Month: June 2011
Lunch Poem
It is 10:21 in Wellington a Thursday last day on Fulbright’s payroll, ticket to fly out on Saturday the 8:30 to Auckland that is if Air New Zealand will bully past the ash plume, volcanoes the only smokers in my poems. In Moore Wilson’s…
Order, disorder
“I love coming to a marae because everything is orderly.” That was Albert Wendt yesterday at Te Herenga Waka, the marae at Victoria University and the site of a conference I’ve been attending, “Reading and Writing in the Pacific.” A first for me: attending…
Coffee with poets in New Zealand
The Katherine Mansfield Birthplace was very, very cold on Friday morning. It’s small, furnished in dark woods with all the Victorian trappings, and of course unheated. Quotes from Mansfield typed up on the visitor’s guide call it “a little dark piggy house,” or something…
Travel dictionaries
That’s how it goes some days, don’t you reckon. You wander the streets of a city that’s no longer your own. You look at a map and all the words are in German. You ask a stranger…
Heroes in trouble
My baseball-playing-son’s choice of “Casey at the Bat” for school recitation made sense. I noticed in his practice sessions that he read the line “Kill the umpire!” with intense personal feeling; he tossed off “That ain’t my style” a little less confidently, but he…
