The Darwin Poems has been shortlisted for the 2009 ALS Gold Medal for an outstanding work of literature from the previous year.
The list in alphabetical order is:
Emily Ballou, The Darwin Poems
Steven Carroll, The Lost Life
Eva Hornung, Dog Boy
Cate Kennedy, The World Beneath
David Malouf, Ransom
I’ve been writing an essay on Darwin and metaphor and came across this entry from the ‘N’ notebook [Metaphysics and Expression] of 1838-39 (the line breaks are my own and the ellipses refer to a long break of text about Darwin’s children):
“Hope is the expectant eye.
looking to distant object, brightened
& moistened by emotion,–…
Expression of affection
is accompanied by slight
protrusion of lips
as if
going to say
‘my dear,’
just what smile is to laugh.–”
I was just searching out an answer to a question posed by Dr. Paul White of the Darwin Correspondence Project in relation to the death of Charles Darwin and never remembering where I find anything, I returned to The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online and to Emma’s diary for the year 1882 and discovered a choice morsel for poetry which I had previously, annoyingly, missed. In my writing of Darwin’s life I somehow failed to include Emma’s diary entry for April 20th, 1882:
“Polly died.
All the sons arrived.”
For anybody who doesn’t know, Polly was Darwin’s favorite dog in his latter years. She was a white terrier that slept in Darwin’s study and accompanied him on his daily ’sandwalk’. Apparently, she died the day after Darwin did, something I have previously never read about. If I had managed to discover this earlier, I would have called the poem: April 20th, 1882 and placed it after “The Green Need” and before “Afterwards”, which is an account of Emma’s life after Darwin’s death. What perfect brevity and rhythm Emma’s words have.
I finally saw the episode of ABC TV’s Bush Slam at Corryong, Victoria that I recorded last March, and discovered that my poem was edited by a third in the course of post-production. As I’ve had such nice comments from people about the poem, I thought I’d post it here in its entirety (though you can also read the whole version on the ABC website). While the poem as broadcast still holds together, I think it has lost some of its rhythm. It is reproduced in two parts (pages) below. If you live in Australia, you can still download the episodes for another week or so.
copyright Emily Ballou, 2009
copyright Emily Ballou, 2009
I promised a couple of months ago, to post Ryan Van Winkle’s poem and this is how slow I am! I blame my transcontinental lifestyle and flying between Australia and the UK twice in six weeks. But I am settled into the new year now, and although newly married and not personally struggling with cohabitation, l did love listening to Ryan read this when I was in Glasgow in late November, my new Edinburgh/American poet-friend. The poem I asked for was about toast, but it’s already been published elsewhere, so he has generously allowed me to reproduce ‘The Apartment’.
However…the stanzas in the version Ryan sent me were alternating tabulations across the page of mostly four lines each and I have tried eight times to not only reproduce the tabulations but to just put the stanza breaks in, but this blog will simply not let me add spaces between stanzas (though I have done it before and have no idea how I did!). This is a frustrated poet this morning…Ryan I’m very sorry because all the stanzas have been run on together.
If anybody knows how to better reproduce poems on these blogs, I’d appreciate any tips…
The Apartment
Our new walls,
empty in the dusk,
hang like sheets
before first light.
There is a driven nail
by the stove that could
hold a pan if the walls
stay sturdy. And the
old tenants left a mirror in the
bedroom which looks back at
staring walls with fine cracks
like a museum’s basement vase.
There are brown smears
in the study; chocolate, blood
or shit, we don’t know what
will happen to us here or what
will settle on rented walls
or if nothing will settle
at all. We’ve just moved
and already we are bitter
cranberries in each other’s
mouths, biting about photos,
the place of the table, lay
of the bed. The apartment is a City
Hall we cannot fight. So we turn
like lawyers, against each other,
let the walls stare. There is a mirror
to look into, a nail to hang onto.
Our unopened boxes hide in corners
and closets like beaten children.
And we will take the blood
off the walls and the dust
from the shelves. We have one
year together in a place that
is empty at dusk, and feels like fog
inside and between us
so I cannot see you, and Christ,
tomorrow, we will live here.
In March, I participated in the ABC Australian TV series Bush Slam, an arts/travel/poetry program, hosted by HG Nelson, which follows poets to various small Australian towns and asks them to write a poem about the people and place over three days. I went to Corryong in Victoria, a town set near the Snowy Mountains, one of my favorite parts of Australia.
I hadn’t been back to Australia in eight months at the time and flew straight in from the UK. While I was overwhelmed to be back in my heartland, writing a poem in three days with cameras following me was an unexpectedly daunting task and I nearly failed, having jet-lag, insomnia and a good deal of writers’ block. Nevertheless, I managed to write a poem in those three days that I am proud of.
The program launched on Dec 29th, 2009 and continues. My episode screened on January 12th, 2010 and can be downloaded free from the ABC TV website for anybody in Australia, for the next 27 days or so. The entire series can be watched this way and if you are quick, you can still download the first two episodes for another couple of weeks I think.
There’s an interview with me up at the Scottish Poetry Library’s website, conducted by one wonderfully named-wonderfully funny Ryan Van Winkle, on all things Darwin, plus the life of an ex-pat (we were both once-upon-a-time American). I saw Ryan read last night at The Arches in Glasgow at Discombobulate and it’s like Allen Ginsberg come back to life, beard and all. So listen to this podcast or skip me and get Ryan’s funky bluegrass poem. We had a few of those men on porches in Milwaukee too… Ryan can also be found hosting the Forest Cafe, Edinburgh’s ‘The Golden Hour’ and as reader-in-residence at the Scottish Poetry Library. Actually, I’m going to see if I can track down his poem on Toast and post it here…
I just found out that I won the Wesley Michel Wright Prize for Poetry for The Darwin Poems. This prize is awarded by the University of Melbourne, Australia and it was chosen from a field of 152 books. Thank you University of Melbourne!
I was interviewed this year by Dr. Paul White of the Darwin Correspondence Project for their website. Conducted in Cambridge, on the way back from the Sydney Writers’ Festival. You can listen to the interview on the website and also read the transcript (thanks to Sam Kuper).
I will also be reading next Wednesday Oct 28th at 7:30 at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh with Australian poet Alison Croggon. Please come along.
I’ve just done a radio interview with Maggie Ball. Go to this link at Compulsive Reader.com to hear it. I read a couple of poems as well: ‘The Donkey, August, 1817′ and ‘Handel, January 1836′.
There’s also an upcoming ABC radio program (ABC’s The Book Show) recorded during the Melbourne Writers’ Festival of a session I participated in along with Bernhard Schlink, Anne Michaels (she of the wonderous books), Christos Tsiolkas, Andrea Goldsmith and Ian Buruma. The session was called “Pain, Pleasure, Poetry and The Body.” I read three Emily Dickinson poems (‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ and I’ve been feeling it ever since; in fact, I can’t seem to get rid of the ‘beating’ beating’ of Dickinson’s verse) and a few days later, I had a chat with the radio presenter Sarah L’Estrange, about how poetry inhabits the body and we talked a bit about Darwin too, of course!
I loved hearing Anne Michaels read Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Plums’, Andrea Goldsmith read an Anne Sexton poem, Christos Tsiolkas read some Nina Cassian and Ian Buruma read Auden. Then we all closed with a short excerpt from Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’. It was a gorgeous session.
