القصة والدي

والدي اسمه ايان من  لندن ولكن ولد في مدينة بلجراد عام ١٩٣٧. 

في الحرب العالم ٢ ذحب ابي وجدتي على مدينة نيو يورك, لان عمتها او خالتها تريد ان الاستقبل في شقتها.

ابي يحب البحر والتصوير والطابخ والتجارة والسياسة والمسافرة.

درس التاريخ في الجامعة اكسفورد, وبعد ذلك عمل في بنك ناتيونال وستمنستر في ثو سيتي في الوسط لندن.

...

There, that's the story about my father. I think I will email a couple of people and ask them to add their own bits of text in the comments boxes down there. 

I could move onto my 4 grandparents next, one at a time.

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?

V, W, X, Y, and Z - Alphabet of my mother

V - very keen on going out for little walks and a chat. Last time we had several expeditions from the house. One was to St George's Square, where we sat on a bench in the sun and I saw her eyes shut so gently, just like that, still sitting up, pretty much mid-sentence. Like a little dormouse needing rest. Smile.

W - wanting me to answer the phone, even though I am out driving for hours each day, go volunteering and doing errands, and sometimes shut out the world by sitting on the sofa watching a film.

X - extremely good at being tolerant, I have never been ticked off for being late, or for not visiting often enough or not phoning enough, etc.

Y - yoghurt with prunes! Her favourite pudding, one she didn't try to get us to eat.

Z - 'having a zizz' my parents' word for 'having a nap'.

Drawing parallels

How can my approach to Arabic be useful when thinking about poetry?

I do my corrections, line by line, page by page, no time pressure.
I do not attempt to read anything else.
I have 2 books to go back to, working through page by page, no time pressure.

I picked one book in English to read, no time pressure there either.

It is true that I have nibbled just one leaf from an entire tree, but any more would give me indigestion.
All my plans change and have to be restarted, it's just a fact.
I have given up expecting anything as such, whatever comes along is helpful.
I am not expecting to know a certain amount by a set date.

I do have a time scale based on my experience with French, 5 years to GCSE, 3 more years to A-level, 4 more years to degree level. That's from 2011 to 2024, academic years of course. ??I'll be 60?? ****
I know I can look up the texts offered for AS and pick the simplest ones... just filled up a basket!

...

So apply all that to poetry:

I can't read it all
I can't follow contemporary poetry in detail
I can't read more than a fraction of it

Make sure I nibble from a leaf I rate highest of all
Take my time to assess what I might want to study next
The more management meetings I hold with myself the better
Allow digestion time, let my mind settle

I am newer to poetry so I don't yet know how my mind works
Observe what works and what doesn't, that will guide me
Try paring what I do right down to the minimum
Be super focused, take time to think and make a new plan
Then relax and just follow my own plan, until things change

Take a lot of time away from it each day
Treat it like laundry, do exactly what needs to be done, then just go away

...

Fresh air
Family
Friends
Films
Fun

Yes, I need to talk to you again (my imaginary tutor)

hi
yes, hallo, what's up?
i am having different problems
ok, tell me then
this is like a doctor, doctor joke...
no, it's not, be serious, don't waste my time
ok, i am trying to read collections of poetry. ones written by people i know, or ones which get to the top of my pile
you do realise that reading a collection is a big ask
yes, that's what i am finding
so, what exactly is your problem?
i hadn't expected it to take so much time and energy
...?
or to be so draining to write about
...?
or to matter so much
...?
or to want to do it seriously
...?
or to see the summer getting hotter and my book stack getting higher too, not smaller
...?
how can i read enough if time just rushes on like this?
...?
how can i, i don't know
have a piece of this chocolate and sit in the garden with a glass of what i am having
you do know that all this is totally normal, it's your problem though and i can only listen
life is swift and can be chopped just like that
how are things with you and your to-do list
great, thanks, i revise it each day, and i have a what's going on section so i remind myself of the big events which are in the background at the moment..actually i have missed out a humdinger of a situation on that list, i will go and add that to my consciousness. it's surprisingly easy to deny that something is going on.
i'm glad it's working for you at the moment. have you finished now?
...yes, thanks, do i have to stop talking about it now?
well, let's pretend the timer has just gone beep, beep, beep and it's now time to be one person again and wander in the imaginary blog garden
...this is falling apart..
end

...

With apologies to Anthony Wilson and his conversations with his book. I haven't meant to copy what he is doing, but it does look like that. Oh well, go and read his blog, it's a mine of treasures.

O, P, Q, R, S, T, U - Alphabet of my Mother

O-juice, a childish name for orange juice.

P - that piano..I bought a very second-hand piano when I was around 12 with my birthday money. My mother had to spend way more than that to get the ancient, but beautiful piano moved from St George's Square, round the corner to our house and up the stairs. It had dark scrolled legs and brass candle holders, but not too many hammers! They'd fall off inside. Mmm, it smelt lovely when I opened the lid and made strange noises by reaching down to play with the metal strings!

Q - Queen, I don't know whether she has met the Queen. If she has, she is keeping quiet about it.

R - refusing to play cards with us point blank, though she let us use a lovely double set of French playing cards they must have been given as a wedding present. Or did she never realise that we had started to use those cards? They have come with me to this house.

S - the Studio at Ovington Square. How can she have managed with such a huge, cold space to live in? The kitchen was primitive. There was no wardrobe or washing machine. No storage. No freezer. A paraffin heater.

T - theatres, threads, tatting, toblerone...none of these have any resonance. Tricycle, tidbits, Tyndrum...nope. "Tink, tink" is what she says when clinking her spoon against something, but I don't really know what it means, just a cheerful expression.

U - Umbrella, up, uven! 'Useful' as in 'a useful bit of string' when handling something clearly useless and which I'd bin straight away.

اريد ان اقرا عن امك من فضلك

...

والدتي ولدت في فنتينبلو في جنوب مدينة بريس, عام ١٩٣٨. درست  اللغة الفرنسية, الروسية, اللاتينية. لا درست امي في جامعة ولكن عملت في لندن. 

كل اليوم تحب ان تقرا الجريدة وتشرب قهوة كبوجينو في مقهى صربي. 

...

So - that's my bit of writing about my mother. Please dive in and write something short about your own mother, in the comments box. If it's too long I will give up and not be able to read it. I need to read actual Arabic. 

Another time I will write something about my father.

...

Happy moment

- sitting on the floor in front of my Arabic bookshelves, deciding what to read next. I skipped over the hot potatoes, the heavies and the histories to choose a book I have wanted to read for ages:

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here - ed by Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi

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.

That moment - Project - London list

That moment

Chloe Dewe Matthews did her research and while doing it found herself with a project, it clarified itself in her mind. The moment of transition from not-knowing to knowing, to having no real plan to having one.

That is similar to the moment of finding something that needs to be written out, or when the words become tighter, more.

In fact there are many moments, they arise and they fade away again.

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-chloe-dewe-mathews

Project

I have decided on a long term cleaning project in my parents' kitchen. I sit there on the floor and scrub away with gloves, baby wipes and spray. At least I am making a difference and am not encroaching on anyone else's roles in the house.

It is surprisingly soothing to be able to focus on one task and to use my hands to be busy. There is only so much talking about my situation that I can deal with before I get bored with the sound of my own voice :)

List

Took a photo of a sculpture in the drawing room
Heard about a language swap app, HalloTalk
Chatted briefly in Arabic to the falafel people down the road
Learnt more Serbian: dravo = hallo, dobre dan = hallo, laka notch = good night, ie going upstairs,
Yosh malo and otichis malo both mean have a bit more, as the alcohol is sloshed into a glass!
My father looked confused when I asked him what the word for no was, he doesn't think there is one!!
Da = yes and dobre = good, both of which Grandmama Maitland used to say a lot while on the phone to Belgrade, listening to family news.
He also didn't think there was a word for good bye, Serbian Goodbyes mean standing in the hall chatting and laughing all over again, the party restarts at the exit!!
He told me he was in fact Serbian Orthodox and only became C of E in order to get into a school, well there's a surprise, I never knew those 2 facts.

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

No introductions, work it out for yourself:

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

Editing, redrafting, my own takes on it following the workshop: Wrangling Suggestions

These are my ideas:

Swap stanzas

Add an extra line in between each line, see what happens

Take phrases to make a 5/7/5 syllable haiku out of my poem, see what this leads to

Make a tiny 3x3 stanza which stands on its own, (3 words per line, 3 lines)

Cut one word from every line

Add two words into each line (I'm making this up as I go along btw)

Turn poem around, or change the speaker (I wrote one as my parents' dining table this afternoon :) )

Do something with the verbs, or nouns or adjectives...make them all start with the letter a or d??

Write a paragraph of prose, or a series of stand alone statements about what happened next; or how I feel now about the poem; or go all dreamy and let's-write-anything on it.

The poem is a door to something else, what might that be? Write that, then see if my mind finds something different in my original poem.

Feeling twins - Looking at bed linen - Alan Buckley

A pregnant woman invited me to feel her twins

I felt the instantly familiar sensation of the surface of the belly, with the baby's head moving in the waters a few millimeters away. I never thought I'd feel that again. I can't bring it to mind, it is a sensation my hand recognised and my primitive mind, but not my conscious mind. I have no words for it at all.

Bed Linen

Maybe it is ok to buy a soft mattress topper, fresh pillows and a super soft synthetic duvet. Create a nest of simple pleasures. Knowing how to do without these things is necessary, but I don't have to live in a war zone any more.

Memories of that lumpy because of springs mattress in Edinburgh are funny in retrospect. Using the end of the duvet as my pillow because there was no pillow, of any sort. Did that box room have a window onto the hallway? If it did, the light would have shone in at night, so it probably had no window at all. It was a big cupboard.

In Paris I used to trust that the cockroaches would not learn how to climb up the bed legs. I guessed the bed was far enough away from the kitchen area to not be attractive to them...all the time knowing they only came out in the dark, and that whenever I brought a friend back I'd keep her talking in the hall while I turned on the light and let them have time to scuttle away.. The horror.

Even here I had a wasps' nest in the wooden beam last summer. It emitted wasps day and night. I must be very calm to sleep amongst all that. They made their slow way to the window, but kept on stopping off to buzz round the light. In the dark they buzzed around the room, but I don't hear much, so slept through it all, though I kept the sheet right up to my nose and over my ear as a precaution.

Alan Buckley

We had a great workshop on redrafting poems. I love taking a knife to a sheet of words, gently teasing out exactly what I want out of it.

I made a haiku out of one. That could be a private entertainment and way of focusing right in on what any poem is saying to me. Or it would be like taking some phrases and making a simple display of them, from a much wider choice. No limits to the number of tiny poems I could make from the bigger source poem. With acknowledgements of course.

My mind goes back to the Ashmolean Museum with a particular cabinet in the basement I sit with every time I visit. I want to leave a small love letter to the curator for being so clear with the displays. All those choices made from a much bigger set of items, a sophisticated version of what I do at work now.

What else? We all went quiet when he read out the poem to his ex-girlfriend Katie, who died nearly 6 years ago. How many of us have had to experience that? I have always assumed a dignified and calm silence was the best way out of any ended relationship, but life might overtake that stance I suppose.

The poem on the whippets and running was wonderful. That silence came over us again for that one.