I - V
Delicately suspended objects may swing
Many people do not recognise it
Vibration like passing of truck
At night some awakened
Walls make cracking sound
Disturbance of trees, poles, and other tall objects
Pendulum clocks may stop
VI - IX
Many frightened and run outdoors
Some chimneys broken
Noticed by persons driving motorcars
Fall of columns, monuments, walls
Heavy furniture overturned
Changes in well water
Ground cracked conspicuously
X - XII
Shifts sand and mud
Water slopped over banks
Broad fissures in ground
Earth slumps
Rails bent greatly
Waves seen on ground
Lines of sight distorted
Found in the 'Modified Mercalli (MM) Intensity Scale', from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, originally published in 1966.
In a recent post, I quoted the middle stanza of The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale, a found poem I wrote as part of a small collection of quake poetry with a working title of Felt Intensity. Today, the Central Hawkes Bay towns of Waipukurau and Waipawa experienced a swarm of earthquakes, the biggest of which was 5.2 on the Richter Scale. Little damage has been reported to date. The quakes have prompted me to post the complete Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale.
Visit
Tuesday Poem for more poems this week and read TP's special 4th birthday poem, each line written by a different Tuesday Poem Poet without knowing what the other poets had written. The whole poem was knitted together by three editors and the result is fantastic.
Showing posts with label quake poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quake poetry. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
Writing Process Blog Tour - Felt Intensity
1) What am I working on?
As Kathy Ferber mentioned in her fascinating Writing Process Blog Tour post, I currently work for New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission. I have been employed there full-time since 6 September 2010, 2 days after the first of the really big Christchurch quakes struck.
It will be no surprise then, to learn that I have just completed a small collection of poems which focuses on the effects of Canterbury's seismic events of the last 3.5 years. Although I live in Wellington, not Christchurch, I travelled there frequently during 2010 - 2013 and so experienced enough of the tens of thousands of aftershocks (including the big and deadly Feb 22nd, 2011 quake) to gain some small understanding of what it has been like for Canterbury residents.
BeckerFraserPhotos
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
During and since the Canterbury earthquakes a sub-genre of "quake" poetry emerged and a number of collections (for example, Things Lay in Pieces by Richard Langston) and many individual poems have been written. One of my favourite poems is Fault by Joannna Preston.
Quake poems are not new (which is not surprising, considering New Zealand has been known as the “Shaky Isles” since the 1800s). Before the Canterbury quakes, Sam Hunt wrote about one he experienced in South Taranaki. He called it Naming the Gods and he reads it as part of the song Cape Turnagain by the Warratahs. I use Sam’s poem as a start point for a sequence of poems in my collection – The Ruamoko Series (Ruamoko is the Maori god of earthquakes and volcanoes).
My as-yet unpublished collection probably differs a little from others in the quake genre because of the number of found poems (poems found in original text) it contains. The poem Headlines is a list of headlines from the Sunday Star Times of 5 September 2010, which was the day after the first big quake; February 22nd, 2011, Report 1 is a slightly abbreviated version of information about that quake published by GNS (New Zealand’s Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences) immediately after it happened; The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale is a ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of this 12-point Scale, which is used by people to report how they experience an earthquake. The following is a stanza from that poem (the language is a bit ‘last century’ because the Scale was written in the early 1900s and the words and phrases are ‘as found’ in the Scale; I like the effect of the clipped, fore-shortened descriptors though - they jar just like an earthquake):
The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale – VI - IX
Many frightened and run outdoors
Some chimneys broken
Noticed by persons driving motorcars
Fall of columns, monuments, walls
Heavy furniture overturned
Changes in well water
Ground cracked conspicuously
3) Why do I write what I do?
Tongues of Ash (see also the side bar) was my first full length collection. It contains poems which are mainly to do with place, reflections on place, memories of living in New Zealand in different localities, landscape, and the physical environment.
Felt Intensity is the working title of the small collection of quake poems which make up my reflections on the Christchurch earthquakes. It is also a term used to describe what the Modified Mercalli Scale actually measures. The titles of poems in this collection are (some of which have appeared in publications as shown below or in earlier posts on this blog):
The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale
One might expect
Headlines
Canterbury Groundworks Group
February 22nd, 2011, Report 1
February 22nd, 2011, Report 2 (JAAM 31)
Disaster Watch
Canterbury INTREP
Kia kaha Canterbury, October 2011
The Ruamoko Series
1. Name-calling
2. Grounds for a Protection Order
3. Dear Ruamoko (JAAM 31)
4. Canterbury Oblations
5. Ruamoko, Trainwrecker
Richter meets Mercalli in Christchurch during the shallow aftershock years
Resilience (Tuesday Poem)
Accident at sea
In effect I write what I do because, like most if not all poets, I write what I feel.
4) How does your writing process work?
In answer to the first question of this post, I said that I don’t live in Christchurch. But I did once live there – as a student, for four years. When I left the city in 1970, I didn’t return for 12 years. The poem I wrote about that visit didn’t get written for another 20 years and is the opening poem of Tongues of Ash (see Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982 below).
This is evidence that in my writing process it can take a long time for a poem to ferment.
I am getting quicker though – the first of the Felt Intensity poems came along after brewing for only one year.
Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982
You clasp a shabby quilt
of dun and brown.
Memories from years before
at first stay locked away
like the snow water
in your mountains
marching north and south.
No storms call to your Port Hills
which are as bare as the trees
that trellis your sky.
But then, they always did.
Even as I enter the city
of my first true love
you get coy
clutch up a skirt of fog.
Once again
I have to fumble my way.
If you would like to follow the blogging tour, return to this blog next week (Mon 24 March), where I will be hosting Sandi Sartorelli’s Writing Process Blog Tour post.
Sandi Sartorelli recently shifted to live in the Cook Islands and is a graduate of New Zealand’s Whitireia Creative Writing Programme. Her poetry has appeared in a number of publications including JAAM, Blackmail Press, Penduline Press, Renee's Wednesday Blog and Shenandoah. Recently, two of her poems were highly commended in the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize and the New Zealand Poetry Society Competition.
Enjoy the trip.
As Kathy Ferber mentioned in her fascinating Writing Process Blog Tour post, I currently work for New Zealand’s Earthquake Commission. I have been employed there full-time since 6 September 2010, 2 days after the first of the really big Christchurch quakes struck.
It will be no surprise then, to learn that I have just completed a small collection of poems which focuses on the effects of Canterbury's seismic events of the last 3.5 years. Although I live in Wellington, not Christchurch, I travelled there frequently during 2010 - 2013 and so experienced enough of the tens of thousands of aftershocks (including the big and deadly Feb 22nd, 2011 quake) to gain some small understanding of what it has been like for Canterbury residents.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
During and since the Canterbury earthquakes a sub-genre of "quake" poetry emerged and a number of collections (for example, Things Lay in Pieces by Richard Langston) and many individual poems have been written. One of my favourite poems is Fault by Joannna Preston.
Quake poems are not new (which is not surprising, considering New Zealand has been known as the “Shaky Isles” since the 1800s). Before the Canterbury quakes, Sam Hunt wrote about one he experienced in South Taranaki. He called it Naming the Gods and he reads it as part of the song Cape Turnagain by the Warratahs. I use Sam’s poem as a start point for a sequence of poems in my collection – The Ruamoko Series (Ruamoko is the Maori god of earthquakes and volcanoes).
My as-yet unpublished collection probably differs a little from others in the quake genre because of the number of found poems (poems found in original text) it contains. The poem Headlines is a list of headlines from the Sunday Star Times of 5 September 2010, which was the day after the first big quake; February 22nd, 2011, Report 1 is a slightly abbreviated version of information about that quake published by GNS (New Zealand’s Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences) immediately after it happened; The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale is a ‘Reader’s Digest’ version of this 12-point Scale, which is used by people to report how they experience an earthquake. The following is a stanza from that poem (the language is a bit ‘last century’ because the Scale was written in the early 1900s and the words and phrases are ‘as found’ in the Scale; I like the effect of the clipped, fore-shortened descriptors though - they jar just like an earthquake):
The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale – VI - IX
Many frightened and run outdoors
Some chimneys broken
Noticed by persons driving motorcars
Fall of columns, monuments, walls
Heavy furniture overturned
Changes in well water
Ground cracked conspicuously
3) Why do I write what I do?
Tongues of Ash (see also the side bar) was my first full length collection. It contains poems which are mainly to do with place, reflections on place, memories of living in New Zealand in different localities, landscape, and the physical environment.
Felt Intensity is the working title of the small collection of quake poems which make up my reflections on the Christchurch earthquakes. It is also a term used to describe what the Modified Mercalli Scale actually measures. The titles of poems in this collection are (some of which have appeared in publications as shown below or in earlier posts on this blog):
The Condensed Modified Mercalli Scale
One might expect
Headlines
Canterbury Groundworks Group
February 22nd, 2011, Report 1
February 22nd, 2011, Report 2 (JAAM 31)
Disaster Watch
Canterbury INTREP
Kia kaha Canterbury, October 2011
The Ruamoko Series
1. Name-calling
2. Grounds for a Protection Order
3. Dear Ruamoko (JAAM 31)
4. Canterbury Oblations
5. Ruamoko, Trainwrecker
Richter meets Mercalli in Christchurch during the shallow aftershock years
Resilience (Tuesday Poem)
Accident at sea
In effect I write what I do because, like most if not all poets, I write what I feel.
4) How does your writing process work?
In answer to the first question of this post, I said that I don’t live in Christchurch. But I did once live there – as a student, for four years. When I left the city in 1970, I didn’t return for 12 years. The poem I wrote about that visit didn’t get written for another 20 years and is the opening poem of Tongues of Ash (see Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982 below).
This is evidence that in my writing process it can take a long time for a poem to ferment.
I am getting quicker though – the first of the Felt Intensity poems came along after brewing for only one year.
Canterbury Visit, Winter 1982
You clasp a shabby quilt
of dun and brown.
Memories from years before
at first stay locked away
like the snow water
in your mountains
marching north and south.
No storms call to your Port Hills
which are as bare as the trees
that trellis your sky.
But then, they always did.
Even as I enter the city
of my first true love
you get coy
clutch up a skirt of fog.
Once again
I have to fumble my way.
If you would like to follow the blogging tour, return to this blog next week (Mon 24 March), where I will be hosting Sandi Sartorelli’s Writing Process Blog Tour post.
Sandi Sartorelli recently shifted to live in the Cook Islands and is a graduate of New Zealand’s Whitireia Creative Writing Programme. Her poetry has appeared in a number of publications including JAAM, Blackmail Press, Penduline Press, Renee's Wednesday Blog and Shenandoah. Recently, two of her poems were highly commended in the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize and the New Zealand Poetry Society Competition.
Enjoy the trip.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Tuesday Poem: Ruamoko, trainwrecker
If you study a map of the South Island’s fault lines
you will notice that they resemble a railway
marshalling yard. The main trunk line is the big bugger,
the trans-alpine fault, running up the spine of the island.
Somewhere near Murchison, it breaks north-east and forms
a series of branch and shunting lines which meet the sea
at Marlborough before chunneling under Cook Strait.
But if you zoom into that junction at Murchison and search
until you find the Train Controller’s box – one of those
buildings on four legs from which the points are operated –
focus in again and look closely through the windows.
There you will see a Train Controller, bound and gagged,
with a look of horror on his face. Ruamoko, eyes shut
and grinning, is playing with the point-setting levers.
I wrote this poem recently and it is the last in my Ruamoko series - a small collection of 14-line poems that reference the god of earthquakes (and volcanoes - sorry Aucklanders). I've posted it because I haven't posted in a while, mainly because my blog took some unplanned time out over the last month and a half. Thanks to help from fellow Tuesday Poem poets Tim Jones and Helen McKinlay, I have managed to resuscitate it.
Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
you will notice that they resemble a railway
marshalling yard. The main trunk line is the big bugger,
the trans-alpine fault, running up the spine of the island.
Somewhere near Murchison, it breaks north-east and forms
a series of branch and shunting lines which meet the sea
at Marlborough before chunneling under Cook Strait.
But if you zoom into that junction at Murchison and search
until you find the Train Controller’s box – one of those
buildings on four legs from which the points are operated –
focus in again and look closely through the windows.
There you will see a Train Controller, bound and gagged,
with a look of horror on his face. Ruamoko, eyes shut
and grinning, is playing with the point-setting levers.
I wrote this poem recently and it is the last in my Ruamoko series - a small collection of 14-line poems that reference the god of earthquakes (and volcanoes - sorry Aucklanders). I've posted it because I haven't posted in a while, mainly because my blog took some unplanned time out over the last month and a half. Thanks to help from fellow Tuesday Poem poets Tim Jones and Helen McKinlay, I have managed to resuscitate it.
Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Tuesday Poem: Resilience
Mathematicians
have worked out
how to calculate
the bounciness of a ball:
(the coefficient of this
x the cosine of that)
+ the differential
of today's weather all ÷ by
a piece of string
(and the speed of the train)
= the same as dropping different balls together
and seeing which ball
has the longest bounce
Measuring how well
a person will rebound
after being dropped on
is still being worked on:
some believe it
has something to do with
the thickness of their skin whether their stretching
reaches a breaking point
or results in withstanding
whether they can fight and flee how many timesthe person has returned to a vertical position before
I am feeling a little guilty for not having posted on Tuesday Poem for two whole months! Excuses - Xmas, grown-up children shifting house, work busy-ness, summer, grandchildren, checking out that the Hawkes Bay still makes wine...writing poetry???
Anyway, today's poem arose from contemplation on a phenomenon of recent (quaky) times.
Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Tuesday Poem: February 22nd, 2011
The earth roared, jack-hammered
bucked like a brahma bull
at a rodeo.
After, we waded through a field of shards
found open space, moved the glass-grazed car
away from the bruised and broken building.
During that afternoon of terra not-so-firmer
we stood around, shivered, hugged the ground
comforted those from the third floor
whose sky had fallen on their heads.
We remarked on a distant tower, three sheets
to no wind, shedding bricks each new tremor
saw plate glass bow and flex, lights oscillate
in a luxury-car showroom, watched would-be
CBD traffic becalm itself in a sea of sirens.
I remember now a grey sky
the absence of cell phone sounds
how no birds sang.
Poems from my Canterbury quakes experiences are starting to insist on air-time. This one was written last month.
Visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Tuesday Poem: Dear Ruamoko
I want you to know how much I admire you.
You have to be a male God, right?
All that tectonic testosterone. Looks like
you’ve done some great bad things
but I’m sure you were provoked and besides,
I ain’t lily-white myself. Check out my photo –
how cool are those fangs and the hair style
with the writhing snakes. You might have heard
of
our sisters gang, the Gorgons. We did some
neat bad shit before Medusa got her head cut
off.
Anyway, maybe when you get out
we could hang and do some stuff –
I’m ace at turning men into stone
which you could use in your rock and roll thing.
Yours immortally
Here is another of the Ruamoko (Earthquake God) poems I am writing. Keep an eye out for future Ruamoko poems on this blog and visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Tuesday Poem: Grounds for a Protection Order
I don’t unpack
my bags anymore
Ruamoko. I know
how volatile you are.
All day, all night
you devise
your next violation
your next vicious act.
Each night I lie awake
waiting your hammer
feeling your vice
tighten my heart
tracing the scars
you've carved on my life.
This is another in a sequence of Ruamoko (Earthquake God) poems I am writing. Keep an eye out for future Ruamoko poems on this blog and visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
my bags anymore
Ruamoko. I know
how volatile you are.
All day, all night
you devise
your next violation
your next vicious act.
Each night I lie awake
waiting your hammer
feeling your vice
tighten my heart
tracing the scars
you've carved on my life.
This is another in a sequence of Ruamoko (Earthquake God) poems I am writing. Keep an eye out for future Ruamoko poems on this blog and visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Tuesday Poem: Kia kaha Canterbury, October 2011
The city wounded at its heart
The steeple shattered in the street
The founder and his plinth apart
Ruamoko not yet replete.
Each tremor the lament repeats –
A severance of peace from place
A déjà vu of loss and grief
A pillaging of time and space.
In sufferance but not defeat
Cantabrians roll sleeves, make fast
then hold each other’s hands and seek
new beginnings, built on their past.
As you may be aware, I am working for EQC and have been since the 4 Sep 2010 earthquake. EQC asked me to write a poem for Canterbury for the front of their Annual Report. This is the poem I wrote (with one or two changes since) but I am not sure it made it to the final version of the report. So, here it is as Tuesday Poem this week. Along with 'Name-calling' (see my 8 Nov Tuesday Poem) I see it forming part of a sequence of poems involving Ruamoko, the Earthquake God. Keep an eye out for future Ruamoko poems on this blog and visit Tuesday Poem for more poems this week.
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