From a Paris Journal

From a Paris Journal

A cat like a plump cushion in a bicycle basket.

When I wanted something less expensive, I said, ‘D’accord, je chercherai à Londres.’ A cheaper product was found.

It takes me one hour and ten minutes to get by train from my suburban home to Melbourne’s CBD. It takes just over two hours to get from Paris to London.

My local is called the Auld Alliance, after a treaty finally abandoned in the sixteenth century.

I aired my bedding and lost my pillowcase in the street.

A guy on a scooter wears shoelaces in his runners which are coordinated with the scooter fairings.

For the first week of Paris Plages it was too hot to sit on the sand by the Seine.

The only time I left the studio without wearing lipstick was when I was having an asthma attack.

You cannot buy Ventolin over the counter in France. This was good as I actually needed corticosteroids.

As the doctor wrote out my script, the smell of cigarette smoke wafted through the open window from the cafes downstairs.

I began to dislike cigar smokers.

The scarf is a mystical item capable of transforming its wearer.

The guy at the vintage shop was reluctant to sell me the scarf until I had admired all its admirable features.

A signed Colette at the book market, also the Surrealist manifesto.

 

I love watching movies in English and then walking back on to the Champs-Elysees.

The faded ballet slippers someone has put near the Isadora Duncan plaque in the cemetery have little notes folded into them.

Every night the homeless sleep outside the shop selling sofa beds.

Catherine Bateson, 2013

I was sick this week with asthma, so I didn't post a Tuesday Poem, but there are plenty to be read at the Tuesday Poem hub, beginning with this week's featured poem, 'Early Growth' by Rachel O'Neill - do read it. I've been trying to find a way of writing about childhood ever since I heard the Irish writer, Ailbhe Darcy, read at Shakespeare and Company, and am still searching for my way into this rich territory, which obviously I access a lot for my children's books. Maybe that's why it will take longer to find poetically?

Rachel Neill's poem is guest curated this week by Sarah Jane Barnett. I would have to say that throwing children's parties were kind of (delightful?)hell for me. I was banned from organising Pass the Parcel by my own children. At the fairy/maypole party, a fairy culling from the minority boy hunters was narrowly prevented and the final straw was a disappearing child at a Buffy the Vampire Slayer party. After that they did it themselves! (Yes, she was found. No, she did not have a stake driven through her. Nor was she turned into the walking dead. She was just a drama queen girlie going through some stuff.)

in lieu of a Tuesday Poem - I introduce you to two poets...

Last night I went to Shakespeare and Company and heard four Irish poets read. There's something so seductive about the Irish lilt and the unexpected vernacular, particularly after all the american I've heard. The poets were: Aifric Mac Aoaha, Ailbhe Darcy, Leeanne Quinn and Maurice Riordan. Of the four, the two whose works spoke most to me were Ailbhe Darcy and Maurice Riordin.

Both of these poets have a laconic but charged and crafted presentation of their world, ideas and experience. In my opinion, Riordan works more within a firm Irish tradition. I don't mean by this that its parochial, just that the tropes and vocabulary are familiar. (Maybe I mean an Irish male tradition?) Anyway, it's lovely stuff - have a look at 'Stars and Jasmine' - the casual authority of the first line held me and then when I came to that final stanza, I laughed out loud at the last domestic lines.

Naturally Darcy's first collection, Imaginary Menagerie, is not as sure-footed as Riordan's new collection, The Water Stealer.  But there's a sense of discovery and play in this collection, as well as self-investigation and I loved the robust vernacular that enters some of her poems juxtaposed against an exuberant and unexpected use of language. Check out one of Darcy's poems here and see what you think of both the poem and Carol Rumens's small essay, cracking the poem open.

Have a look, too, at the Tuesday Poem hub and read Saradha Koriala's poem, 'Tika' published here guest editor/curator Harvey Molloy. I lingered over the final stanzas of this poem, it resonated uncannily with some of my recent travelling experiences.