Hinemoana Baker and Josephine Jacobsen - Workshop 13/05/22

Hello, everyone.

Hinemoana Baker was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1968. As well as writing poetry, she is a teacher, a broadcaster and a musician.

Josephine Jacobsen was born in Canada and died at the age of 94 in the United States. She wrote poetry for over 60 years.

The first poetic text deals with the idea of the destination. Try to write about a destination, or more than one.

The second poetic text is not only about destinations, but also about the idea of the home. You could write about a home or a homecoming.

The structure of the two texts can be observed to be a longer poem, in one case with a regular line pattern, and in the other case without. Think about writing a slightly longer piece today.

Six words to attempt to incorporate into your writing from Baker: silicon, wire, water, clock, formation, gaze.

Six words from Jacobsen: rock, motion, return, arrival, voyagers, shadows.

If you have a copy of the Exercise Book (Manhire, Duncum, Price & Wilkins), turn to page "#182: Story in Three Acts" for an unrelated challenge that you could use instead for loose inspiration.

That's all. I hope you are inspired to write today.

What the destination has to offer

by Hinemoana Baker

Like trees, there are rings
in the small headbones of an eel
we count the rings to find the age.

Each bone too small for tweezers
my cousin plucks one up
stuck to a bead of silicon

on the end of a wire.
He is putting his bones under the microscope.
He can tell you what they've been eating.

They go to Samoa to breed
he tells me, probably Samoa
or somewhere with water

so deep it crushes the sperm
and eggs from their bodies.
They die then

and the tiny glass eels
make their way from Samoa
back to the same river

in the Horowhenua.
Salt, fresh, salt, he says.
The opposite of salmon.

I threw out the clock
the rubbish is ticking.
On television

people are making alarming discoveries
about the secret online lives
of their loved ones, the daughter

and the cyanide, the no-reason.
Our dishes smell of flyspray
I wash them while the flies circle

the same flies that have flown
the rooms of this house
in formation for weeks

two zizzing pairs.
Or perhaps they are
different flies every day

replenishing themselves
away from my gaze
middle-aged state servants

in a timeshare, bored
with what the destination has to offer
the hydroslide

the boardwalk
through the mangroves
bitching at each other

they can't settle
they should have gone
to Samoa instead.

Destinations

by Josephine Jacobsen

Home is mysterious: a place to die, a place to breed:
a rock, a streambed, a burrow. From far far far
a deadly magnet: violent unarguable rapid need.

The waste of waters, printless, the wastes of air, prepare
for them death, failure, but never death of destination:
the thread snapped in the labyrinth, the shifting of a star.

From the Brazilian water-pastures, in her homing passion
the green turtle travels fourteen hundred miles to find
(with tiny water-level eye) Ascension Island reared above her
motion.

Eels. No eel in the western world but is reminded
in autumn of Sargasso: to its weeds and washes comes in the spring
to breed and to die: the elvers will return to do in kind.

The Manx sheerwater (monogamous as a wolf) flying
back back to his unidentifiable cliffy burrow; the al
batross, the salmon: need I labor the point in fin, fur, wing?

The point is established. But if I swim, I sink, if I fly, I fall.
How do I know that over the terrible distances where you are I
must arrive?
Well, the point is established. But the how, the how is not estab
lished at all.

But there is a question below the question of how I contrive
finally to reach you through the disasters of my weather;
I must come, and I come; so I accede, prevail, arrive.

This is the false arrival. O most fortunate fin and feather,
fortunate voyagers come where they had to go.
Now it turns out that this was a shelter, a shelter we leave
together;
for elsewhere. And the shadows, pulsing, say “night”, and the
short wind says “snow”.