser style that relies on placement, symmetry and wonderment.
1:25000
Only slightly lost, we find the paper
Folded in an inside pocket. We are there,
Somewhere, one to twenty-five thousand,
A mote of mobile imagining.
And a trickle of blue splits the landscape.
In the orange skein
We untangle a rolling surface pressed
Flat on the map, but filled with pebble,
Outcrop, blades of grass.
On close scrutiny of the stylised code
A shrubby plantation catches the eye
With its little lollipop trees
Springing from the rough green hummocks
Of a rough green pasture.
And a trickle of blue splits the paper.
On the ground
We find no deep black names.
No red carpets are laid on our tracks.
Hidden from the ink are the implicit sheep,
The thin, abstracted cry of a curlew’s mate,
The wide airy volume of the space
The loneliness
The unprintable emptiness of being there
© Martin Porter 1999
Shell is a piece written to explore the difference between the mechanisms (the map, the googling and the met report) we use to describe the world and the world itself. In some ways it shares the same properties as 1:25000, with a growing disorder in the punctuation, but in "shell" the contrast between the virtual and the visceral is further examined by the use of upper case characters. The only "reality" in the poem is the Single Fragment of Shell, all the other references are just exactly that, someone elses experiences referred forward.
shell
her father unfolded the concertina
map, laying it in dunes on the table
she googled it, name in box, click
of a button, eyes on the screen
and zoomed in to see
every grain of sand,
a hermit crab caught, mid-
scuttle,
the met report told them it was
comfortable yesterday
comfortable today and
it will be…
i gently rest my finger on the sand,
raise it to my face, observe
the Single Fragment of Shell adhered
and rub it, abrasively, across my open palm
© Martin Porter 2010
As an aside, but nevertheless important to note, is the play with the written language in 1:25000. I do not know how you read that particular string of characters, but the one to twenty-five thousand in the body of the poem probably reads the same, although the string of characters is very different.
1:25000 won 2nd prize in the Jersey Evening Post writing competition 1999
shell was published in the 52/250 blog 18 March 2011
Friday, June 10, 2011
Wavelengths
The launch of Wavelengths, an anthology by writers from the Channel Islands, took place on Friday, 10th June at 18.00-20.00 at the Jersey Museum. It is published by Holland House Editions and is available from the Societe Jersiaise and the Jersey Museum.
Wavelengths contains two of my poems: "My Lover is a Rainstorm" and "a dripping tap", both featured on this blog.
Wavelengths contains two of my poems: "My Lover is a Rainstorm" and "a dripping tap", both featured on this blog.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Language and Place on the Edge Blog Carnival
The sixth Language and Place blog carnival is now online, with the theme Language and Place on the Edge. One of the links follows the Take Flight Writing in Whangarei exhibit, which includes a version of The Tree at the End of the World.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
The Tree at the End of the World
This poem is also published on the Take Flight Writing in Whangarei "Language and Place on the Edge" feature.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Sick Child (Flying)
in the distance
our knowledge starts to fade
is this the tops of some turbulent nimbus
or the flat eroded crater of a diseased volcano
hurling upwards
over the sea
peaks of waves dip and echo
the crests and troughs of the wrinkled land
(it would be a hard healing
hitting one of those)
sleeping in derilium
creases across the sheet
lying over the bedrock of a sick child
body lava hot knees quaking
heave geography
© Martin Porter 2011
This poem has a compound title, and no other explanation. I often insert a commentary into a poem in the form of an epigraph or postscript, but there is no suitable candidate for this. The poem is a very recent piece, and I am not entirely sure it is in final form at this stage, but it has gone through my editing process and I'm not unhappy with the current form.
Language used in poetry does not always follow the established rules of written (prose) language. It may be moulded into unusual forms rather like a sheet of metal in a press, and, like a sheet of metal forced into an unnatural shape, exhibits stress patterns and weaknesses as well as structure and strengths. This poem uses a reduced form, rather like that discussed in an earlier entry "in the cinema stalls watching..." Punctuation may allow the reader to construct a different interpretation, although this is still constrained by structure - the stanza, line structure and parentheses. So although the language has reduced coherence, it has not crossed the boundary of meaning to become nonsensical.
In some ways this poem may be seen as difficult in the sense that the meaning is not immediately obvious. As discussed in the entry "Disregarding 12 0 2", there may not be a need for a poem to be immediately obvious. It may be argued that poems which reveal their all in one single glance are just too obvious, but such judgements become subjective. A case, perhaps, of one man's meat... Unlike "Disregarding 12 0 2", this poem is difficult not because of the reduced content of the subject matter (which concentrates on what is actually happening, not where or why) but because of the language and its use. The obscurity is not going to be lifted by a simple internet search, because knowledge is not the issue here, this is a poem that is more about the seen and the interpreted.
This poem starts as a relatively simple description of a scene viewed from above as indicated in the last part of the title, although the first two lines are designed to challenge a simple interpretation. The use of brackets at the end of second stanza is intended to add an external commentary, but external to the narrator rather than external to the poem. Here the poem starts to move towards the edge of simplicity, and the language starts to obtain meaning not from the words used but from the structures in which they are placed. The structure becomes more chaotic in the third stanza, a structure that is prefigured by the word "diseased", which matches the word "derilium" used at the start of this final stanza. Note that the structure becomes chaotic, not disorganised. There is something structural operating there, rather like a defined feedback process that produces unpredictable results rather than just randomness or ill-discipline.
The first stanza contextualises the poem in both space and time. The time is the geological present, the place is what I call "home". The language has to work hard to push this past this boundary to an understanding of the origins of this location. The understanding is not a scientific understanding, however, but a poetic understanding. It attempts to take the reader past the point of tectonic activity and theory and pushes towards the concept that this young land has parallels to a sick child, hence the title. Perhaps this is what gives the poem the opacity that can be seen as a problem. But this is a good place to ask whether a poem should be just description, or just knowledge based, or perhaps something more visceral.
By using structure and move understanding past knowledge by using analogy, this poem tries to push language past the simple use of words. It takes the observation of a landscape on the clashing edge of tectonic plates, pushes language beyond its normal boundaries and takes the reader past the visible into something that lies beyond the seen. In some ways the language is also searching for this substratum, a language beneath language.
The poem is not just about the known, it is about the experience the feelings and the interpretative process that rationalises and stores the experience into the fabric of the observers conception of nature. If nature poetry is to advance, perhaps it should position both language and place on the edge. The skill is to ensure it soes not fall over the edge, either into the dull or into the incoherent.
our knowledge starts to fade
is this the tops of some turbulent nimbus
or the flat eroded crater of a diseased volcano
hurling upwards
over the sea
peaks of waves dip and echo
the crests and troughs of the wrinkled land
(it would be a hard healing
hitting one of those)
sleeping in derilium
creases across the sheet
lying over the bedrock of a sick child
body lava hot knees quaking
heave geography
© Martin Porter 2011
This poem has a compound title, and no other explanation. I often insert a commentary into a poem in the form of an epigraph or postscript, but there is no suitable candidate for this. The poem is a very recent piece, and I am not entirely sure it is in final form at this stage, but it has gone through my editing process and I'm not unhappy with the current form.
Language used in poetry does not always follow the established rules of written (prose) language. It may be moulded into unusual forms rather like a sheet of metal in a press, and, like a sheet of metal forced into an unnatural shape, exhibits stress patterns and weaknesses as well as structure and strengths. This poem uses a reduced form, rather like that discussed in an earlier entry "in the cinema stalls watching..." Punctuation may allow the reader to construct a different interpretation, although this is still constrained by structure - the stanza, line structure and parentheses. So although the language has reduced coherence, it has not crossed the boundary of meaning to become nonsensical.
In some ways this poem may be seen as difficult in the sense that the meaning is not immediately obvious. As discussed in the entry "Disregarding 12 0 2", there may not be a need for a poem to be immediately obvious. It may be argued that poems which reveal their all in one single glance are just too obvious, but such judgements become subjective. A case, perhaps, of one man's meat... Unlike "Disregarding 12 0 2", this poem is difficult not because of the reduced content of the subject matter (which concentrates on what is actually happening, not where or why) but because of the language and its use. The obscurity is not going to be lifted by a simple internet search, because knowledge is not the issue here, this is a poem that is more about the seen and the interpreted.
This poem starts as a relatively simple description of a scene viewed from above as indicated in the last part of the title, although the first two lines are designed to challenge a simple interpretation. The use of brackets at the end of second stanza is intended to add an external commentary, but external to the narrator rather than external to the poem. Here the poem starts to move towards the edge of simplicity, and the language starts to obtain meaning not from the words used but from the structures in which they are placed. The structure becomes more chaotic in the third stanza, a structure that is prefigured by the word "diseased", which matches the word "derilium" used at the start of this final stanza. Note that the structure becomes chaotic, not disorganised. There is something structural operating there, rather like a defined feedback process that produces unpredictable results rather than just randomness or ill-discipline.
The first stanza contextualises the poem in both space and time. The time is the geological present, the place is what I call "home". The language has to work hard to push this past this boundary to an understanding of the origins of this location. The understanding is not a scientific understanding, however, but a poetic understanding. It attempts to take the reader past the point of tectonic activity and theory and pushes towards the concept that this young land has parallels to a sick child, hence the title. Perhaps this is what gives the poem the opacity that can be seen as a problem. But this is a good place to ask whether a poem should be just description, or just knowledge based, or perhaps something more visceral.
By using structure and move understanding past knowledge by using analogy, this poem tries to push language past the simple use of words. It takes the observation of a landscape on the clashing edge of tectonic plates, pushes language beyond its normal boundaries and takes the reader past the visible into something that lies beyond the seen. In some ways the language is also searching for this substratum, a language beneath language.
The poem is not just about the known, it is about the experience the feelings and the interpretative process that rationalises and stores the experience into the fabric of the observers conception of nature. If nature poetry is to advance, perhaps it should position both language and place on the edge. The skill is to ensure it soes not fall over the edge, either into the dull or into the incoherent.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)