lemon: a dream of Janet Frame

This poem is composed around words and phrases selected by others: ‘lemon’, ‘snake removalist’, ‘shirt of arrows’: thus its principle of composition becomes, for me at least, a mise-en-abyme of the poetic bricolage driving Frame’s work, deploying a dream logic to forge artistic patterns from the random cruelties that the world throws at her: for instance, the psych nurses literally throwing sweets to the patients, just to see them demean themselves scrabbling on the floor to catch them. The persona addressing Janet is borne of intertextuality: ‘lemon’ celebrates Frame’s work by seeding the poem with her name and two of her titles: Owls Do Cry and Scented Gardens for the Blind. The image of the youth’s prostrate abandonment ‘under’ [sic] his dismantled scooter is also hers, from ‘The Linesman’ in the 1983 collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart. The image of the ‘lemon’ is activated as both gift, carrying the light of survival, and punishment (suggested by the cruel pun: ‘we want you better bitter’), that is, the electro-convulsive therapy to which this great writer was repeatedly subjected.