Another month with 30 days and I’ll be prompting for the 30/30 crew (a group of poets working to write 30 poems in 30 days) every Monday, posting some of the result here and also posting up the prompts I set for anyone that wants to join in.

As I write this it’s Halloween — or the Pagan ‘New Year’ festival Samhain (literally meaning ‘the end of summer’). Bonfires were lit all over the country, pumpkins and gourds were harvested, and it marked the passage from the season of ‘day’ (summer) to that of ‘night’ (winter).

Photo courtesy of Naomi Woddis

It was also seen as a time when the veil between the living and the spirit world was at its thinnest. This festival is reiterated all over the world in different forms, from All Saints Day in Eastern Europe to the Day of the Dead in Latin America.

It is  a time of divination, when we honour our ancestors, meditate on the past, think forward into the future and contemplate the cycle of birth, death and renewal. I’ve been thinking about the idea of poetry being an attempt to influence the future…as a ‘spell’ that is cast, momentarily, over the reader.

Write a poem that tells us of an event that will happen in the future…it could be an event that HAS happened in the past, but is written in the future tense, or a poem that intuits the future, as a prophecy…

Pascale Petit 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.