Helen Lehndorf

Author: helenlehndorf

  • 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.

  • ‘The Comforter’ launches (2)

    Launch one:

    The first launch was in Palmerston North at the City Library.

    The speakers were Helen Rickerby, my editor, Thom Conroy, friend and creative writing professor at Massey University, and Natasha Allan did a beautiful blessing of the book.

    This one felt like a slightly more formal, ‘family, colleagues, local community’ (and friends, of course) one.  People bought books, I had my first experience of signing books, like a proper writer and it felt weird and really wonderful all at once. I tried to write something meaningful in each book I signed, so by the end of the launch my hand was really sore.

    Launch two: 

    Launch two was the next day in Wellington at my friend Emma Barnes’s house in Aro Valley. Wellington turned on the sunshine for us and it was a stunning day. This one was at 3pm in the afternoon and because of the perfect weather and all the women who obliged my request for floral frocks – it felt like a luscious garden party, (Emma McCleary said it felt to her like a wedding!).

    There was good food, plentiful wine, The Comforter cocktail, Simon (Emma B’s partner) played live banjo, which was just beautiful. The guests were many different kinds of lovely!

    For the ‘formal’ bit at this launch, Helen spoke again, then Pip Adam and Maria McMillan spoke about my writing and said extremely humbling things, then I read poems and all that, and then Natasha Allan did a closing blessing, which set me off crying a lot.

    (Oh and there was a notable earthquake.)

    Both launches went without a hitch and were just (as far as I’m concerned) perfect. I really couldn’t be any happier. Sometimes dreams come true. Check out this cheesy grin:

    If you want to see more photographs, I made a set on Flickr HERE.

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    NEWS! My poem ‘Garlic Planting Time’ is the Tuesday Poem on the Booksellers Blog today, HERE.

    & I’m also the Tuesday Poet, on Winged Ink, Helen Rickerby’s blog, HERE. & Helen wrote a little bit about the launches on the Seraph Press site HERE.

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  • ‘The Comforter’ launches (1)

    It’s early Monday morning and I just said to my editor, Helen Rickerby ‘Isn’t love the best drug? because I am still high from all the love at the launches!’.

    Helen and I did two launches, in two cities in two days! They were both really beautiful and special in their own ways.

    For a taster of the Wellington launch, Emma McCleary has written a post about it HERE.

    I held it together pretty well through both launches, but at the blessing part of the Wellington launch, (the very end of the formal bit) I lost it completely and cried like a baby, which was a little embarrassing, but then my friend Ben said: ‘Don’t worry. It just made it more ‘Helen’.’ Interpret that however you like.

  • a flower falls

    ‘A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.’

    –Dogen