Two new letters from Miriam.
I can’t wait to open these, but I have so I can scan them here. Yes, they are iris coloured. I love the way garden plants have a calendar of colour. First yellow with forsythia which took all February to bloom this year. Then blue hyacinths. The hotter reds, oranges come later in the summer. We need this brightness as winter drabs on. More as I open these and read…
Last week, my 92 year-old grandmother passed away in the States. In my rush to grab a last-minute flight to go to the funeral, I packed a black skirt and top, my running shoes and one writing notebook. One! Just when I was finding it hard to live/work with only five!
On the flight, I wrote a poem for my grandmother’s service:
Graves Avenue
In memory of Hazel Langdon Page
(1917 – 2010)
the light and the dark of it
that house
we’d enter through the buttery-bright kitchen
where first thing he’d lift the dome
to check for chocolate cake
the voodoo doll
hung on a nail across from the cookie jar
its little brown body wound in threads
of yellow and red
the warm wood
of the long family table where we’d sit
in the company of chickadees and robins
beefy as quarterbacks and, feathery tailed
acrobats, those damn squirrels
the sun on your sandwich
the light tapered arc of a spider plant
then the armchair where you’d tuck up
your legs and lean in toward her
at her end of the sofa
the one cushion worn to a slope
crochet needles joined in tablets
of little sweater fronts and backs
and down the hall, a gallery
of high school photos
and things came from cold closets
photo albums, the Ouija board for contacting
the dead I confess now I would guide
one eye open
loose ends of stories of Indian blood
trailing through our veins
and fortune tellers
ferris wheels
she liked my story of a palm reader
who told me what I already knew
you have a large family, I can see here, like a net
or a spider web
some little lines broken
What I think of spider webs today
is simply, how mysterious, how strong
As I was writing the first draft, I did think momentarily that I was writing in the wrong notebook. The one I had brought was supposed to be for my Tate Modern course. Stuck on the plane with no choice, I felt a slight giddiness at my rule breaking (I know, I’m kind of a geek….) and then I thought it was a good lesson in reality, making do and, in a way something like thrift, all things my grandmother, and most of her generation, would have applauded.
Our writing ends up in different notebooks for different reasons, controlled by how methodical, anxious, sloppy or rushed we might be at the time. Academic work aside, the creative work will land where it lands and I think I’ll stay clear of controlling it as much as I originally wanted to. I think I’ll work on letting go.
In Notting Hill Gate
sun brightens the stucco walls.
A new month begins.
Two sourdough loaves
cooling on a wire tray.
A short snow flurry.
Rushing out to squash
soaked to the skin on our bikes.
New balls and partners.
The poet Jacqueline Saphra invited me to take part in Accident & Emergence, a project that teams writers with visual artists. I am working with the printmaker Alan Cox. Yesterday we got together to talk about the collaboration.
Litho inks.
Alan lives and works in an old cabinet maker’s workshop in the heart of Hoxton. The studio is full of print machinery and paper.
All the ink, rollers and proofs reminded me of my first job as an editorial assistant at a reference publisher on Pentonville Road. I used to sign off camera-ready copy and occasionally visit printers who showed you hot metal presses. The publisher had a design studio where people cut and pasted up pages with hot wax onto gridded pages from great long galley proofs.
Upstairs in his kitchen Alan and I talked about how the project might take shape. Having read Open Notebooks Alan suggested I write out poems by hand.
I was worried that my handwriting might not be ‘good’ enough, but actually, I just remembered that ‘being good at English and having nice, legible handwriting’ was how I got that first job in publishing. That and knowing the marketing director…(some things never change).
Rather than do something where poem + picture = print I think I want to do a series of illustrated prints that explore one poem in depth. So each print might represent a verse, or a couple of lines and then use this method to reinterpret the form. Key phrases or ideas might surface. Each limited edition print will have the text then a line drawing overlaid, and Alan will hand colour each print at the end. So they’ll all be unique. I’m keen on the single poem book, but binding costs might be prohibitive. This way there’s a sense of continuation and perhaps it’s something that could be bound later…
I’ll be blogging the process and pasting up our work in progress. Stay tuned.
Having arrived in San Francisco not long ago I sat in a diner and wrote about my first impressions.
…I’m waiting for two things: one for the baby to arrive – today is my due date, and two, to work out how to upload my feet at dawn video entry that contains lots of stop frame feet images shot at dawn.
In the meantime I’m sorting through old notebooks and trying to find a stashed away but accessible place for them…I found this rough note along the way that I thought I might work more on.
The dark was so dark it had hands that pinned me to the flattened mattress and stuck a knee in my solar plexus. Outside starlight stiffened me like a starfish chucked in a bucket on a tumbledown pier. I did not struggle. A whole night where I tried not to tug at the edge of the madness. The Irish guy who had stayed an extra five days and still could not sleep at night. Days haunted by a purple cartoon of a motorbike accident, pages whipping open on it in the wind as sand blew round our ears and overtly muscular cats clawed at fish bones at our feet and spat hunger at each other.
Then this note from Anne Sexton:
‘Sometimes my doctors tell me I understand something in a poem that I haven’t integrated into my life . In fact I may be concealing it from myself, while revealing it to the readers.’
The feet at dawn and perhaps an incident in the dark, possibly connected. Meanwhile, I wait for the baby to make the journey from light to dark to light again.
Evening is the hardest skin we carry. I got this last line for The Weather in the Womb from an exercise that I adapted from the US National Poetry Month 30/30 challenge – writing 30 drafts in 30 days. I didn’t sign up, but I dabbled.
The original exercise replaces every noun from a pre-existing poem with the seventh noun that follows on in the dictionary. I didn’t have a dictionary, so decided to replace nouns consecutively from another poem. I think it’s a good way to generate a new line if you’re stuck, although of course, you benefit (or not, as the case may be) from the syntax of the original.
The original poem is Jane Hirshfield’s Hope and Love from Each Happiness Ringed by Lions . I don’t have permission so I include just an excerpt.
All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
if the solitary habit
is their way…
…I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry…
The ‘replacement’ text was verse 4 of Wild Idyll, by Mexican poet Manuel Jose Othon (1858-1906) translated by Samuel Beckett.
The salt and infinitely bitter plain,
Like a dead ocean’s dessicated bed,
And in the grey distance, by way of haven,
The precipitous crags, forsaken and stark.
On my rigid face the evening spreads,
like unguent, horrible obscurity,
and on your skin, burnt by the sun, the copper
and sepia of the wilderness’s rocks.
And in the hollow where eternal shadow,
beneath the cragy peaks’ enormous frown,
provides a bower and cavern for our love,
the lianas of your body twine
about the virile subugating trunk
in a vast palpitation of our lives.
The translated poem was this:
All salt
the blue plain
slept among the ocean.
I do not know the custom of beds,
do not know
if the solitary distance
is their way
or if he listened for
some missing crags
not knowing even
that was what he did
in the blowing
face in the dark.
I know that
evening is the hardest
skin we carry.
He slept with his long sun
folded, like a rock
put away.
The original ‘hope is the hardest love we carry’, with its confident use of abstract nouns, delivers more, but I liked ‘evening’ here a lot, particularly with ‘skin’: it fit with the summer that marries and the autumn with its head in the sink. The evening as death, and all that we carry with that certainity.
Karen McCarthy Woolf was born in London to an English mother and Jamaican father. Her poetry pamphlet The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She is also an editor.
Check her website for more.
