Tuesday Poem: “The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery” by Siobhan Harvey
The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery
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1. Taranaki (and cloud), Wanganui, 15 April 1986
Studying Aberhart, Cloudboy takes up a camera, empties land
of everyone except his mother, pictures the bare pathos of
what remains in photography, in black and white clouds.
2. A Pair of Godwits
Studying Palmer, Cloudboy wings his mother to canvas
desolate as a godwit’s flight; below cadmium sky, in oily air,
they nest until the pull of somewhere else – a cloud – rises
them to portray each other at the edge of the world.
3. Aotearoa – Cloud
Studying Albrecht, Cloudboy paints a shed of cloud
as solid as his mother’s nerves; inside, they draw,
eat, dance and sleep secure in the knowledge
they’ve sewn themselves into skin thin as white paper.
© Siobhan Harvey
Reproduced here with permission
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As I noted in March 26th’s Tuesday Poem post, I am currently running a series of poems in response to works of art, which will include a note from the poet. This week’s poem and note is from Siobhan Harvey.
You can find out more about the work of New Zealand artists Laurence Aberhart, Stanley Palmer, and Gretchen Albrecht by clicking on the artist’s name.
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Poet’s Note: from Siobhan Harvey
“An intregral part of our landscape, our sense of belonging, clouds continue to remain invisible to many. Parenting a child who, at 5 year’s old, became fixated with the firmament and the pictures he could unlock there, the manner in which so many other people disregarded the clouds was made apparent to me. At the same time, as my son charted (what became for him) the exceedingly fraught terrain of his first primary school, during which his nephology was viewed by peers and teachers alike as esoteric and divorced from the everyday, I realised that in cloud-watching my son had become something akin to the focus of his obsession. At 7 year’s old he received a diagnosis – ASD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder. That latter word, disorder, continues to feel like the true dysfunction to me, for many reason, not least of which is that when I took my son to the newly opened, newly renovated Auckland Art Gallery, we discovered his passion for the clouds replicated time and again in the photographs, paintings and imagery upon the walls. The cloud, we both understood then, is not the matter of dislocation or peculiarity, but the inspiration for and genesis of creativity, ‘The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery’ is part of a much larger body of nephological poems which I’ve written over the course of the last year or two and which, individually, like little clouds journeying hither and thither, have found homes in magazines in New Zealand, Australia, the US, England and wider Europe.”
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About the Poet:
Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost Relatives (Steele Roberts, 2011) and the book of literary interviews, Words Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010). She is also the editor of Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random House, 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Asheville Poetry Review (US), Best New Zealand Poems, Five Poem Journal (Ned), Landfall, Stand (UK), Structo (UK) and Turbine 12. She was runner-up in the 2012 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (Aus), 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition, 2011 Landfall Essay Prize and 2011 Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, and nominated for the 2011 Pushcart Prize (US). She has a Poet’s Page on The Poetry Archive (U.K.), here: Siobhan Harvey.
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I love this poem!
Me, too! Thanks, Frankie.:)