Crisis night and day

Not so fun. My mother was ill. Not very. I checked on her each hour for a while, then judged she was sleeping pretty soundly. I did not sleep soundly at all.

No clear thoughts, just an anxious jumble. Decided I would not drive anywhere on Friday. Fixed a taxi for H and cancelled my 2 appointments in Oxford. Slept and sweated and dozed for 6 hours in the day. Didn't help my mother at all.

Better evening. Dressed, went to Sainsbury's, called in at shop where I used to volunteer, felt more human again. Listened to some poetry videos, clicked to let someone to be a member of a Facebook group I am on, submitted 2 poems.

...

That was Thursday night and Friday daytime.

Sigh, not that sort of sigh, this sort..emotional, expressive, thankful, appreciative

This is why I spend so much time reading poetry blogs, going to festivals and more:

The woman at the workshop

Why does the word 'sigh' imply entirely the wrong thing? With all its words, English just fails,  and needs phrases instead, lengthy explanations. It has to be created freshly each time in order to actually say anything. How can anyone learn English?

page poems vs performance poems

I have just come across an interview with Carrie Etter. At the end of the article this topic comes up.

When I am at a reading I know I will never hear the poem again or read it, unless it gets published some time in the future. Often I don't know the name of the poet either, it whizzes past. Followed by many more.

Now I know I need to go up to the person I liked the most and get their name. Then I may see them again at another reading or workshop. Gradually I am getting to know the writers whose work I love the most.

Choosing a set is interesting. Do I make sure nothing is ever read out twice? Or do I read out my favourites? Do I test things out on live audiences, risking the not quite rightness of a piece? Do I dare to read out a piece I wouldn't want published, knowing it won't be recorded, risking that exposure, deciding it won't go any further, letting others enjoy it there and then, live but not in type?

The other thing is that I have to speak loudly, so a soft gentle poem can't be spoken in that way and also be heard. That means only direct, uncompromising poems can be read out across a big room.

Now I know that a writer produces many things which never get performed or printed. The more experimental and personal pieces. The ones which are more from themselves and which mean more to them than to anyone else. So the performance or the print version is just part of it.

Having my mother to stay: it feels like Christmas

The cat from next door has started to go straight to her bed in the mornings. I go in and see them both in the bed. Having a memory foam top layer was a good decision.

I move the tv cable from downstairs to upstairs and back again each night and morning. It is important to my mother to be able to see the woolly mammoth dissection programme. So I'm crawling around under my son's desk more than I ever have before to do the plugging in and unplugging.

Soon we will open up the old stationary boxes her mother kept the Christmas decorations in. They have been passed on to me. I think we can use an unused fireplace as the spot to install the crib. Maybe this year I can put logs and dry leaves from the garden around it. Every year it looks different.

I have not been able to spend Christmas with my parents for various excellent reasons for many years. We can have a mini one here instead. I even have a pudding with cherries in the middle.

She is on the sofa sleeping, with a duvet and the cat on top of her. A real version of family stuff going on in our own stable/house.

The American Sentence, try it out

Explanation of the American Sentence, an 11 syllable sentence, written across the page, no line breaks.

Interestingly, this is simply part of a Sapphic Stanza, 3 lines of 11 syllables, followed by a 5 syllable line.

Reading out someone else's poem

First time around I made a stanza break, not realising I should read on into the second stanza. Then I noticed that I made 2 grammatical changes, unable to stop myself.

The second time, I read over the stanza break and I read out the exact words. I was proud of myself for attending to my errors.

Pronounciation, never explained clearly in the books, I am having a moan

I have had to work this all out for myself. It was ages ago, but it is still something I find myself doing automatically part of the time and stumbling over at other times. Books! Why don't they just carefully explain these tricky things. The waw is sometimes an 'u' and sometimes a 'w'. Just because of the unwritten vowel immediately before it.

sura and suwar, صور ,صورة.

Also, the emphasis is on a particular vowel in each word. I have picked this up instinctively, but it would have been really helpful to find it maybe once or twice in the book. Ok, I have got it all by myself.

sUra and suwAr

How do I know? I just do. Probably from hearing it, but also from hearing other singular/plural combinations.

I need a drop-in: "Learning Arabic? So you will be needing coffee and a rant every week? I knew it. Well, here it is."

pic of modern stairs vs being swamped vs losing vocab

Being swamped

Everywhere I look I see things I should do
Things not in their right place

Books from years ago
Two black holes in the wall

Knitting I don't want to have time for
Collages I do want, but somewhere else

A radio which has terrible reception
Necklaces which are not my style

I want to shove it all out
like a determined little hamster
making her nest

...

To top it all I have lost piles of Arabic vocab. Where are they, all my adjectives on yellow cards? I have even looked in the boot of my car. They are having a little private party with the verbs on their red cards. I give up :)

Form - Sara Peters

"it's noodling and experimenting until you find a form that helps you generate what you want to say."

and

"something that helps you do it as well as you can."

Robert Pinsky on form, in a discussion which centred on a poem, not available online, called Abortion, by Sara Peters.

It is written in 6 stanzas, starting with just a one line stanza, increasing so that the last one has six lines.

I think this is the problem with the first poem I read on Sunday. I am too attached to the form I chose. I need to let that go and do a total rewriting session, which would mean arriving somewhere else entirely.

Book stack - Songs on the A34

This is my Arabic book stack which I cart around in the car. Too much. After the photo I split it into work I need to do for the lesson and 'other'. The book at the bottom will keep me busy for months. The children's book Al Diktatur will take a while, there are so many pages. I am only on the second page of the actual story. There is a film in the stack I can share around.

The second photo is of my notes on the poem I am trying to translate. It's a start. I need to look carefully at another poem written by the poet and at its translation into English. I also need to look carefully at the inspiration text in Arabic, but at least I know the English version extremely well. The Arabic will have slightly different connotations and shift my world around a bit. Then I will be more ready to decide on the meanings I will pick on for the translation. I have been peering at my dictionary with my glasses off so I can see every letter exactly, and at the printed poem. All so tiny, these little letters.

...

On my way back from the Woodstock Poetry Festival on the A34 I heard 2 lovely late night songs:

George Ezra

Snow Patrol

Then I switched off the radio so I could remember the titles and find them back at home. Not as easy as I expected.

Those 2 love poems which silenced us on Sunday afternoon

I'm half thinking that it is better to just hear these poems read out to you when you are least expecting them. So I won't give the poets' names or the poems' titles, in case you want to save yourself for those moments sometime in the future.

First one

Second one

Not knowing where a poem is going: 'Out, Out - ' Robert Frost

I am rattling through the Pinsky poetry class before it all disappears on around the 3rd December.

Many poems are linked to as examples of this and that.

This video from favoritepoem.org, an American project, shows a teacher talking about her work, then reading out this particular poem.

I needed the ocean at the end.

Woodstock Poetry Festival - This weekend in London

Woodstock Poetry Festival

Feel the entire room go still, holding their breath to a stunning love poem.
Enjoy the mystery of not knowing what each reading will contain.

Don't read out a poem which needs sharpening, people need my best.
Do read out a tight poem, even if it is almost too risky, for that murmur.

Clap extra loudly for the first time reader, welcome her in.
Look and listen to the reader being filmed, take in her voice.

...

My mother has just got out of the car to go back home, but we waved at her to come across to the Serbian cafe. I could see her do a bit of thinking, then turn the zimmer frame to make her way over here. We all took photos of each other and talked too loudly. My brother took this one and my father is just to my brother's right, next to my mother. I had lost my cards and wallet, so was down to a £1.15 small espresso. I tipped every bit of sugar into it since it was included in the price. Wolfed down the biscuit too.

The necklace was one I'd found on the tarmac in the rain. No one took it from the top of my car, where I put it to be found by the owner, so I decided to keep it. Wearing it in public near where I had found it was not a very clever thing to do though. I imagined someone walking past and thinking it was just like the one they'd lost... All I would have had to do was hand it over and say sorry.

...


This weekend in London

Carry the breakfast tray my father has made for my mother, put it on the bed.
Wait for the next request, don't rush the morning, let her sleep.

Stand outside the shower room, waiting for my mother to finish.
Make an improvised tube of toothpaste for her from a corner of a plastic bag.

Sit on the bed with her sharing a hot chocolate and a danish from the cafe.
Never mind about past dramas, just live in each half hour.

Sitting in my father's study - Putting a collection of poetry together

Up to the right there is a clock he has had for years. I can almost read the formal Arabic now: al bank yamani al isha' wa al taqmiir...The Yemen Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Hmm, I am not certain enough. I will have to put the English through Google translate, then look more closely at the calligraphy with the extra decorative dots and such.

The family tree goes from 1227 to 1965 when my younger brother was born. We are both little handwritten footnotes squeezed in at the bottom. We used to look at our names when this chart was on the wall of the landing at Ovington Square and we were free to just wander about in the house.

There's a sheep's skull up between some books near the ceiling. We found it on holiday in Scotland in the 70's. It used to be on the drawing room mantle piece for years. Now it has been here for years.

If I crane my neck to the left there is an old jam jar of what can only be potassium permanganate. Bright blue crystals. I am no longer surprised by anything in here.

This desk is a sea of papers, glasses, old calculator, cup with coins in it, nice fountain pens and...surprise: more Arabic on some sort of luggage labels hanging from the angle-poise lamp.

al afdaliya - something about pleasing?

'anatiya khasa - ? ?
darja awf - class ?
as-s'awdiya - the Saudi created thing, untranslatable.

ad-darajat alawla - first class

This is very hard. I can't read plane labels yet.

---

Jeffrey Levine on the thinking and reflecting work needed over a long period of time. Measured and clear, read this first.

Katrina Vandenberg on the passionate reasons for a collection, from the innuendo of the space between stanzas to the necessity of revealing your obsessions. This is a fantastic read.

There is no reason why I shouldn't play around with what I have written in 2014 and see what I can make of it all, for my own pleasure.

Tossing nearly everything overboard

Having abandoned nearly all the regular activities I used to have, I just focus on the key things:

Facebook
Blog
Email
Hall Writers' Forum, plus feedback I have promised to give
52 group on Facebook
plus a translation I have promised to do
and .... my Arabic classes with the home work

It is actually easier, because everything else goes into the bin or onto the big heap for another time.

A few years ago I told a friend that there was a great freedom in being at rock bottom. That was related to school, home education and autism/aspergers - or rather the uncomfortable clash between mainstream culture and what we actually needed.

This time it is a response to relatives in hospital, on top of the changes due to H going to school.

.....

If I look around this dining room, I can see 4 Madonnas.

I can also see the picture of my father which I must have taken 25 years ago because he looks about my age now. Also a recent one of my mother in a big hat, plus my favourite sculpture in the house, makes it sound as if I grew up in an art gallery, a Medici looking woman with a calm, steady demeanour. She used to be on the landing at Ovington Square, my grandparents' house.

I have booked my father's big screen for later, so I can relax by reading other people's poetry and making some comments.

Fire hazards

There are more levels of discomfort than I had imagined.

Just one smoke alarm, but I open the windows of the guest room at the top of the house.

Just one smoke alarm, the windows have been screwed shut, but the room next door has easily lifted sash window.

All of the above, but I will have my nearly immobile mother in the guest bed with me, how would I make that safe? I have asked my father to help, he says he will unscrew the window, so that will reassure me.

Anyway, it is just for her first night back at home. We might be telling each other ghost stories, or I might teach her some Arabic.

...

In fact she was just mobile enough to sit laughing watching tv with my father, so I left them to it and she was with him instead.

Oh my God! London - 1 Saturday

This is me being over the top, but London is just amazing.

---

I have lost the little notebook with my info about Saturday, which means that some poems of mine have gone awol too. Oh no. And good grief. That's one way of getting published.

---

 Lunch visit with my mother at the hospital.
So very lovely to be pushing her in the wheel chair and generally hanging around.

I buy an Arabic newspaper, I buy one a year at the moment!
My mother suggests I circle the words I do know on the front page.

Off to do some work, peering at this translation I am doing.
Cafe packed out, so I sat in the bookshop, Arthur Probsthain (again).

Chatted to woman near me, turns out she knows Jenny Lewis,
What a very small world, she has done the Praise workshop I am going to.

Back to see my mother, we all meet up there,
Because we are very noisy when we all get together we all go to cafe.

Debate plans and current situation, bit of a war cabinet at the cafe,
Then I decide we must have a family photo, someone kind takes a few for us.

Off to my evening event, Reuters News Oratorio
Drenched thoroughly due to making some bad decisions.

Roam around the church before it starts, can't settle down.
Try the upstairs balcony, but I am not one of the cast.

The church is huge and gracious, peeling walls, cracks, darkness above.
Warm crypt with cryptic route to loos, unusual.

Finally sit down with a group of people, we chat and chat.
The improvised - and - structured performance is how it is.

I sit and lean forwards, look here, look there.
People do their thing with guitars, cellos, other musical instruments.

Jude stands at the piano and does her thing.
What I adore is the seriousness and stance of people in the middle of their own worlds.

I just have to give my whole attention to what is happening,
Let it be and let it continue, witness it, be part of the essential audience.

Imagine a poetry reading with no listeners?
That is how important being the pew-bound crowd is.

There was burning afterwards, scrolls from a dream project in Olympic Year,
A version of the Wailing Wall for Bethnal Green.

The private and unread scrolls were tipped into the fire, a brazier in the rain.
We held and relit our candles while this all went on.

We wondered whether by now some of the wishes had come to pass:
The wishes for a baby, for a partner, health.

By the end our little group had refound itself on the steps of the church,
But we had to break it up and go home. Twitter/email details...all given.

What a wonderful day and evening.

Oh my God! London - 0 Friday

The tree trunks and branches are covered with white lights in front of the Natural History Museum.
Skating has started beneath it.

There are 2 shisha cafes in Beauchamp Place now. I will take my brother there as soon as I can.
Tomorrow I might be able to go to the World News Oratorio, Jude Montague is putting this on.

Time at my father's desktop, finished my first draft of comments on a sequence of poems.
A big responsibility, I need to make it concise and helpful for the rewriting phase.

Oh my God! London - 2 - Sunday

Eating my way through my father's sour dough loaf, this time with his own plum and ginger jam.
Tube to Warren Street, more comfortable working on my poem translation on a seat.

Find my mother on her bed, so cut her finger nails and do other beauty tasks.
Dr arrives, a Glaswegian :), full update, so many tests, grabbing this opportunity.

Adventure with a wheelchair, backwards, forwards, lifts, doors, even the shop.
My mother's idea of heaven: cafe facing buses, tube station, PEOPLE, LIFE, LONDON.....

She manages to eat a hard boiled egg without an eggcup.
I go back and forth like a yoyo; plates, coffee cup and a human in a wheelchair,
Eventually we are all at the same table.

Kisses, goodbyes, odd to know I won't be back until next Saturday. Why don't I live near my parents?

On my walk along South Bank I go the the end of a little pier. Smile at a toddler who is trying standing on a metal tying up point for ropes. Then she decides to sit on it. Whole series of discoveries for her and her patient mother in the sunshine.

Disgusting colour of Thames. Will it one day be something healthier? At least the froth that used to be there is gone.

Lean against the wall and sit on the floor of the Turbine Hall, watch the babies and toddlers with their kind parents.
Bit of writing, then pick out nouns from what I have done and write with those, then pick out verbs from that new set of lines.

I get distracted by the women's hairstyles, always hoping for inspiration.
Decide to get some half-processed merino wool to make primary colour hair wraps out of, based on simple, bold colours of the Richard Tuttle installation above my head.

Films, a set of 3, set in a light bulb factory in China, so many flames.
Other one is just grey on black with occasional people, even I give up on that one.

Find 'Zaytoun', a DVD, for my Arabic film club, plus board books for the babies in my life.

Millennium Bridge: I always think of the stranger who once walked at my pace, level with me, whether I sped up or slowed down. It is a long bridge, so after a while I just walked at my own pace while this mysterious man walked along too near me. I deliberately didn't look round, but I saw that he was all in black and perhaps 30ish as he went off down some steps.

Back to the house to see my father, kisses, goodbyes.
See the owner of the Serbian cafe opposite, rush over to share the news about my mother, more kisses, goodbyes.

As I drive along the Embankment in the dark towards the A4/M4 I enjoy the sparkling lights of the new flats on the other bank and the bright tree decorations. Really I just love all the lights at night. It's my city and I love seeing it again each time.

I listen to my music and find myself imagining having a huge row in the middle of Oxford with a complete stranger on the pavement because I have decided to open my car window and share my music with the world. Don't know why this arises. By the time my mind is back in a state of calm I have got to the Hogarth Roundabout. Strange.

Other people drive oddly tonight. Twice I find myself stuck behind a smart car being driven very slowly at 50mph by a male driver on his own. It is 8pm on a Sunday, perhaps they are both drunk and can't decide to stop to clear their heads. This is a new danger.

Find a set of photos of the event I was at yesterday, brings it all back. I am the one holding a candle while holding a bag of books with Arthur Probsthain on the front! And chatting. The photos don't show the fact that I am still damp from being drenched before the performance even started. Many of the performers had worn coats.

Home ed, being on the other side

I now see that, as with breastfeeding, once an era is over I simply move to the next era. That post-era era lasts the rest of my life. It will include offering perceptive comments on the process.

Quite soon my comments will be from more of a distance. Without care they could be unhelpful. So the most important thing is to be alert to what the person I am speaking to needs right now from all the things I could say.

The people who are in the midst of it can offer the practical comments and wry smiles. My view is from afterwards.

Those things which were 100% of my life are not so any more. That is unsettling to someone who is right in it. How could I not keep up with the latest research and legal confrontations? This is a generation gap of a non-family sort.

Urgent Poetry - Kim Hyesoon - Cathy Dreyer

Hi Cathy, you are in my blog post.

We met up for lunch and I came away with the name Kim Hyesoon. I have just had a google and hit an article with the stunning title of 'What is urgent poetry?' I then found a gory kitchen poem.

What is urgent poetry? I like this phrase because I used it myself in a poem I wrote a few weeks ago after a poetry experiment out in our garden during a massive thunder and lightning storm with no rain. See how different the comments are.

Gory kitchen poem by Kim Hyesoon The cries of the spoons....a glass of tangy star...a flock of birds crawled out of the hole...

Cathy edits The Stare's Nest with Judi Sutherland. Do submit work to them.

أحبك - Poem for my mother

والدتي في المستشفى

كنت في لندن

اسمك آن

أنا بعيد عنك

أنا أحبك جدا

غدا في لندن

I need to switch these lines around so they have some sort of pattern. The vowel markings don't show in type, so you have to know that there are lots of kasras, the 'i' sound.

أحبك

هو الليل

والدتي في المستشفى

غدا في لندن

اسمك آن

أنا بعيد عنك

أنا أحبك جدا

Ok, so now there are 2 stanzas, first lines have 2 words each, second and third lines both have 3. Title is addessed to my mother, first stanza is stating facts and second is addressing her again. Neatly, it has her name at the end of the first line of that second stanza. On another laptop I could add a word which looks exactly the same as her name, but which means 'now'. That could go in the same place but on the first stanza. But then it would ruin the 2,3,3 pattern. 

There, all done, for now = aan/ann, oh dear, an arabic/english pun. Now to call and see if she is on the table, under the knife.

100 word biography - Endlessly tearful - Hospital/Paramedics again

Biography

Ten lines of my handwriting. I have made several versions. All not right at all. I thought it would be easy. Writing in the 3rd person about myself is very odd. I wind up name dropping wildly and surely that's not the point. A blunt statement that I was into extended breastfeeding and then home education won't entice anyone, nor a comment that a house that is too big can be overwhelming. Hence the escape into poetry and online anything. I don't suppose anyone at a poetry reading wants to know about my struggles with Arabic either. Or autism and the school system here. My hinterland will have to stay where it is. I can put it here instead.

Tearful

What is up with me, age, youth? The songs at the assembly at H's school set me off, the little child fiddling with my hair from behind and kicking my chair in a meditative sort of way, all these songs I listen to, the voice of a Big Issue seller in Oxford looking up at me and saying 'pliz' a voice from a home land and a family totally zapped, a grandfather in Observatory Street just standing there while the younger ones did things with push chairs and car doors, the hair and hands of the artist in his films at the unattended basement showing of various incomprehensible and necessary films at Moma...

My grandmother cried a lot, I was told, when she was in her last nursing home in 2000.  I was at home here with H and T and was not talking about my miscarriage. I didn't tell her, maybe I should have, she would have been kind and would have been sad with me. What a total fool I was. Maybe she knew somehow?

I just watched a piece of film by someone I follow on Twitter, Eyad El-Baghdadi. He talked to another activist who said she never cried about all the horrors she saw in Syria, but finally cracked when he asked her something when they were both in a cafe in exile in KL, Malaysia.

Madonna Frozen, not that I'm into Madonna in a major way, but this is beautiful.

...and then...this happened...

Paramedics

While the para was here I helped my mother in law. She was 95% confused, so was turning taps on and off while I made soothing comments. A couple of times she giggled in her normal way and she said one or two usual things. I am hoovering, washing laundry and have washed some carpet. We now have the hamster. Back to hoovering and tidying next door. There is no perfect way of being on hand, just approximate attempts. How could I have caught this sooner? Things have to be a certain way before you can just make the 999 call. I didn't make the call myself, but said if my husband needed the para then call, irrespective of whether he thought his mother did or not. Now! Rather than at 3am.

-------
This is from last Friday/Saturday, the night of 24th/25th Oct.

Dolls = A whole can of worms

I stumbled on The Paris Review having a doll post day, then looked at some linked posts within the blog. What a big topic.

I had a stringless male puppet who I made to fall repeatedly and without any point at all down the front of my bookcase, what on earth does that imply? I'd save him, only for him to repeat the process. I think he had been Pinnochio once. I never played this game with my brother or any other girl... What on earth was I processing? And why not the stairs or plants on the patio, or up in the attic? He had a very limited life with me. He must have been moved on/binned by my mother, as I don't remember him going away.

Once I had my 2 children, sons, I saw some girls in a playground with their precious dolls, now dirty, clothes-less and with mangled hair. They were gaily sending them down a slide, all higgledy-piggledy, to land in a heap at the bottom. The girls were perfectly happy and were not doing anything bad to anyone else's dolls. They each sent their own one down the slippery slope again and again, then forgot them to laugh and lark about. The dolls were just abandoned until I suppose the girls picked them up again by an ankle or by the hair.

As a trainee breastfeeding counsellor I needed dolls for the new parents to practice various things with. I felt extremely odd buying one and choosing nice clean clothes for it. It was even worse walking along the street in Didcot holding it without a daughter next to me. There are very strict social rules around dolls. It was a relief when I moved on from all that and I forgot this precious clean doll somewhere, the one with the mobile head.

I had a collection of more second-hand looking dolls with biro on their faces, given to me by friends with daughters. They didn't cause me the angst the perfect new doll did. They just went in a big plastic bag, but the special one couldn't even be placed face down unless it seemed as if I wanted to kill her.... We never discussed all this in the tutorials, which is probably why it didn't work out for me. Not enough talking it all through.

Wow, I hadn't thought I'd get there with this post.

My father's Italian photos

Well, there are ghostly bits of the pictures on the wall opposite, so these photos show more than I planned. Never mind. I am waiting for the other 2 pictures to arrive by email from my phone/camera.

There, all done. Slightly off centre and with glare from the ceiling lights. The actual photos on my wall are peaceful to have around, a permanent background to this house. Portable though: 'Picture and book remain' as Yeats wrote. I'd include 'rugs' or 'carpets' because they mean a lot to me too.

Not happy with Solo (Library system in Oxford)

It has done it again, let me view interesting stuff (British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies), then told me I have no ability to access it. I get more satisfaction from Facebook. Bah humbug, academic institutions either kill off your interest or drive spikes into your heart so you get the bloody stuff some other way. I knew there was a catch. No such thing as a free library/lunch.

So........facebook has led me to this online journal, which does open when clicked, and provides English and Arabic, and what's more, translated by someone who has read to me in person. Much better than a cold system. The magazine is called 'Tulips', and has text as well as images.

On reflection, the benefit of not being able to access things via Solo is that I am not swamping myself further with too much to read. And I only make a supreme effort to get hold of something if I truly want it, so this situation is acting as a delaying mechanism for my naturally impetuous self.