Helen Lehndorf

Author: helenlehndorf

  • The David Merritt Experience

    I met David Merritt late last year when a colleague introduced us. We had a coffee and talked poetry and chickens and politics and I was very impressed by his dry, self-effacing humour and sharp-as-a-tack brain. When you talk to David it isn’t like the tennis of usual conversation: my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn, in measured thwoks….it’s more like chasing a snake through the grass – sometime he is right there, present and gleaming and you’re close – so close! and then he slips off into some elusive (but usually hilarious) tangent and you’ve lost him again.

    He’s a poet – a unique one, in that he makes small books out of the waste of other books (usually Reader’s Digest Condensed Classics which he rescues by the box-load from Dump shops because they don’t sell.) He tours the country, sitting on the street, making books, talking to people and selling his books out of a little wooden drawer ‘for the price of a good cup of coffee’.

    Last night he ended his latest tour of the country in Palmerston North (he lives kind of near by in Mangamahu) so I went along and it was a grand evening out.

    His performance is more ‘experience’ than typical reading, because he shuffles around the room, interacting with people so there is no illusion of the line between poet and audience, taking requests, talking and poking fun, laughing at himself and generally filling the space with his gentle, delightful presence and aroha.

    The night reminded me of a parlour performance I attended by the incredible actor Warwick Broadhead – there was the same invitation to people (not literally, but invoked) to engage, to be more present in their lives, to challenge what they are being offered and turn it into something better.

    The local ‘support’ act was Rob Thorne who does amazing things with Nga Taonga Puoru and effects pedals. Then David was accompanied by Chris Heazlewood (formerly of King Loser) on guitar playing incidental music between and behind the poems. The guitar playing was subtle and interesting and enhanced the poetry very well.

    There is no doubt from his poetry that David is a romantic – nature is beautiful and pure, jobs are for sell-outs, the disenfranchised are heroic, relationships with women are either high-romance or hate – however, I am entirely susceptible to this manner of romance, so heartily enjoyed it and found myself crying at one of David’s ‘barbaric yawp’-style poems exhorting the reader to shoot him if he finds himself in a litany of deadening situations – the kind that probably most of the audience dwell – suburban housing, day jobs etc.

    I had a great night and went home fizzy with ideas and inspiration. If the David Merritt Experience passes through your town – I reckon you should definitely make the effort go. It is entertaining, involving, funny, moving and much, much better than anything on the TV.

     

  • ‘May I admire you again today?’

    There was a brief window in the 1980s when people told me I looked like Molly Ringwald. I have brown eyes, full lips, thick hair. I loved Molly. I loved the way she chewed her lip, how she gave off an aura of ‘I’m quite resilient, but also tender, baby, tender like the tiniest pea. Don’t come near me, but also come over and shuck me and eat me off a spoon.’

    That window when people said I looked like Molly, Molly was so very hot  then, and I loved her anyway. It wasn’t like I had to start loving her just because people said I looked like her. That was my pretty time. It was a good time. It was over before I had time to bask. I’m thankful it happened at all.

    I even loved Molly’s name, like ‘dolly’ but with the gravitas of an ‘M’, like a gangster’s moll. She just kept getting hotter and brighter. She took ’16 Candles’ and raised it a ‘Breakfast Club’, then slapped down a ‘Pretty In Pink’.

    Aah – ‘Pretty In Pink’ – I have seen it dozens of times. Although I’m pushing 40, it remains one of my favourite films.

    I can’t see how bad it is, how cheesey because I can only see it with my teenaged, adoring eyes. That movie has everything perfect: The Smiths, second hand clothes, a record store, class war, an excellent soundtrack, ….and a funny alternative boy called ‘Duckie Dale’.

    Duckie! He was so perfect and fey and heartbreaking. The scene where Duckie is sitting in his ugly bedroom on a dirty mattress, because he is poor and has no proper bed and he is longing for Molly (in the film, her character is called ‘Andy’ but really Molly only ever played Molly so I will call her Molly), but he knows it is fruitless, that she only loves his wit, the wit that is a blanket he hides under, an umbrella to shield him from how ugly and cruel the world is – that she will never love his sad, yearning entrails, his melancholic viscera, that he will have to carry on cracking jokes into her benevolent indifference because she will never be able to see him ‘in that way’- in that ‘love, love, won’t you run your hand along the swell of my inner thigh. Won’t you lie down on this mattress beside me so we can just gaze at each other without saying anything’ way.

    In that scene, I think Duckie thinks, ‘although – Molly Ringwald- we laugh so hard together and I love that we laugh- it is not funny how much I love you, it is as serious as a dirty mattress on a floor in a shitty house somewhere west of privilege and south of comfort and yes, on the wrong side of the tracks, and you are the sun that comes in my curtains, you are the complete perfection of The Smiths playing over this scene. Yes, that is how deeply and seriously I love you, Molly, as serious as your alcoholic Dad and my broke-down house, as serious Morrissey’s voice on a dark Sunday afternoon.’

    The Smiths’ song which plays over Duckie’s scene is ‘Please, please, please let me get what I want‘, but he won’t get it, certainly he won’t get Molly, not in the way he wants her. There is a scene at the end of the film where Duckie has his arm around a girl at the prom, so that the ending isn’t in any way sad, so that we aren’t left thinking ‘sure, Molly got her rich guy, but what about Duckie?’, but we know that he isn’t really into that girl. It’s just a noble act for Molly’s sake. He loves Molly so much he doesn’t want her to feel guilty.

    That is how awesome Duckie is.

    I think that is why ‘Pretty In Pink’ haunts so many aging Gen Xers – because, now even more than then, it’s clear that Molly chose the wrong guy. Blane (as Duckie said: ‘Blane? That’s not even a name, it’s an appliance!) might have been rich, but he was a vapid a-hole. The film is a tragedy, because Molly should have chosen Duckie.

    I sure would have.

     

     

     

  • open heart

    (Life is)

    “…a slow, elated, awed recovery

    from humiliation.”

    -Geoff Cochrane

    On New Year’s Eve we climbed the hill behind the house and drank wine until the sun had gone. I gnawed on grass stems because they tasted like peas. When clouds crossed the moon, I couldn’t see your face and you talked about the ways next year would be ‘awesome’. I say ‘I can’t remember much about this year except that most days I felt tired and thought it would get better tomorrow.’

    We talk for a long time about ‘isms’. You are giving them up. I am keeping a couple. ‘Why can’t you just do Helenism?’ you say. The isms start to cause schisms. I switch to home-decorating. I tell you that a warm colour would be better for you in winter – Indian spice colours to warm you up, but you are set on hot pink, ‘1977 punk-rock pink’ you call it.

    Then it’s midnight and the countryside doesn’t care. We wait for the clouds to clear so we can find our way down again. The dog has come to find us, and the two cats, their bells tinkling in the long grass. Sheep are nestled under the ridge and don’t stir as we walk past. Around the north side of the hill we cast long moon-shadows.

    ‘Look’ I say ‘We have moon-shadows, like the Cat Stevens song! And there I was thinking that was a load of hippy bollocks all these years.’

    I make tea for drinking on the porch because the wine is making my gut sour, but then it feels very late and too cold to be outside. I have so much to tell you but I can’t think where to begin so I talk about the band playing in the Square on Waitangi Day and how long it takes to drive to Paekakariki from here.

    I start to shiver. ‘I need some sleepism’ I say. You swallow down a handful of vitamins with the last of your wine. The animals bolt off inside to avoid being shut out.

    I go into dark rooms to check that my children are still breathing. I notice how the quieter I want to be, the more the floorboards creak. The microwave casts a dim light across the kitchen, it’s LCD screen says ‘Err’.

     

  • the next step

    ‘Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.’ -Chuck Close

    Halfway through last year I started work on my second book. The first book was out of my hands while  it was being edited, laid out and designed.

    I had some notion of what I wanted the second book to be all about. Books begin with opening a new document on a word-processing package, so I opened one, gave it a working title and got started.

    I have written about a third of it. It is not going where I want it to go. It is not the book I had in my head when I opened that new document. This is a common experience.

    ‘A poem that doesn’t get out of hand isn’t a poem.’ -John Hollander

    The writing has been lurching off into strange side-alleys and cul-de-sacs – uncomfortable places.

    I don’t want to write the book that the book wants to become.

    ‘She’s lost control again’ -Joy Division

    Last week I hit a bit of a wall with it and thought I should give up writing. The writing life is hard, harder than you might think if you are outside looking in. I feel vulnerable and tired. I get sick of getting rejection letters 70% of the time, of missing out on funding. Keeping writing going in my life is a fight. Fighting takes a lot of energy.

    The new book is telling me this: Drag it out into the light. That is this book’s imperative.

    This post sounds a bit mental – like I’m hearing voices. What can I say? This is how I experience my writing self, my writing life.

    I feel like I’m fighting with myself. It is a violent fight. People are getting hurt.

    Everything I write lately is tangential, difficult and odd.

    ‘Sentimentality – that’s what we call the sentiment we don’t share.’ -Graham Greene

    A friend told me to ‘stop second-guessing yourself.’ Whenever anyone tells me to stop doing anything  it makes me do it more. The elephant is in the room. The emperor is naked.

    It is good advice.

    I feel extremely confused about who I am as a writer right now.

    ‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose.’ -Dolly Parton

    My friend Pip once interviewed David Vann and he told her that tragedy is when a protagonist is forced to make a choice and whichever way he chooses, he loses half of himself.

    I love imperatives and maxims and bold assertions because I feel so unsure of anything lately. Experiencing life as all nuance, all complexity, all ambivalence, all sensate and half-truth and murmur and roar and silence and spiritual nihilism and nothing that ends with an ‘ism’ makes certainty so attractive.

    I’m so hot for other people’s certainty.

    ‘Poetry springs from something deeper, it is beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom.’ -Jorge Luis Borges

    I am going to keep writing. I feel as weak as a new-born kitten as I type that.

    I get more courage from THESE PEOPLE than from anyone who ever taught me writing.

    ‘Writing 101: moral courage is seldom the subject, but it is often the prerequisite.’ -D.A.Powell

  • corn bones

    I am always walking up or down the driveway – and the corn is getting bigger or it is just starting or it is gone. There is always something I am worrying about but the focus of the worry changes but the worry doesn’t change – it is tinnitus. Brain plaque. I am always wondering why my body is the way my body is because it is a curious nearly-40 body and it walked away and left my mind behind. Something happened to time that I don’t understand. How did I get so tired? When can I lay down? I don’t want to lie down. I have too much to do. I take photographs to remind me but they don’t remind me they just open windows, or maybe valves. The corn was hard seeds dropped into holes poked into the earth with my finger and now it is nearly as tall as me and I encourage it when I walk away and greet it as I come home. I’ll eat it with a bit of butter and too much salt when the time comes, if it stays standing, if it hasn’t been plagued by bugs. Will it be tough enough corn to hold a summer? Magnus calls corn cobs ‘corn bones’. The corn bones take years to break down in the compost so we are always throwing them back, and throwing them back but If I wait long enough it will all rot down.

  • manifest poetry

    Yesterday I found a bird skull in the garden while I was weeding.

    I like the way there is a little patch of feathers on the top of it’s head, like a macabre toupee.

    In one of those cases of art foreshadowing life, I wrote a poem a long while back about digging up bird skulls. It is in my book.

    I really did bury some bird bodies in the garden – however, that was at my old house, so this bird skull is not one of those that I buried.

    Since I wrote that poem, my cat died of throat cancer. I didn’t bury him in the garden, though. I had him cremated. His ashes are in a little white box on the mantlepiece, wrapped with a yellow ribbon.

    Here’s the poem:

    Latest Project

    I am curating the kills of my cat, collected

    with shovel, buried together in a yard-bird cemetery

    at the edge of the comfrey patch. Soil nourishment, for sure,

    but mostly because I want to dig up the skulls.

     

    A bird skull is a beautiful thing.

    Mechanics of bone, small sculpture with hinge of jaw,

    tiny teeth and spike of beak. When I dig them up

    I might make a necklace of skulls, like an urban Kali,

    goddess of change, of Your Time Is Up.

     

    Sparrow head, blackbird beak, thrush face,

    threaded on leather, fastened with wood.

    More likely, I would sit them in a neat row

    on a bookshelf in front of my orange Penguin classics.

     

    Or, more inevitably, I will forget.

     

     

  • seed heads

    Often, if a plant isn’t taking up space I need for something else, I’ll let it go to seed. Partly because then it will drop it’s seed everywhere and next year I might get plant babies, and partly because I love seeing what plants do when they go to seed.

    Have you ever let a leek go to seed?

    They grow up and up into a crazy tall spindles, with a Hundertwasser-like turret on the top which eventually explodes open into a purple pom-pom! It’s almost worth letting a few go to seed as temporary garden sculptures:

    I also like parsley seed heads. They are pretty and similar to their plant cousins, Cow Parsley which you often see growing on the edges of fields in the countryside, and Queen Anne’s Lace.

    I am somewhat in love with Queen Anne’s Lace and have tried to grow it in my garden this year, but because it prefers to grow in a grassy environment, it isn’t all that happy in my flower beds – it’s a bit droopy and lonely-looking. It is still lovely, though. It’s also known as wild carrot, because the roots are edible. This is the sort of thing I like to know, even though I’ll probably never dig up one to eat the root! Aah, useless esoteric knowledge…

    Seedheads I am not so fond of are dandelion seed heads, because even though they are lovely – everytime one blows in my garden I know it means a lot of weeding….and grass seedheads for the same reason.

  • What the garden was doing at the turn of the new year…

    Happy New Year! I’m starting my year on the blog as I mean to go on – with excessive photographs of plants.

    Here is a snapshot of the garden on January 1 2012.

    There are new peas everyday – they never make it inside because we always eat them right there, standing beside the garden. It is my personal garden snack bar…

    The corn is getting taller…

    The apples we will enjoy in autumn are starting to look like apples, rather than little swollen buds….

    The herb garden is running riot: oregano, marjorum, sage, borage, mint, parsley, chives…

    The hydrangeas are doing their purple-pom-pom thing to the fullest…

    & the poppies continue to pop, then flop…

     

  • green bean serene

    Summer = season of green.

    Broad beans until we can’t face another broad bean.

    I divided up my monster stinging nettle plant and now I have baby nettles thriving away. (Anyone local want a nettle plant?) Nettles are a wonder herb and are seriously good for you – very high in iron, it also builds healthy blood cells and clears chest congestion, among other things. It also tastes great in soup – very savoury and iron-rich tasting.

    Green polka dot sundress with my green roman sandals. Welcome in summer, you’ve been a long time coming this year!

  • The Comforter Cocktail

    The Comforter Cocktail

    We made this in a big punch bowl, but of course you can make it by the glass also.

    One part Blackcurrant Vodka

    Four parts soda water

    Enough rose-infused sugar syrup to make it pink and tasty. This is the stuff I used – it’s French, lovely and costs about $18 for a bottle at good bottle stores:

    Edible flowers – borage, calendula petals, rose petals, cornflowers, violas etc

    Ice

    Mix the wet ingredients, pour over ice, sprinkle edible flowers on top. Drink and feel comforted!

    This drink is pink, refreshing, tastes like summer and roses and good times.