Helen Lehndorf

Tag: poems

  • Slow-Small Media for the Weekend #17

    (Above: PN’s Te Manawa Museum currently has an exhibition about sunshine and light. Here I am playing with my shadow in the light box.)

    Song for the week: Just George ‘Lungs’

    This local tune is by my friend Abi Symes. I’m proud to have a little connection to this song, all about the overwhelming nature of grief, because Abi wrote it after we had a conversation about the physicality of grief. Abi got a bad lung infection after going through multiple griefs in quick succession and I told them that in Traditional Chinese Medicine, the lungs are an organ where grief is felt.

    Abi sent me the song and I felt all tingly at the way, as creative people, we can cross-pollinate each other without even intending to. I love the song and I love Abi.

    (I add one song every time I compile this digest. You can enjoy the whole playlist on Youtube here.)

    Be careful, this video may turn you into a total bird nerd

    I loved everything about this little clip from Gardening Australia: the birds, the Australian native plants…but mostly, the enthusiasm and nerdy citizen-science of the sweet, sweet couple who are developing the bird garden. They gave me a deep case of ‘elder couple goals’ for me and F.

    Watch this and then tell me people aren’t good:

    A fun spring challenge: can you find enough edible flowers to make a ‘fairy salad’?

    (Above: my fairy salad – all of this was growing in the garden.)

    Spring in the Manawatū is pretty horrid. Squally winds, sudden temperature drops, weather that goes from warm to icy within the same outing…leaving me in the wrong clothing…all uncomfortable and cross.

    It’s been like that all week….then on Wednesday…there was a brief reprieve and the sun came out. The garden was still. I could hear the tūi. I could hear my own thoughts.

    I grabbed the sun-window to play in the garden and I made a fairy salad from edible flowers.

    Read all about it, including the recipe for the dressing, over on my Substack.

    (btw, I’m still not sure about writing in two places. Here and Substack. I thought I’d do it for a year and then reassess. Do you have any opinions? I’d love to hear them in the comments.)

    Affordable Art*: ‘Forage’ vase

    (Above: image of the ‘forage’ vase from Jilly Jam Pots borrwed from Felt)

    At just $48, I think this vase is such good value. Handmade, rustic, interesting, very original. The inside is glazed to hold water for the little stems you have foraged from around the place. I love it – so simple and eye-catching. The maker, jilly jam pots, has lots of other goodness in their shop, too, including this little vase that looks like a lotus pod. So good.

    (*To qualify as ‘affordable art’, the item needs to be less than $50 NZD. Let me know if you’ve spotted anything around the internet you think people might enjoy and I’ll share it.)

    Rest in power, Kelly Ana Morey

    As a Gen-X NZ writer, I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Kelly Ana Morey.

    Kelly is iconic among my generation of NZ writers. Punky, fierce, funny, no-bullshit, straight from the hip, generous, strong sense of justice and of course, a brilliant writer who didn’t get enough kudos and celebration.

    As my FB feed filled with tributes and lamentations, I was again filled with that deep sense of life is so short and random.

    Tell people you appreciate them now. If people cross your mind – get in touch and tell them you were thinking of them.

    Tell a creaky, broke, vulnerable NZ artist that you love their work TODAY. Or if you can’t be bothered doing that, give them $20 via their online begging bowls or maybe, buy one their creative efforts.

    It’s hard being an artist in NZ:

    “This fucking stupid milk-loving piece of shit dumbass mean-spirited sale at Briscoes racist sexist 40% off deck furniture piss country.”

    as Hera Lindsay Bird once tweeted. (Also iconic.)

    A poem: ‘After Work’ by Gary Snyder

    I love Gary Snyder. Especially this book.

    This week’s poem, ‘After Work’ I thought would be a good one as we (in NZ) leave winter…

    It’s simple, it’s erotic, it’s amusing.

    The stew simmering on the fire is not the only thing simmering.

    & it reflects his Zen-eyes. 

    After Work

    The shack and a few trees
    float in the blowing fog

    I pull out your blouse,
    warm my cold hands
         on your breasts.
    you laugh and shudder
    peeling garlic by the 
         hot iron stove.
    bring in the axe, the rake,
    the wood

    we'll lean on the wall
    against each other
    stew simmering on the fire
    as it grows dark
                drinking wine.

    *

    I think that’s all I have to share this week, friends. Soon we are driving up the Desert Road to visit my folks. I’m hoping there will be snow so we can have a snowball fight and I can take photographs of icicles.

    (I have a poem which mentions the Desert Road.)

    + Happy Fathers Day to all the good Dads in the world…and may the not-good Dads be forgiven so their offspring can find peace in their hearts.

    If I don’t blow away in these horrible spring blusters…I will see you here again next week.

    x Helen

  • twenty years ago I started a commonplace book and didn’t even realise

    I was reading on writer Pip Lincolne’s delightful Wallflower Cordial the other day about her beginning a commonplace book. Then I remembered I had something similar, although I hadn’t realised it was a commonplace book.

    I called mine ‘The Brilliance of Others’. On the cover is a somewhat gloomy photograph of the reading chair of someone famous. (I didn’t record who so if you recognise it–let me know.)

    On the inside cover it says, “Personal Poetry Anthology: words by other people that move, stimulate, excite…& at the back, quotations.” 

    I guess I hadn’t heard of commonplace books then because that would have been a much more succinct title.

    I started it in April 2004 which was around when I became pregnant with my second child, Magnus. I guess that is why, after over twenty years, it is only half-way full. Nine months later, a decades-spanning distraction was born. 

    Still, from time to time, I remember it exists and I add something. There are currently 51 entries. 

    In it there are poems I’ve copied by hand from library books, some snipped out of the New Yorker (now yellowing…that New Yorker paper doesn’t age well), or printed out. From time to time I subscribed to the Academy of American Poets ‘Poem a Day’ emails and I would print out the ones I particularly liked. 

    (I’ve subscribed to this so many times over the years…usually when I feel like I’m not reading enough new poetry and I should make more of an effort to ‘keep up’…but a poem every day to your in-box is so many poems! & so many emails. Therefore I usually only last a month or two and then unsubscribe again after getting overwhelmed. It turns out even poets can be exposed to too much poetry.)

    (Above: This Merwin poem on brittle, yellowing New Yorker paper still gets me in the gut. What an ambiguous, radiant, brutal final stanza.)

    There’s also the occasional dashed-down note which must have seemed very relevant to something I was thinking about or working on at the time and now I have no clue why. Thus:

    According to USA lifestyle magazine The Good Trade, commonplace books are increasing in popularity again. Younger people are enjoying them as a kind of palate-cleansing, analogue and slow antidote to the relentlessness of social media. I totally approve of this trend. 

    Do you have a commonplace book or something like it?

    Here’s a quote I wrote down from G.K.Chesterton. Why younger me liked it so much, I’m not sure…possibly the poetry in the final eight words?

    “He discovered the fact that all romantics know–that adventures happen on dull days and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight then it breaks with a sound like a song.”