By the end of this year, expect to see four more of Lee’s wonderful poems published.
“Ketamine and Other Holes” is to be published by the Poetry Aotearoa yearbook.
“Ward Terminology” and “I, Well” will appear in the winter issue of Tarot.
“Three Ordinary Miracles” is being published by the UK’s Long Poem Magazine, issue 35, available in May. Here is the process description that will appear alongside her piece:
This poem reflects on parenting through hardship including the Christchurch Earthquakes (NZ, 2010). The ‘Lyric Notes’ were lifted from my writing journals during a period of recovery from illness, with many lines appearing here as originally penned. After rewrites I had a deeply felt set of verses that formed some kind of argument, but the content was too abstract. They sat in a folder for several months. Happening on them again, I immediately thought of poorly attended school events demonstrating role conflict. This didn’t seem like enough, so I scrawled across the draft “What anecdotes fit these?”, leaving it visible on my desk. Over the following weeks my daughter was applying to universities and my work was frequently interrupted by memories of a smaller girl’s adventures. Observing these ‘sticky’ thoughts gave me the idea to realise the lyric concepts with snippets of one child’s story of shifting reliance. Rather than weaving the Notes into the anecdotal content, I kept them separate for contrast and scrutiny: how might the communicative qualities of genre repeat within minds and between loved ones? As layers of self-conscious identity? Initially, I arranged the ‘Narrative Artefacts’ in chronological order but that read brashly. I restructured trusting the sequence of the original lyric, placing story parts with the Note they best addressed, adding images here and there to strengthen connections. The fractal result is, I hope, a more nuanced and sincere depiction of family, whose progression rarely runs in straight lines or simple arcs.
Post written by Cleo Isobel.
Photo credit to Josh Kahen.
Sky House Poetry 