{"id":1815,"date":"2010-10-12T01:00:23","date_gmt":"2010-10-11T12:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=1815"},"modified":"2010-10-11T20:34:50","modified_gmt":"2010-10-11T07:34:50","slug":"tuesday-poem-maze-by-nancy-mattson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2010\/10\/12\/tuesday-poem-maze-by-nancy-mattson\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Poem: &#8220;Maze&#8221; by Nancy Mattson"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4><strong>Maze<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>What I miss is gravel<br \/>\ncrunching under foot or wheel,<br \/>\nwide sky above<br \/>\nthe road straight into horizon.<\/p>\n<p>I want to walk the crease<br \/>\nof a prairie book, lines of wheat<br \/>\nas even type, all one size<br \/>\nthe word gold over and over.<\/p>\n<p>London\u2019s a fused maze<br \/>\nof alphabets: wherever you walk,<br \/>\neach road, wherever it turns,<br \/>\nis utterly paved or cobbled crookedly.<\/p>\n<p>A crazed typesetter has been at work<br \/>\nevery night for centuries, his head<br \/>\nswirling with shadows thrown<br \/>\non crumbling walls by candle-flame.<\/p>\n<p>He has set every line diabolical<br \/>\nin a different font and size,<br \/>\nHot lead in higgledy-piggledy frames<br \/>\nand gutters overflowing with errata.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a9 Nancy Mattson<br \/>\nfrom <em>Writing with Mercury<\/em> (Flambard Press) 2006<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/Writing-with-Mercury.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1817\" title=\"Writing with Mercury\" src=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/10\/Writing-with-Mercury.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"191\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a>I met Nancy Mattson in 2008, when she and her husband, Mike Bartholomew-Biggs, also a poet, were resident in Christchurch for several months and appeared as guest poets as part of the Canterbury Poets&#8217; Collective annual Autumn Season of Poetry Readings at Madras Cafe Bookshop. Nancy is an ex-patriate Canadian now resident in London, and I love the way the poem, <em>Maze<\/em>, captures that experience in poetic form, using the extended metaphor of print. Nancy herself says:<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cWhen I first moved to London twenty years ago I kept getting lost in the winding streets, the layers of history and the echoing voices of writers. What a contrast after the openness of the Canadian prairies, where I was born and raised. I now claim both places as part of my psychogeographic inheritance.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maze What I miss is gravel crunching under foot or wheel, wide sky above the road straight into horizon. I want to walk the crease of a prairie book, lines of wheat as even type, all one size the word gold over and over. London\u2019s a fused maze of alphabets: wherever you walk, each road, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-writers","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1822,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/1822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}