The Tuesday Poem: Featuring Siobhan Harvey & “Autistic Cloud Boy Visits Auckland Art Gallery”
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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About The Poem:
Currently, I am re-posting poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010. Siobhan Harvey’s Autistic Cloud Boy Visits Auckland Art Gallery is from her recently published collection, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014), which won the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry in 2013. The Autistic Cloudboy Visits Auckland Art Gallery first featured here on April 9, 2013, as part of a series featuring ekphrastic poems (poems in response to works of art.)
Siobhan also supplied the following Poet’s Note:
“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, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014), which was winner of New Zealand’s richest prize for poetry, the Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry. Also recently released, with Harvey as co-editor, is Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House NZ). Her other awards include runner up in the 2014 New Zealand Poetry Society’s International Poetry Competition, runner up in 2012 Dorothy Porter Poetry Prize (Aus) and runner up in 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Competition. Her work has recently been published in Books Unbound, Evergreen Review, Pilgrimage (Colorado State University Press), Segue (Miami University Press), Stand (UK), Structo (UK) and the New Zealand Poetry Society 2014 anthology, Taking Back the Sky. Her creative nonfiction has been published in magazines in New Zealand and America, and is a finalist in the 2014 Landfall Essay Prize, as well as being Highly Commended in 2013 Landfall Essay Prize, and runner-up in 2011 Landfall Essay Prize. Between 2006 and 2013, Harvey co-ordinated New Zealand’s National Poetry Day. She lectures in Creative Writing at AUT’S Centre for Creative Writing, and has a Poet’s Page on The Poetry Archive (UK), here: Siobhan Harvey.
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