PHOTO RENGA. THIS IS A CALL AND RESPONSE POEM. IN EACH ITERATION NAOMI AND I SEND EACH OTHER A NEW HAIKU AND A PHOTOGRAPH. IN TRADITIONAL RENGA THE LINKING TEXT IS TWO SEVEN SYLLABLE LINES - HERE WE USE OUR PHOTOS INSTEAD. AS I INVITED NAOMI TO COLLABORATE WITH ME ON THIS, IT'S ALSO TRADITIONAL FOR ME TO START THE RENGA. THIS RENGA READS BACKWARDS ...SO IF YOU WANT THE FULL NARRATIVE START AT THE FOOT AND READ UP. OTHERWISE SCROLL DOWN...

Numbered paragraphs

illustrate simplicty;

joy of making dough.

Two circles, some squares.

Jasmine floats over roses

in the back garden.

Geometry rules

the stairway. An open door

is bold as sunshine.

A shaft of sunlight

brightens the darkest corner.

What looks soft is hard.

Heat and light reveal

hard edges of weather-worn

aging paving stones.

Clouds breed like rabbits

as the ground drys and hardens

cracks start to appear.

Everything has

its season. Dying roses

mimic cumuli.

Look up to catch luck

as it showers down unseen

but all embracing.

A heavy sky lives

in pond water. Thumb sized frogs

wait for a downpour.

Even a dead tree

has a purpose: as a host

for new leaves, regrowth.

Clouds scud without thought

landing on those that will last

just a short season.

Although delicate

the poppy petals hang on

as wind sweeps through corn.

A piercing of red

shoots through the green, pepper-hot

petals make their mark.

Above the beet field

clouds muscle in on blue sky.

Underfoot: cracked earth.

In a courtyard an

enamel bath sits and waits

for the Summer rain.

Uninterrupted

the scenery says its piece

to the croquet lawn.

The heat’s everywhere -

flames licking the air, the sun

returning their touch.

The gerberas look

up to the sun, are shocked

to find only one.

Over cups of tea

we look at the stars, but can’t

predict the winner.

An open goal leads

to quieter streets and pubs.

On one side blue sky.

An open door leads

on to heat and light, green leaves -

a rose petal falls.

A helicopter

flies overhead as dogs bark

and a Hoover dies.

Red and yellow ducks,

sitting pretty, pose for snaps

and ignore the heat.

A new day bristles

as the green parakeets screech.

With the heat comes dust.

Nightfall - lovers find

their comfort in marble wings,

the sky darkening.

A crush of petals

balanced on a single stem.

Night takes hours to fall.

This bright yellow smile

rules my kitchen. Cut flowers

know their time is short.

Roots swim up for air,

shoot leaves lighter than water.

A flower opens.

Crab claw, nettle sting -

spiked and sea-tossed, gaze skywards

to the scattered stars.

The sun continues

while white clouds float out to sea.

The beach is empty.

While I was drawing this a tanned teenage girl wearing only a Rasta hat and a bikini came toward me on a bicycle, stopped, looked down at my drawing and said, ‘Did you like, go to college to learn how to do that?’

‘Yes,’ I said, looking up at her.

‘My Mom went to college to learn how to do that, too,’ she said, ‘but she can’t do it as good as you,’

‘That’s nice of you to say,’ I said to the girl, ‘but you probably shouldn’t say that to your mother,’

‘No,’ said the girl after short pause, ‘I guess I probably shouldn’t.’

colours painted into the screen

After all the time spent thinking, sketching, planning and sketching again, the printing process is fast and furious.  I spent a whole day in the print studio: in the morning I exposed the artwork into the screen and mixed my colours, and in the afternoon I made the print.

inks mixed ready to print the exposed screen

the first layer drying on the rack

layer two: a blend of purple and brown to add detail

layer 3 - green/blue highlights

I overprinted the image with words to bring the three parts of the tryptich together, and finally added the feathers  - I used real feathers in the exposure unit with the hand drawn artwork, and then printed the ‘negative’ image by painting the ink straight onto the screen - the same method I used for the first layer.

the final print

While I was drawing this 2 middle aged women with dark orange tans came up the street on bicycles, pulled up on either side of me, looked down and started talking at me.

‘Well, hey there,’ said the woman to my right, ‘I see you’re doing some painting?’
‘Actually,’ I said, putting a pastel back in its box and looking up at her, ‘I’m drawing,’
‘Oh, how neat,’ she shouted out.
Then the other woman started talking.

‘On Oprah yesterday there was an artist who did this like massive portrait,’ she said, letting go of her handlebars and drawing a big air square with her hands, ‘and he’s like the fastest portraitist in the world. And he was like doing this portrait in 2 minutes only using his hands, no brushes, and right alongside of him they had the fastest violinist in the world and he was playing Vivaldi, one of the seasons, I don’t know which season, but it was, really, really fast.’

Then the other woman shouted out how neat again and then, without even waiting for my response to the Oprah portrait story, they both told to me to be sure to have a great day and rode off.

While I was drawing this a series of teenagers went up and down the street on red motor scooters while a short, fat woman with hair like a Lego man shouted instructions at them- ‘A little gas, a little break, a little gas a little break a little gas, a little break,’

Then, as if I’d called out, hey who’s related to that fat motorcycle instructor, a middle aged man came over to me, pointed to the woman and said, ‘That’s my sister. She’s got a whole heap of them motor scooters so she’s teaching my kids to ride ‘em,’

Then, because I didn’t know what else to say I said - ‘I have a proper motorbike at home,’

Then the man, who was wearing shorts but no shirt, put his hands on his hips, turned his attention fully toward me and started to tell me the story of how he’d once had a motorbike.

But luckily, before he was too far in, he was distracted by his sister who had stopped screaming out motorcycle instructions and was now literally bellowing out information about their evening meal.

‘We’re going to take the scooters out onto A1A,’ she was crying out, ‘we’re gonna go order pizzas. We’re gonna head on down there now and get us some supper underway.’

While I was drawing this a fat black and white cat sat in the driveway and stared at me.

Then a man came out and started putting fishing equipment in the back of a truck parked in the driveway.

Then a woman came up on a bicycle and parked it in the driveway.

After a while the fishing equipment man and the bicycle woman came out and sat on the porch drinking what I presumed, being in America and being only 8am, was coffee.

Pascale Petite is known for her vast imaginative reach, sharp editor’s eye and consumate craftmanship. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is ‘a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo’s life and work’.

Pascale Petit on What the Water Gave Me for Open Notebooks from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

Listening to her read with the paintings projected behind her at the Old Horse Hospital in London last week, I was struck by just how integrated the paintings and the poems are — it was as if the paintings were speaking, not the poet or the artist. Pascale IS however speaking in this interview I had with her about her writing process, where she shares some early first drafts from a collection that was 10 years in the making.

I’ve reached the technical stage.  Now I need to turn my ideas and sketches into a number of colour separations which will be layered to form the finished print.  I’ve decided to paint directly into the screen for the first layer and then will use either single colours or blends of colour for the detail.

I’m a little concerned that the sketches now look like lush rainforest, rather than a hawk’s habitat, so I may need to mute the colours a touch.  I’ve sketched out each layer and then hand-drawn each one full size, ready to expose into the screen when I go to the print studio on Friday.

The ideas are coming together.  I took Karen’s hawk photos as a starting point - I really want to work in the yellow of the hawk’s talons as a counterpoint to the calmer colours - and I found a feather at my allotment, and some more in a box when I was sourcing objects for another project. Scanned and solarised, they become something alien and unworldly.

I often work from photographs, so I took my camera to the Poetry Gazebo festival in Culpeper Community Gardens. I like the ‘hidden’ connections that are gathering in the print, with colours drawn from an event organised by Naomi Woddis, another Open Notebooks guest booker, and Karen reading her Wing poem as I took pictures of the greenness all around.  Next I searched my photo archives for images of leaves, water and wings. All these images are spread around me as I work on the colour sketches.

I was fascinated by the shape of Karen’s drafts for her own hawk poem; I hope to incorporate the form of her handwritten notes into the final print.

This isn’t live as in live TV but it is live in that I’ve written and posted my drafts as I go — so the process is transparent.

One of the photos I used as a prompt to help generate the poem.

One of the things I do when I’m writing is read other poetry books. I write down quotes and snippets that stand out or relate to my train of thought..

When I set the Hawk Prompt I also picked out this quote by Carolyn Forche, but when I wrote my rough draft I didn't respond to this, although I find that sound is very closely connected to the emotional tenor of my work.

Now as work on this edit I’ve returned to my original notes/free write. I rarely write poem drafts in lineated form. The messier my first draft the more likely it is to produce something worth working on.

I realise also I'm back on a subject I've been avoiding: grief. I don't want to bang on about my angst - but this is where the emotional heart seems to lie. I also picked up Sharon Olds' One Secret Thing in the library. Sometimes I find her work claustrophobic (if brilliant) but reading the first poem in the book 'EVERYTHING' that opens 'Most of us are never conceived./Many of us are never born -/we live in a private ocean for hours,/weeks... really heartened me and gave me the permission I needed to keep writing about this personal subject.

Re-reading my early scrawl I can see that the opening I’d originally marked for deletion, may just be where the poem needs to move towards: ‘I am most interested in the feet and claws’. In the notes above, it’s my son’s feet that I move towards.

The next step is to think about whether this is one or two poems. Is it the hawk or the child? Or is it hawk and child? Now I’ve finished scanning pages I’m going to go back to my notebooks for a bit, see what I get next.

Showing this kind of rough edit is uncomfortable I have to say: this is definitely in my discard pile. It's also disconcerting, changing my mind in public like this, but that's the constant part of the editing process. Trying new things. But it's interesting as a process: to identify the true ambition of the poem - not in terms of its syntactical realisation - but in the 'what does it want be/do' kind of way.

Yes, I definitely think it’s two poems. This new verse arrangement seems to have honed it down a bit - it feels more right like this.

I realise that what I was chasing here is the idea of being able to see an animal very close up - a wild animal. I once saw this fox that had just been run over, and it was all still perfect. It was fascinating. That moment when something's not long dead and still has the life in it. That's different to this, but this idea of proximity - as in Wing - is still there.