a toast to sharing, to generosity

A record of two communal festive moments.

Today is the day after our annual supra - a Georgian feast celebrating Georgian music - passed down through generations in the mountain villages of Georgia and still so powerful today even though the languages have changed so much that the meanings of the words have often been lost. Incredible polyphonic singing in which the voices stay close together - a social singing where the solo voice is no more important or superior to for example the resounding and never ending drone of a bass part - sung in such unison that the snatches of breath taken to maintain that sound cannot be heard.

The warmth of the supra, and the remembered aftertaste and after sound of the delicious foods - layered Georgian honey cream cake, spinach, pomegranate, beans, cheese bread, a quince concoction, the Georgian toasting call and punctuations of Georgian song  - is combined in my case with the warmth of an earlier meeting on the same day of a small group of haiku writers - sharing our own and others' haiku. In this small group, gentle and uninterruptive, the theme is the senses, the topic of discussion moves to quite deep philosophical territory as we consider the place of the senses in an experience of residing in the now, the here, the immediate, untrammeled by thoughts of past or future.
The haiku are superb as is the willingness to discuss comment and alter to get the words and feeling exactly where we would like them to be. Topped off by a small delicious repast which includes both Christmas cake and homemade butter bean hummus...

There is something about the bringing and sharing of food in an atmosphere of artistic openness, generosity and yes again sharing that warms and warms so deeply

To friendship! To generosity! To sharing!

riddling in to the Old English world

Very happy to report one of my translations of the ancient Anglo-Saxon riddles (riddle 65) is now up on The Riddle Ages site https://theriddleages.wordpress.com/2017/08/10/riddle-65-or-63/

My commentary follows next week.

I have been working on translations of Anglo Saxon riddles for a while now and have five good ones and several more in progress. However, getting on Riddle Ages is an exciting new venture for me, since this site is run by Anglo-Saxon scholars. No mean feat to meet, as a non Anglo-Saxon speaker, with their approval.

I have signed up to translate two more of the riddles - there are over 90 of them and they are slowly posting them all up in numerical order so quite a few left to do....

Maggie Scott, with whom I work, and the Riddle Ages editor Megan Cavell have been most helpful with my naive questions and assumptions about this ancient language I have forgot. And now I am looking forward to any comments the site might generate so I can learn even more about the language and about riddling - something we still do as I was reminded in Hereford when I witnessed a young boy entertain his grandfather with a series of riddles to which, probably, they both knew the answer, but which acted as a strong bonding exercise nevertheless and which they both clearly enjoyed - the ritual of it, the team-playing it involves: knock knock says one, says who says two....

broken toes - the narrow and wide

In many ways narrowing down really focusses the mind and senses.

When you can't use and know you mustn't use some unprotected snapped or fractured bones (and note, as my highly-qualified medical niece recently revealed to me, in medical terminology 'fracture' means 'broken', not a milder version of the same, which is what I and my literary friends used to think because why would you use two words to mean the same thing? - I am beginning to wonder if there is a potential pot of funding waiting here for an impactful creative writing research project to identify and expose/disseminate other such common but deeply-confusing misunderstandings experienced by people like me who won't take a broken bone seriously if it is called a fracture), yes, when you are unfortunate to have such a broken bone, or more than one, then you begin to appreciate everything those bones so quietly enable - crouching to garden; twisting to reach from a top shelf; the spontaneous little stroll down to the market, coffee shop, train station, running - in any form, yoga, trekking over rough country, inching over rough pebbly tracks - indeed every time I need to shift balance in one tiny way or another, those little toes really pull their weight.

When they break, or if they break, you also get to appreciate the foresight of the planners, designers, lawmakers in buildings and public transport systems that have taken the option of providing special seats, escalators, lifts. A visible limp, or even more visible crutch (I didn't get to have one of those), really clears the air, giving you space to move, averting that fear that someone will bump into you or tread on your foot, and bestowing upon you the right to ask for someone to give up their seat to you, together with the probability of receiving a very gracious response as well.

It reminds me of the time, after my first session with the Theatre Anthropological group in Japan as part of our year-long training to act in the Noh play I and a friend had translated, that I had to go to work with severely deeply sore tendons in my legs from over-exertion at the simple exercises our unrepentant director had had us do for a rather too extended period. I learnt, slowly and painfully, that you could negotiate your way all round Kanazawa University on disabled ramps without have to lift one foot up a stairway, despite the fact the campus is set up in the hills. I learnt because I needed to. I couldn't move up or down without great cost, so much so that in order to leave the room after teaching a class in a more or less graceful manner I found myself clandestinely clutching the table so as to lever myself up without too much of a grimace of pain.

And now? It's hard not being able to nip out when I like, but the compensations do stack up. Incapacity awakens such kindness and generosity in others, friends, sister, niece, colleagues, neighbour - offers of lifts, shopping, drives, cinema trips, meals, a supportive arm, an invitation to come to stay while I heal. It also provides plenty of writing time and a great excuse not to hoover or dust or weed for a while if I can manage to let the resultant clutter not get me down. It is an interesting experiment in exercise-desistment and how that might affect well-being and how to compensate for it - more meditation is a good idea.....  As conditions prolong, it becomes, too, needful to work on my own reluctance to receive help, and also to work on learning to ask for it, as well as beginning to decipher the thin but very important line between keeping safe and stable, letting things get stronger, and the alternative of striking out best or even worst foot forward to allow weight-bearing to play a positive role. I don't want to learn funny walking habits by hobbling around on my heel for too long and then promptly create some other problem as a result of that. Been there already....

There is the joy of firsts, coming outside for the first time in a week to hear and feel the sunny growing green airs of summer, climbing up (very carefully in a toe-footed sort of way) and picking the now very ripe, because not picked for so long, clusters of black blackcurrants and red gooseberries on my steep grassy bank, making a trip to my local town, to the big city, an afternoon stretched-out half asleep on the slightly damp grass near one of the outdoor sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park soaking in the unusually strong sun of early northern July, and revelling in the (imagined?) sense of a vitamin D topup in process. Mmmm can still feel it now. Narrowing down, widening up.

Performing virtually in Amsterdam - a video

I spent a good two hours last week recording this excerpt from my new 'brief brief: a riddle', an extended visual poem on the process of translation, particularly challenging to perform not only because of the many visual effects but because of the inclusion of Friesan, Scots and Old English in the text - none of which I can really pronounce. I also forgot to brush my hair before the first take so had to scrap that one and start again. I never even thought of considering the background which is rather higgledy piggledy to say the list. And uploading it on WeTransfer took about two more hours...

Who'd be an actor!

The launch of the Versal issue (no 12) in which my poem features is on Sunday 11 June in Amsterdam. I'm sorry not to be there but very glad I was able to join in virtually.

Hope you enjoy the excerpt!

http://www.versaljournal.org

May Proliferations

I sometimes dread May - the garden explodes with life, flowers yes but also weeds and I cannot bear it - an uncontrolled untrammeled mess - reflecting perhaps the chaos in my head pre-poem, inter-collection, running up to the deadline of commission - which is the place I am now. But I cannot bear to pull the weeds. I even feel apologetic about the dandelions - although I do pull these knowing the fluff from their seeds will float not only all over my garden but my neighbour's.

Currently the garden is a glorious chaotic riot of colour as daffodils persist, forget me nots invade, pink, white-rimmed, orange, red etc tulips tower in all sorts of unexpected places, submerging the hyacinths, and then the other flowers that I have forgotten I planted and forgotten the names of also surprise. Going away for a few days is a treat because when I come back the colour has changed in all sorts of unexpected ways. But I have a struggle with the dandelions, the ragwort which as a responsible horse lover I feel obliged to pull is lurking and the foxgloves seem to proliferate every year - when is too much foxglove? Already the ferns are shooting up, curling their ends, and the plum tree is in a sulk, still straggly despite my crude efforts at pruning last year and definitely refusing to blossom while continuing doggedly to branch and branch and branch.

I am that plum tree - I don't want to write even though I know I must and must produce by next week. Not poems anyway. I am busy on a monograph about the thickness of language, reading Tolkien, Wittgenstein, Nick Humphrey, William James. I wading into it thickly and more thickly, and the creative elements don't seem to get much of a look in apart from the occasional haiku (what a saving grace that little form is and the Yorks/Lancs Haiku group which every month call me to produce at least one for their northern peripatetic meeting).

What I am proud of is my thin roadside verge, not really mine but not really anyone's - unadopted they say. So I've provisionally adopted it. Previously it was a tarmacky gravelly thin scattering of soil but now it is green with fern, dandelion (I allow them here this wonderful glowing flower), an occasional nettle - thinned by me, grasses, and other wild flowering weeds. This year it also had snowdrops, now forget me nots and a even a few tulips - more next year as I realize the battle with the squirrels is not fought on the road - they prefer privacy for their tulip and hyacinth robberies. Perhaps this is all I am doing at the moment, finding a place for creation where the squirrels won't rampage. And perhaps my unusually quiet calm demeanor in front of an impending deadline is a reflection of a deep certainty that the creative well will well and well in time and timely if I actively wait.

May explosions can't be controlled, not by me at least, but enjoyed and worked with - letting them take their own rhythm and very speedy pace with an occasional encouragement to shape and direction  seems to be the way forward (not forgetting the RHS expert gardener I know I can call in if things get too jungly - although I am not yet sure what form that takes when I thinking of poetry commissions!?)

water's sound

After the tanka workshop:

the need to go on a walk with an empty head in the hopes that into it will run the word for the sound of water flowing quickly and with music down a gully...

running back to the death of Samora Machel

Running in a group is easier than running alone. I know that - I can get out of bed much easier for that than if it is just for me. Running while talking allows you to run without getting puffed. I know that too, was just reminded of it this morning (but it makes no sense). Running on a march allows you to achieve great distances of sustained jog, especially when chanting - I found that out in Zimbabwe many years ago, when, by no means a runner, I joined a march after Samora Machel's strange death. 

This requires a little backhistory for some of you perhaps. Samora Machel was the first president of Mozambique, and much much much loved by Zimbabweans for his support of them in the long guerrilla fight for independence at a time when Rhodesia's conservative white government restricted access for black Rhodesians to land, education and even the right to walk on the main street (First Street) of the capital city, then Salisbury, now Harare. It was a very harsh time and surely left huge psychological marks. 

The extremes can be indicated as follows. When the country became independent, and many conservative white Rhodies left the country, a great number went to what we knew then as the Racist Republic of South Africa. Fable has it that they were too racist for the South Africans, and a number of these then went on to Perth. (This was apocryphal and may not have really been true but we all believed it - it chimed with our several experiences: black, white, Zimbabwean, expat). Certainly, of those that remained, tempers could run high. I remember shaking with rage at a high-class tea party shortly after I arrived in the country, in part because of the extreme racism being articulated in polite conversation, in part because it was being articulated at full blast within the hearing of the black servant, and in part because of the fact of a servant and of the treatment of that white uniformed man - quite elderly, whom the host referred to as a 'boy'. I also remember, a year or two later, being chased from a braai (a Rhodie-style barbecue) by the host waving a (steak?)knife after our discussion of the rights of black Zimbabweans got too heated. This time there was no rage for me - I was laughing, though scared, and yes for once running fast! I was used to such disagreements and had accepted them as par for the course if I was going to attend a Rhodie braai and say what I think. You just get accustomed to stuff.

In 1986 Samora Machel died in an aircraft crash on the border between Mozambique and South Africa. The world outside believed it was an accident. No one I knew in Zimbabwe did. But then we were used to reading between the newspaper lines - a skill people in Britain lacked as I discovered on my return home a few years later. How could this accident have happened over the only small patch of South African soil on the aircraft's route, or, as some said, off the plane's route? Too much of a coincidence for us. People were distraught. It was like your father dying. I went to a gig at Queens - one of the best venues for Zimbabwe music -  Tobias Areketa was singing a new song about Machel. People were dancing with tears running down their faces, including a wheelchair-bound war veteran at the front of the dance-floor, reminding us all of why Machel was so much loved.  You can listen to that song on youtube, wonderful youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpqObGE4WtA and note the apparently cheerful guitar melody counterpointed with the mournful notes of the singer. The word 'baba' means 'father' in Shona. 'Mai we' (am I spelling this right?) is a lament. I am sure you can pick them out. Imagine that dance floor. Take yourself there. 

But tempers ran high then too. When I and my (white) friend went downtown to join the march to mark our sadness at Machel's death I was grabbed by the wrist by an irate marcher who wanted to force me to join in, until she realized, with delight, that I was intending to anyway. What I hadn't understood however was that the march was a run, and a run to song and chant to the stadium (5 k away). I was not a runner then, nor any kind of athlete. I had bunked off games when I could at school, choosing Hungarian instead (it was a very academic school) and had never taken sport up since apart from the occasional walk, except perhaps after heated Braai discussions..... However on the march I made it all the way. My feet stung at the end but I was happy, euphoric, incredulous. It was the rhythm - of the chant, the music, the marching feet, and the rush of emotion that drew us into one strong running body, even me.

Wow I didn't know that spiel was going to take me where it did!! Lovely lovely Zimbabwe. 

Wrestling with Old English Riddles (7 and 8)

Less than monthly I know. Been working on Riddle 8 today - my second Old English riddle. It is a slow business and tiring but the fresh air that I feel blowing round the tough concrete physicality of the words is still evident.

               my coat makes no sound

[Before I go on, here is a spoiler alert in terms of riddle solutions by the way which I will be spilling in a few words' time.]

                                                                   as I tread on the ground

My last and first riddle, 7, was a silent swan, a mute, so everyone believes, but either swans have changed their flight patterns, wing depths and bone densities, or we have changed our tastes because while for the riddler this wing-song is sweet, for us today the words we would choose to describe that sound are quite different - some of them incorporated in my version, and I think quite making it, for what it is. Why is this? I know our tongues are less tolerant of bitterness than in bygone days - we sprinkle sugar on everything and so have quite limited our range in terms of taste - you can see it in all the wild foods which used to grace our tables but which we no longer like to eat - try a few - we now find them too bitter and this is why we let them go. Similarly, are our ears less settled with rougher sounds as we sprinkle the atmosphere with pop tunes, thus making songs like those of the swan's feathers much harsher and harder to hear as songs?

A similar question comes to mind with Riddle 8. Less unanimous than with Riddle 7 but still quite convincing is the proposed solution of a noisy nightingale, but once again our modern day reading of nightingale as sweet and beautiful is several times at odds with the riddle which in one line equates the bird with a less pleasant sound: a stormy shout - is this the same bird, or did they hear noise where we hear sweet? Alternatively, do we with our centuries of poetic nightingales fail to register noise as noise, plastering it over with a veneer of sweetness? Have our musical tastes changed so much? And there is some work with music history I also need to do in terms of other aspects of this riddle. But I know descriptions of sweet nightingales go way back to Anglo-Saxon times. I need to look into this more - I am not sure about it at all.

The other parallel I notice between these two riddles is the contrast with 'men' - in each riddle we have both heroes/warriors and the everyday sort. In Riddle 7 the humans are firmly landlocked unlike the soaring swan and in Riddle 8 they are possibly defiantly silent in contrast to the shouting bird. Interesting how the contrast with the bird lumps the two different groups of humans in one less than flattering heap.

The differences in the translation process? I still enjoy reading the words out and still seem to do it with a natural Swedish-Finnish accent (grace a my ex Swedish-Finnish lodger?), so that has not changed. However, I am much more au fait with the resources I can access now and more familiar with Anglo-Saxon syntax. I remember a great sense of freshness with Riddle 7. With Riddle 8, while the freshness is still palpable, I notice more a feeling of tiredness, and as well as struggling with word definitions and grammar, I am spending more time looking at readings, interpretations and discussions - (is critical work more tiring than 'straight' translation?). I am currently stuck because I need to read an article (on order) which seems to argue for a different reading for scericge (not actor/actress but nightingale). If this is really the case, it could have a substantial effect on the end of the riddle which seems in bit of a tangle at present, hence perhaps my tangled mind.

I can't post the two translations here (Riddle 7 being practically done, Riddle 8 less so) in case it limits their publication chances elsewhere. However, a visually manipulated draft of Riddle 7 reflecting some of its process of translation is appearing in the Amsterdam literary & arts journal Versal 12 in June - this is exciting as they have asked if they can translate my choice of a variety of typefaces into a variety of point sizes and layout options instead: http://www.versaljournal.org

                With one mouth    

Riddle 7 has one word spelt in a kind of olde english way - not a 'real' Old English word but a neat reminder of that language, which I hope I can replicate in another riddle so a reader of them realizes this is not a misprint....!


                                                      I talk in multiple tones

Poetry film

We had the privilege of hosting the Poetry Film iteration of the North West Poetry and Poetics Network at Salford university yesterday, jointly organized with two other poets, Antony Rowland (Manchester Metropolitan) and Ursula Hurley (Salford). I was reminded once again of the potential for generosity, openness, enquiring exploration, humour, inventiveness and eagerness/readiness to connect in surprising ways of poets, here accompanied by the wideness of scope and attention to both overall structure and details of perspective that a filmmaker can bring.

Sharing their work were Dalia Neis, CJ Hamand, Sarah Tremlett (and Meriel Lland and others), Helen Mort, Michael Symmons Roberts (interviewed by Martin Kratz) and Tom Jenks.

A really successful day in which I was able to make contact/be reunited with a fellow climbing poet Helen Mort - her poetry film set on (or up) Stanage Edge and another underway in Greenland; and also experience the excitement of boredom while listening to Tom Jenks' fantastic performance of many 'Dull days', which often seemed to initiate or presage exciting events (does excitement require the blank scratchiness of boredom?), to a backtrack of 9 1/2 minutes of train spotting filmage. Sarah Tremlett gave a generous introduction to a range of poetry film from the cartoonic, to the collage, to cave art (Meriel Lland); and Martin Kratz teased out of Michael Symmons Roberts a very interesting assessment of docu-drama and the difficulties of combining the two, both in the case of poetry and not. Also wonderful were the discussions between and after sessions, in which again and again the emphasis lay on the textured and spatial complexity a conjunction of film and poetry can bring. I was conscious there were other poets there (Ursula Hurley and Antony Rowland for starters) who could have contributed and that we were also lucky to have performance specialist Jo Scott whose comment in the morning debate on the use of screenplay techniques in poetry from the perspective of the stage play script set me thinking all day.

However I was particularly proud of the representatives of Salford's postgraduate community, both for the quality of comments and questions they offered in the general discussions, and also for their presentations in the morning's postgraduate panel - Dalia Neis' expansive discussion of the filming of wind extended to a filmmaker's view of Ann Carson's work, providing for it an extraordinarily liberating perspective ... exhilarating; and CJ Hamand's 'Depthlessness' https://curtisjadepoetry.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/depthlessness/ could be described on a first view as performance poetry delivered over black and white shots of urban Manchester, but there are such complex undercurrents, both in the half-captured words of the background chatter (and preaching) in the sound track, and even more in the words fleetingly present on screen, seen as reflection in water, advertising slogan, broken sign, graffiti scribble we can read, and elements that could be scribbles but that we cannot read. I find my eye adjusting by the end of the film to search for writing / letters in all the visual images, an exciting and very curious experience. She's on to something here!

Poem reaches A level syllabus

A weird discovery last night - that at least one set of sixth formers in a school in Croydon are studying one of my poems. Not sure if this is good or not but certainly intriguing. How it happened: a teacher friend of mine told me that the Forward Poems of the Decade anthology which includes my poem 'Wa/Harmony' (from Joy Change the Japanese collection) has been adopted as a set text for the Edexccel Alevel and AS syllabus! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/16/poems-of-the-decade-anthology-forward-prizes Quite soon, or possibly as I write, students may be writing essays comparing and contrasting it to another poem in that anthology.

This is the second time a poem of mine has reached syllabus level ('The Character of Rain' from the same volume was and perhaps still is on an Open University module). In this case not only is it strange to be re-reminded of the trajectories a little poem can follow outside my ken or even my awareness - how true they are now something other - an arrow sent forth to find its own way; it is also interesting to observe how work can be altered and reinvented in the process of anthologising and reprinting. The Forward Anthology has extended my poem by three lines! 

How this happened: I was not involved in the proof-reading of that anthology. Indeed I did not even know my poem was in it until it was published, and it took quite some time for me to be sent a copy of the book. When I did receive one, I saw that they had actually combined two of my poems into one. In Joy Change, 'Wa' on page 8 is followed by a little separate haiku on page 9. Haikus are traditionally titleless so this one was set slightly further down the page to indicate a new poem (other indications also being its separate listing on the contents page and indeed the fact that 'Wa' is in six regular stanzas of four lines each, while the haiku is much shorter in line length and in entirety - only three lines). Yet in the Forward anthology the two poems are presented as one.

I quite like the transformation this effects in an odd way although I wouldn't have (and didn't) choose it myself. It fits with one of the collection's potential themes - the expat lost and trying to find her way/make new connections in Japan. It also comprises a good lesson in layout - exaggerate the difference in layout if you mix titleless haiku with titled poems. And it illustrates so well the unfinished nature of a poem or any text. How often we assume we hold the definitive text in our hands, forgetting to check if what we see has been reprinted, republished, revised, or indeed translated from another language - perhaps several times, each of these actions having an effect on the text whether it be through differing layout, page design and size, alteration of wording or indeed changes in the actual language used. Those essays we write, those ponderings we indulge in are in this text now that we hold in our hands or behold on our screen, but not necessarily or not at all in the text the writer originally wrote (and what after all does that 'originally' mean - I had many drafts of 'Wa' I am sure and there is certainly one alteration I would make now if I was me back then (if that is ever possible) and rather wonder if I intended to make then but forgot: adjusting stanza one so the  'pack' is not used twice - although there may well be a student now commenting on exactly why that double pack is so important. (Sorry for the triple brackets by the way)).

But instead I think I want simply to celebrate the different groupings and interpretations that editors and readers and happenstance can come up with. A poem is never finished, is flexible and open and so Forward and Edexcel have done me a favour I think, in that way.

2017: into the new - a love song to Tod

very much still a rainy northern place but after some days of meditation what stays is not the chill and the wetness but the sharp clean brilliance provided by that rain, and also thankfulness at how individual and very much itself this little town I live in continues to be. every year seems to mark the beginnings of yet another new festival, which go on to win awards (Pulling Up Daisies), draw in relatives to visit (Lamplighter Festival), set a high standard for consciousness-raising through poetry evening and cartoon graffiti (The one-off how I wish it wasn't Climate Change Festival). The singing groups, the musicians, the folk festival, the one-off gigs... Yes, placed on the periphery, between two anciently warring counties, Tod has a history of going its own way that still sets a standard for the town, centre of Incredible Edibleness and yet without clinging on to it as IE threads its radial connections throughout the world, stuffed full of poets, potters, printers perhaps who knows, preachers(?), and other crafts or crafty men and women, builders, plumbers, wood-turners, small business runners, both an indoor market and an outdoor market, a traditional tourist information slap-bang up against a thriving willow weaving centre, a simple greasy or not so greasy spoon next to a state of the art truly ART hairdressers where I might get a lecture on how to take my glasses off and on so as not to spoil the cut, and in among the sheds and warehouses of one of its smaller industrial sites a totally unexpected climbing centre gleams its own promises and aspirations. and deep at its centre, opposite the lavish town hall is a huge gold bicycle - the tour de tod - as the Your de Torkshire /Tour de Yorkshire was fondly remembered - that it never even came through the town making not one wit of difference

                                                                                       love it