Albion Beatnik - مختارات من قصائد جديدة

Rough version

Uhibb herdha alshair: Apple Quarters - Claire Crowthorne.

Umm laa bibayt walakin filhaqiqa laylan. Laa lnur, wa laalqamar. Fabihiya lalaamal. Hiya baada anahum.

waladanha Fi baytahum. Alan yatakallumun wayalaabun.

Limaada alumm filhaqiqa?

Amut alumm?

Alshaair halwa wahajaza.

Alwaladan fibayt da'iman walumm filzalaam da'iman.

No font or GT on my phone, so I'm making myself do this anyway.

..

Neat version - big difference

احب هذه القصيدة : أرباع التفاح - كلاير كراوثر

الام لا فبيتها ولكن في حديقتها ليلا.

ليس هنك نور القمر.

لها لا الامل.

              وهي بعيد عن عائلتها

اولادها في بيتها

الان يتكلمون ويلعبون بدونها.

ولماذا الام في الحديقة؟

هل هي ميتة؟

  ....هذه القصيدة هلوة وحزنة.

بسبب الاولاد في البيت دائما والام دائما خارج في الظلام....

Translating one line of poetry a week on Facebook

This is turning into a bit of a nightmare. It is occupying too many comment boxes. There is so much to explain that it takes ages. I want to mention the invisible vowels and the endings. I don't want to miss out anything crucial. I want to explain all the things that I didn't have explained to me, clearly, simply and slowly.

Originally I wanted to spend an afternoon a week with someone friendly at a cafe doing this. My imagination said surely at least 10 people would jump at the chance!

What's worse, I have decided to not post short films again until December. This allows space for the tribute to Khalid Al Asaad of Palmyra links all November. It means that the group has gone all wordy. Will my new members be put off and get fed up?

Once in a while I need to write in English.

1.

اليوم اسمع الى الموسيقى واكتب في كتابي صغيرة.

ولا ساكتب باللغة  الانجليزية لان اريد ان ادرس.

اقرا قصص صغيرة باللغة العربية كل يوم.

 صديقتي بفايسبوك مدرستي جديدة وانا مدرستها ايضا.

Julie Whiting - Hitting this wall - Other walls - Names

Hitting this wall

It has taken weeks to realise what caused me to hit this particular wall. It was reading a poem by my friend Julie Whiting. It is one of a series, not yet published.

I had thought I'd be drinking my Lebanese coffee with lots of sugar in the sunshine and generally feeling at peace.

Instead I was doing two things.

Looking across the street, gazing through the lamp posts and cars, holding thoughts in my head.

Then I would be looking at the words, perhaps two at a time as I read across the lines. The moment I'd start doing this I would sense the air touching my arm, face, neck. At the same time I would have in my mind the images or facts from a few lines further back in my head.

After that I would shift to looking across the street again and would stop perceiving the air moving over me, why?

This happened every time I looked down then looked up again.

I don't want to give the game away by talking about the poem. You might get to read it one day. Read it fresh, without expecting it.

Other walls

Not wanting time to move forward. Stay still, move slowly, don't disappear. If I have to wait for things, then that's how it is.

Names 

The Waterstone's in the centre of Oxford has the best poetry section. I read the names on the spines. All these names I know. I can't read the collections or even one poem, but I can read the names.

Anthony Wilson - Lifesaving Poems

This is the last book I read before stopping for a while. Since I cannot take in poetry at all at the moment, I just read his prose comments on each writer.

Anthony Wilson set himself a task of writing out one poem from each writer who meant the most to him. He then explained why he made those choices on his blog several years ago.

Really the book is about Poetry Exhaustion. He knows of several varieties of it. Arriving for no reason. Arriving after being 'too ready to follow every whim', ie reading too much, sheer greediness. There must be others.

'all we really have as poets is the process' page 122

The book is stuffed with names of poets and collections, so it would be helpful for anyone at a loss to know what to read next.

My problem is that even a few words are too dense, I don't want them. The night sky and the full moon is enough. Music in the car and the Proms on Radio 3. All my ill friends.

Still poetried-out

but getting interesting flashes or revelations. Not in a religious cave type way, but in a connecting my dots helpful way.

so

... continue with doing pairs of poems while half ignoring the Proms

... go on more rainy walks, as long as I have one pair of dry shoes/boots I can go out there

... try doing a series on my most touchy and difficult subject. Well, which one? I must have half a dozen 'don't go there' subjects

... continue with my Friday Evenings, I have wanted to do this for absolute years, I needed a certain question a while back to help me realise this

... live in the now, ie replace light bulbs and go to Sainsburys to buy more light bulbs and bleach

... raise my eyes in astonishment at the fact that I am able to read the second piece in an Arabic text book from the 80's a neighbour has lent me for 2 years so far!, it has all sorts of combinations of letters which have foxed me in my other books, but this one has explanations :)

I was about to return it to her unread, but decided to give it one last chance. Since I couldn't follow the first piece, I tried the second one and it was so much clearer. Never be surprised by anything when learning/forgeting a language. There is more forgetting than remembering, that's my tip to everyone. How many rivulets of rain are needed to create a dip and then a tiny river? Lots.

12th Aug 2014 to 12th Aug 2015

That reading and dinner was the start of an era and the results are in today: print publication in Obsessed with Pipework 71 and selection for reading at Ekphrasis at the Ashmolean on 22nd Aug.

Many thanks to the lively souls who make up and stir up my world.

I need some outdoor medicine over the next few weeks, so I am prescribing myself many hours of being outdoors, as little reading as possible and much gazing at clouds and leaves.

It all started with a Facebook chat in the middle of winter

Where would we be without rhyme
Nonsense needs some sparkle sometime
It lightens the soul
And we all need a goal
To focus on while becoming sublime

Some of us think in limericks, some can't fall asleep for frustrating end rhymes, some of us go away from the thread for a week and come back to find a party underway.

Hall Writers' Forum

Non-conversation during the Proms

I am writing two poems a day, on facing pages of my notebook

Now I don't plan ahead, but think on the spot

Obviously I am hoping for significant insights, miracles

The music is the starting point, the reason for sitting in one place

Experiment with cutting right back, not poems as such, just ideas

Cutting too much leaves a heap of sawdust. An online friend and I are choppers, we laughed that my poem would be a haiku by lunchtime during one morning of editing. It's happened here.

F ..  Just 3 lines

1986 - print was made
1987 - I bought it
1988 - year of marriage

E .. Now 3 words per line

playing with blutac
suddenly tearful again
feeling my heartbeat

needing to understand
how our complexity
arose back then
...

Now go further, what would have never emerged without this pressure, D:

D ..

If I stand and look from the side I see the indentation of the printing process

This is all physical, transitory: the print, vases, knowledge of eras could all go

The knowledge would be rediscovered; new vases created; new museums built

All this knowledge is to comfort us, carriers of one combination of dna

My dna is merely a collection of many fragments, they are all out there in others

I think culture is a quirk which seems to help transmission of the dna

...

The piece A below is very long. Regard it as preparation. What did I really get from thinking about this picture of mine? First I got to B, then left that behind and got to C.

C .. I reacted to the even colours by thinking of the shadows left of the people incinerated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then I thought of a phrase in a book I was reading at the JR this afternoon, about the ghosts of knowledge left behind when someone dies. The book was 'Al Mutannabi Street Starts Here'.

B .. Calm, stillness, peace, contentment. Differences of design, but a permanent acceptance of each other. A space between them which is also beautiful, allowing each to breathe. A symbolic representation of a relationship.

...

A .. I spent a weekend at a family house after some weekends at hotels. The difference was that all the items in the house would have had a story behind them, even the strip of decorative edging along the top of the wall in the downstairs bathroom! Each of these stories would have involved people and particular events. What a thing, a household of stories.

I could take photos of things which have a story behind them, then tell the story.

(Imagine the photo)

This picture is of 2 vases or ewers - print by Betty Schlesinger

I bought it already framed for about £50, which was a bargain considering its size

I was the first person outside her family to buy a picture from her, so this was a significant sale

I knew her because I was renting a room in her parents' house in Durham

I had the money to buy a picture direct from the artist because I didn't drink, smoke, eat out, buy clothes...

I clearly wanted to spend what small amount I had on art and books even then and not on anything transitory

One day I happened to be in the V and A Museum and saw them in a cabinet in exactly the same relationship to each other as in my picture, so I realised that Betty must have stood there, just like me, and appreciated them enough to make such a large version of the cabinet. The cabinet was in the centre of that dark room.

The picture used to hang above our bed in the house in Hackney

I took a lovely photo of S sitting on the bed under it

It was above our bed in the house in Shillingford too, so T would have rolled on the bed as a baby under it

There is a lot of glass in a picture that big, now I wouldn't want so much glass anywhere near my head

Strangely my side of the bed was under the right hand side of the picture in both houses, even though the window was on opposite sides. Given that I prefer to be beside the open window at night I don't understand that, perhaps I needed to be by the door so I could get up and go to see to T in the night as a baby and toddler. We moved before he got any older. That overrides any need for fresh air doesn't it?

For many years the vases were not on display at the V and A. All I had was the print and the memory of them

Then the picture spent some years not being loved until I decided to rehang the hall way and up it went again

I happened to go to the V and A in London recently and spotted the 2 small ewers in exactly the same formation, but by the back wall of the Islamic Room this time around. Someone must have remembered how they were set out before and decided to recreate it. Or perhaps it is an instinctively correct and beautiful arrangement. Maybe they only have those 2 vases, so are not likely to do anything else with them.

Apparently they come from the 2 main empires, Ummayad and Abbasid. The U came first, then the A. Mind you, which vase came from which? More of my endless questions.

Since I have visited various places since then I now know they might be water jugs for the loo. That didn't get mentioned in the captions in the museum. I viewed a flat and saw exactly the same jug there on the floor in their bathroom :)

Owen Lowery on poetry, marriage, life

Imagine writing a poem to your husband or wife every single day, what a conversation that would be.

http://www.writeoutloud.net/public/blogentry.php?blogentryid=50162

I surf until I find the thing which stops me in my tracks, this is it.

Jo Bell on admitting that poetry matters to you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hojs12e1yRE

The Interpreter's House - Newspaper/Passive/2

Launch of issue 59 of The Interpreter's House

These names jumped out at me:

Andrey Ardern-Jones - (poem about plucking at the buttercups on the sheets)

Nancy Campbell - (poems about Greenland)

James Caruth - (poem about his grandfather, including the OT quotation)

Anas Hassan - The Front Row

Michelle D. Lauder - Lances

Mostly I looked carefully, but sometimes I looked at the floor to listen better.

With one poet I had to shut my eyes, to simply listen. Have I done that before? Who was it?

A friend and I took a very long way round to get back to our cars, so we could talk the more.

I needed to sit down on a low wall so I could tell her about the line I loved the best, God is my hiding place and about his gentle accent.

That phrase is from the OT, in translation of course, none of us know Hebrew, but it's that close to us here in English, bathed in the words of the Old Testament in all those different translations.

Newspaper/Passive/2 

Earlier H saw a photo of Princes Diana on the back of my very old Arabic newspaper. Amazingly he listened when I showed him the letters of 'Diana' and spoke the words al-amiira diiana, he and I repeated this again and again, getting the emphasis in the right and wrong places! I don't know how Diana is pronounced in Arabic, so was at sea there.

How exciting, I chanced on a couple of lines about the vowels u and i which make the passive. I had no expectation of actually learning it.  Then I saw a passive in a translated book title in a poetry prize review. Then... I realised that wulidtu uses exactly those vowels (I was born), so I half know it already :)

Taking no chances, I have booked for 2 different Arabic classes this autumn. They can't both fall through. One requires an assessment. Will I have to go and talk to them? I hope so.

Who's this then? - Thank you - Infrared Thermometer - Moon lit night

Another go at writing a 3rd person bio:

'Sarah Maitland Parks got started by the man at the write-your-own-poem Tube Train tent at Poetry Parnassus in London 2012 and by taking part in the Modern and Contemporary American Poetry MOOC run by the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. She studies Arabic, loves encouraging other poets, and blogs at globeonmytable.'

Thank you

First poetry workshop, of a sort: A young man sat me down on a bale of straw with a sheet of blank paper on a hard surface with a pencil attached with a piece of string.  There were simple instructions on how to write a first poem, so I looked at the Thames and wrote about my mixed up weekend.

First reading I attended: Readers and organisers at the Migrant Resource Centre, 3 blocks from where I grew up. Iraqi man who chatted with me, but then said nothing, not a single physical response to my question: 'How's your Arabic?' His heart may well have just fallen shattered from its sockets, or I might have sounded a bit rude? I will never know. 

A household with sons

Means coming into the kitchen at 10pm  and being lasered to see what temperature I am. After a bit I use it to see how warm it is outside by aiming the red beam out of the window, 26c. Then I get all excited and stand outside aiming it into the night sky, 1c and -5c.

Moon

I am always going out with bags of rubbish. H tells me, you just fucked off and left me. I say yes, I am busy doing housework. Really, I'd been standing at the gateway listening to the quietness, feeling the night air moving. It is the 1st, so one breath is all the meditation I can do tonight. He had come out to find me, but didn't want to know about the bright moon light.

Experiments with 4 lines

Heat wave

A bit like Hong Kong
minus the humidity
the typhoons
and the downpours

Summer dress

My pregnancy dress
way more sheer
than I realise
I still wear it

Crammer

I owe so much
to those focused classes
graded homework
no assemblies

I can't remember
any of the teachers
only the drug addict
opposite me in French

My poetry whatsit has woken up

11pm

It's hell trying to get to bed in poetry land
We are playing with words and memories
Party time with comments and likings

The waves keep on breaking

So, I take part in a project; meet someone at their event; meet their wife, family, friends, previous tutor; read their book; and then they die just 3 weeks later.

The libraries and museums still stand, everything is the same.

Is it horrifying or reassuring?

Is it anything at all?

I sent a beautiful card with 2 birds on a branch which would have reached them both before he died, before they were parted.

I consider being searched by eyesight across a room.

Will I do that to people, staring openly, with eyes like dinner plates, when I am older?

I need a tutor

Since I am closest, I'll have to pretend to know what to do. So week 1: Nice to meet you. Why do you need a tutor? Because I am not focusing clearly enough. Ah! That's normal. Where is your to do list? Somewhere. I've lost it. That's normal too. Could you go away and only come back once you have made a simple to do list to show me? Goodbye. That was quick!! She's a good tutor, has seen it all before and doesn't waste my time.

Contemporary French poets

From Claire Trevien's blog: http://clairetrevien.com/2014/05/04/on-finding-contemporary-francophone-poets/

Their names: Vénus Khoury–Ghata, Frankétienne and Tahar Ben Jelloun. Examples are in the link.

Kevin Reid - for-now - a sequence of poems and photographs

No introductions, work it out for yourself:

http://eyeosphere.com/for-now/