A seasonal poem 'Hieroglyph Moth' from The Treekeeper's Tale

For years I'd kept a postcard of a tropical hieroglyph moth bought at the Natural History Museum in London. It gave me a particular feeling, those hieroglyph colours on its white furry wings:

As I was writing my last collection The Treekeeper's Tale and had already written two "moth" poems, 'Atlas Moth' and 'Moon Moths (in the Day Room)', I thought surely it's time for me to write that hieroglyph moth, so I did. The poem for me has some of the feeling I associate with the visual image, the colour language on those snow-wings, and the meaning is meant to be quite open-ended, though it makes me think of how I learnt English when I was seven, the newness of the language and the country (mid-Wales) I was having to adapt to from Paris. How hard I found it until someone gave me a picture dictionary. There were the English words below the pictures and after that it all came clear. The three moth poems are in The Treekeeper's Tale, along with other ice and snow poems 'Siberian Ice Maiden', 'Frozen Horses' and much else.

Hieroglyph Moth

When the white ermine wings

opened at night

like a book of frost

smoking in the dark,

I understood the colours of vowels

painted on moth fur –

the black, red, saffron signs

of a new language.

Antennae grew from my forehead,

my tongue was restless in its chrysalis.

I felt lift-off

as if my bones had melted.

I stepped out into the snow –

not even an exoskeleton to protect me

in this strange country.

Video of my poem What the Water Gave Me

Here's a video of me reading 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)' from my next collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, to be published by Seren in May 2010. This was filmed at the Sha'ar International Poetry Festival in Israel by Asher Gal last October at the Hebrew and Arabic Theatre in Jaffa. There are six poems in the collection based on Kahlo's painting of that name, interwoven throughout the book. I'll post photos from the festival and of Israel soon.

In Kahlo's painting she is lying in her bath surrounded by scenes from her life and paintings. This sixth of my WtWGM poems is more a version than a literal interpretation.

Poetry from Art reading at Tate Modern

Poetry from Art: a public reading by poets on the Tate Modern course. 

Monday 23rd November, 6.45 – 8.45

This is my fourth year of tutoring poetry writing courses at Tate Modern and this year the course has expanded to three terms. This autumn term will culminate in a reading open to the public. 25 poets have been working in the magical setting of Tate Modern, when the galleries were quiet and closed to the public. They wrote poems in response to works from the permanent collections (including Anselm Kiefer's Palm Sunday), from current exhibitions (John Baldessari: Pure Beauty and Pop Life: Art in a Material World) and past exhibitions. You are invited to hear their poems in the unique surroundings of Tate Modern’s autumn exhibition John Baldessari: Pure Beauty.

Level 4, Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Admission free, booking essential as seating is limited 

For tickets call 020 7887 8888 or book online http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/20562.htm

                                Palm Sunday by Anselm Kiefer (Energy & Process)

                         Hotel International by Tracey Emin

                 Brain Cloud by John Baldessari

                  Untitled by Maurizio Cattelan (Pop Life)

Interview in Horizon Review & Poetry at Tate Modern

Issue 3 of Horizon Review has just gone online and includes Michelle McGrane's interview with me, Dreams, Spirits and Visions. Michelle also has two fine poems featured from her forthcoming collection The Suitable Girl which I highly recommend.

Last night was the first session of my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern. Twenty-seven of us sat in Anselm Kiefer's installation 'Palm Sunday' in the Energy & Process collection and soaked up the uprooted palm tree and its thirty-nine vitrines. I can gaze and gaze into these and always see new things among the ghostly plants and pods bursting from cracked clay, smoke, earth, ash, ladders, flying clothes and scratched words. I handed out a hat containing lines from Paul Celan's poems (huge influence on Kiefer), carefully selected but picked at random to incorporate in a 5 minute quatrain, then asked everyone to introduce themselves by offering the group a gift line from their resulting quatrains. These were poems in themselves. After discussion of Celan's techniques (twisting language to say the unsayable, in his case the aftermath of the holocaust), everyone had ten minutes in which to respond to the installation in a poem, aided by selections from the list of gift lines.

The results were impressive and rather moving, as one by one, each participant stood in front of 'Palm Sunday' and read out their first drafts. The course is launched! I've been planning it for months and thrilled with the results so far, but it never fails to amaze me how people can write to order in such a short time. Perhaps pressure is the key. Next week we are in the John Baldessari: Pure Beauty exhibition and I'm plotting writing games for his extraordinary new ocean installation 'Brain/Cloud', if Tate confirm we can keep the AV on that evening. This is also where we will hold the public reading at the end of the course on November 23rd. Book early if you'd like to come and hear the poems written on the course, entry is free but seating limited.

I've encouraged the poets to email me their works in progress but guess I'll have to respond on the hoof as next Tuesday I'm off to Tel Aviv to take part in the ninth Sha'ar International Poetry Festival, and I get back on Sunday night, just before Week 3 in the Pop Life exhibition, and after that I'm off to do lots of things in the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, so an exciting time ahead.

Tezcatlipoca & Guest blog for Bernardine Evaristo

This week I'm delighted to be a guest on Bernardine Evaristo's blog. Bernardine's latest novel Blonde Roots made the Orange Prize Longlist, then was shortlisted for the Orange Youth Panel Award, which it won. My guest blog is titled A Suitcase-full of Hummingbirds and explores the relationship between images and my poems and how I draw on my training as an artist in my poetry. This image from my guest post of a suitcase-full of hummingbirds in pyjamas prompted me to write my poem 'The Strait-Jackets' in The Zoo Father.




One source of imagery for me has been Mexico, both Frida Kahlo and Aztec mythology. I love this animation of Tezcatlipoca the Aztec night jaguar/ trickster god, twin to the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. I used Aztec mythology in my third collection The Huntress, all about my mother who suffered from severe mental illness and seemed to me as a child and teenager to be a powerful trickster, always changing faces, some quite terrifying. However, the fire/ice jaguar in this animation is a beautiful creature, and I hold on to the idea that there was some beauty within her under the terror.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Anselm Kiefer

I'm researching for my Poetry from Art course which starts at Tate Modern on 19th October, enthralled as always by some of the art, and hoping we can start in the Palm Sunday room by the German artist Anselm Kiefer which is in the permanent display Energy & Process on Level 5. There's not that much space in the Kiefer room and the group's large – 26 poets plus one Tate staff and myself. If they let us work in there I guess we'll set the chairs in two rows against the back wall, facing the installation. If we're not allowed then we could work in the room next door and walk in to write.

Anselm Kiefer is a deep-thinking, spiritual artist, and will be a stark contrast to the Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibition where we'll be working in later weeks, and to the ironic cool of John Baldessari. But in each show there are pieces I am getting very excited about working with. For now, I'll leave these images to speak for themselves, but am collecting words towards writing about them, and more importantly, towards fun ways for the class to write about them. But whenever I peer into those vitrines behind the powerful palm presence, I see new misty shapes emerge.

For our last session, on Monday 23rd November, we'll be giving a public reading of poems written during this and previous courses, in the Pure Beauty: John Baldessari show on level 4, 6.45 to 8.45pm. Details will soon be up on the Tate Modern website, (click on Talks & Discussions and Courses & Workshops). If you'd like to come, early booking is essential as space is limited . Entry is free.

King's Lynn Poetry Festival

I arrived lunchtime at King's Lynn rail station after a lightning journey catching up with Moniza Alvi and Susan Wicks, to the traditional champagne reception on the platform. After I made a dash to the station loo (no working loos on the train) we refreshed ourselves courtesy of the always-welcoming-and-smiling festival director Tony Ellis. This was my second time at King's Lynn. Last time, I have a faint recollection there was also a bagpipe player. In the photo, from left to right: Richard McKane, Susan Wicks, John Hartley Williams, Annie Freud, Kit Wright, Moniza Alvi, PP, and Larissa Miller from Moscow. Also on the platform to meet us were our assorted hosts who would offer up their houses for lodging and ferry us about, and a group of volunteers who help Tony run the festival. I met my hosts, Maryanna and Roger, and later their dog Samba (a cross between a border collie and black Alsation) and their two hens Lupin and Clover. They warned me as I'd answered positive to "dog tolerant" that I'd drawn the short straw, but the moment I entered their home I felt thoroughly at ease and long-strawed. Roger would later show me his unique cabinet of antique bird eggs. But first, lunch at the director's house.

More champagne, which I declined, as my school visit loomed. Rob Elwes, who I'd already met on Twitter, attempted to whisk me away as I fumbled for the note where important info was jotted, such as name of school and teacher contact. By now Tony's house was heaving so we battled through the kitchen and made our escape, since my school was a fair distance, the exact whereabouts neither of us were entirely sure of, nor the age group, which turned out to be 13-year-olds. Quick flick through books for okay-poems-for-any-age en route. But I was prepared for all eventualities and had xeroxed pics to circulate with poems. The class's burning question was "Miss, are you famous?" And their answer to my question: "How many modern poets have you heard of?" was "Only you miss" – a sobering thought. One boy though has ambitions to become a poet and most had written some poems in class.

I kicked off with 'The Strait-Jackets', showed them the photo that sparked it (40 hummingbirds in a suitcase) and we discussed how I made the poem, what a metaphor was (silence), simile (they knew), and so on. Where were my rhymes, they wondered. The story of Ruschi transporting the birds by suitcase for air travel had them hooked. Further chat about travels, China, the Great Wall (ooh!), and did they know what "primeval" meant? "Of course! We've seen it on telly!" One mile high waterfalls, 2,000 feet high trees (how high is that Miss? Umm...) and out came my pics of atlas moths, in real-time eye-popping size so we knew what we were talking. Magical silence.


I settled into my lodgings, and dashed to the evening reading – Susan Wicks, who was here as stunningly original French poet Valérie Rouzeau's translator (but Valerie had gastric flu so didn't make it) read her translations and her own exquisite poems, Moniza (still recovering from gastric flu but luminous – 'Mermaid', 'Europa' and 'How the World Split in Two' never fail to thrill anew), and Michael Hulse who read the best poem about the grinding and creation of pigments I've ever heard.

It's one of those festivals where all the poets attend all each others' readings, so I had the pleasure of a first acquaintance with a number of new-to-me voices – Annie Freud (wow), Basque poet Eli Tolaretxipi, and one of my co-readers on Saturday afternoon, Lachlan Mackinnon. Must get that poem by Kit Wright about Roy Orbinson's 'Only the Lonely', just thinking of it has me giggling "not only the lonely, Roy, but simply the pimply, nearly the bleary and lastly the ghastly." I've also come away with an image which won't dislodge of a polar bear in John Hartley Williams' living-room during his Dove Cottage residency, and a very absurd dialogue with said bear a là Ionesco theatre. Two morning panel discussions (one of which was hijacked for a celebration as this is the 25th year of this splendid festival and Michael Hulse had secretly published an anthology for Tony with contributions from us all), and after-reading parties, have mingled in the imagination. I do remember a serious discussion with Michael about God, atheism and aliens in the early hours of Saturday morning and vivid recollections of his nine-week-old daughter Agnes.

My next festival is Warwick Words, where I'll be reading in the Kozi Bar at 11am on Sunday 4 October. After that I go to Israel's Sha'ar International Poetry Festival, and then Aldeburgh, and in between there's classes in Tate Modern with 26 writers, bang in the middle of the Pop Life and John Baldessari new shows.

Bill Viola's video installations & The Zoo Father

Bill Viola is one of my favourite artists. I have a video by him called The Passing, and when I held Poetry School workshops in my house back in 1998, we all huddled around my small tv to watch it. The students had never seen anything like it before. The video was about his dying mother and even has her last breath, amplified. The first work of his I saw was 'Room for St John of the Cross'. It led me to read St John of the Cross's poems and the writings of St Theresa of Avila – two Spanish mystics.


This is a still from 'Five Angels for the New Millennium'. Another multi-video installation is called 'Ocean Without A Shore.' These remind me of a dream I had before I wrote my second collection The Zoo Father. I dreamt of returning to the base of Angel Falls, into a kind of church (Viola's 'The Messenger' was installed in Durham Cathedral). The spray of the immense falls resembled whirling bridal lace, but gradually I realised there was a gigantic face in the tumbling sprays – my father's. I hadn't seen him for thirty-five years and never expected to hear from him again, but a few days after this dream I received a letter summoning me to visit him in Paris. And that's how I started writing this collection, with the 'zoo' father both in Paris and in the Amazonian Lost World.


Room for St John of the Cross



This is 'The Messenger'. A naked man slowly floats towards the surface of a water wall. His face breaks through the wall and he lets out a long-held breath, takes a deep breath then floats back into the blue-black distance. This had particular resonance for me as my father was dying of emphysema, and could only breathe with the help of supplementary oxygen from an oxygen recycler machine. He found talking hard, yet I wanted him to tell me about his life. I am attempting to write an expanded fiction account of The Zoo Father story in my first novel.

Cover art of The Treekeeper's Tale

This is the cover image of my latest poetry collection The Treekeeper's Tale. I made the artwork while I was in the Sculpture School at the Royal College of Art in 1986. It was called 'Wound' then, but I've since renamed it 'Treekeeper'. It was one of the sculptures in my MA degree show. The studios were in the sheds behind the Natural History Museum in Kensington Gore, and a few of the birdskulls came from the skips, though most were found on beaches, woods, or bought. The monkey skull was stolen during the show. There was another student who we called the Bone King and he and I used to swap finds. The face is a lifecast, cast into fibreglass with white polyester resin filling. The relief was mainly white with green, rose and red tints.

I loved working in my studio, and the way artists can be in their own created worlds. I miss that about being a poet – now that I have an 'office' rather than my world made physical. But there are compensations, and ultimately metaphor can become a realer world to me than one made of stuff. A poem is a house and each stanza is a room. It has always been important for me to be able to make an alternative world I can live in. This world may be located faraway, so my poems are often situated in Venezuela, Nepal or Kazakhstan. Sometimes they are both here (where I live or have lived) and there, the two superimposed.

In The Treekeeper's Tale those giant coast redwood habitats might be in zoos, or in a glasshouse at Kew Gardens. Many of the poems in the book are about 2,000-year-old people, creatures, or excavated museum objects (horses in permafrost, ice-preserved mummies, a Galilean fishing boat), so this transporting of locales is also on a temporal plane, from the deep past. The redwood trees are 2,000 years old and 2,000 feet high. Someone's sculptures? Hermits lived in the lightning-struck ones. They lived inside the sculptures. It might be uncomfortable, damp, but the trunk could be a kind of exoskeleton, protecting the inhabitant.

What would it be like to be half human half tree? Perhaps that's what I was after in my sculpture. It was only a small piece (3' diameter). I was never satisfied with my artworks but it had a quietness, a listening-ness. When I lived with my mother as a teenager I taught myself to vanish into myself, to be there but not be there, for safety. So I have a fascination with altered states and how to travel faraway into yourself yet out of yourself. I wonder what other people see in this piece and in the object-poems?

'Two Golden Eagles' from The Treekeeper's Tale

This is Saykhan the golden eagle in the Tien Shan mountains near Almaty. He was heavy! My nose is red because it's minus 20 degrees. I was in Kazakhstan in January 2008 tutoring 28 Kazakh and Uzbek writers with Tobias Hill for the British Council's New Silk Road project, and on our day off I asked if we could go up into the mountains which tantalised from my hotel window. And there he was. For 200 tenge (80p) we could hold him for a pic. These creatures catch wolves! I tried to write a poem about what this felt like, in my latest book The Treekeeper's Tale, and the closest I got was to describe it as like falling in love, that shock of the other, with all the wonder and fear intermixed. The poem is in two parts:

Two Golden Eagles

Saykhan

Holding Saykhan is unexpected as meeting you
after all those years on my own.
Here in the Tien Shan where it’s minus twenty degrees,
with this sudden weight on my gauntlet,
I peer into tawny eyes, see the wolves he’s killed,
swooping onto their napes to knock them down.
If he draws blood he’ll attack but the glove
protects me from his talons and he bears
those jesses that bind him to me.
If he took off he’d lift me with him –
the way we rise into sheer air above the rolling steppe of our bed,
our wing-feathers icicles
while we glide through snow’s embroidered sheets,
our faces cataracts of light.


Kukai

This time it’s you holding a female golden eagle
and I’m her, gripping your hand through the gauntlet,
my hood pulled off as if for the hunt.
You’ve propped me on your arm for a photo
where we’ll always be together.
You’ve noted my beak, my two-inch claws,
how piercing my eyesight is,
and how at home I am in this biting cold.
For the moment I trust you, even when
your fingers feel my wings, so that although tethered,
I start flying in my mind.
And when you follow on horseback to claim
my quarry, I let you believe it’s yours.
I wait until you allow me to feed.



Yes, the female golden eagle is larger and is the one used for wolf hunts. This photo is of the poet Dauren Kassenov who attended my workshops in Almaty and here he's at Nauryz, the Kazakh New Year festival in March, with his daughter, holding a female eagle. He had just taken part in the yearly traditional poetry battles with audiences of 25,000. Sounds like the Eisteddfod, which I used to sing in when I was a child, only much harder because these 'battles' are improvised. Two poets go on stage and have to answer each other's improvised poems. The audience decides who wins. Even scarier than holding an eagle!

The Lost World Part Three

This is Autana Tepui in Venezuela's Lost World, a plateau sacred to the Pemons who consider it the stump of their tree of life. It's pierced by a cave-tunnel through which the sun's rays shine. I went to the Lost World in 1993 and 1995 and wish I could go back. So here I am instead trawling the web for images.

It's hard to think that I climbed Mount Roraima below in 1995. There's a 'ramp' I scrambled up on the other side. It was really hard for me to do this but once I'd dreamt of being up there sitting over the edge with my legs dangling into space I had to do it.



I flew low over the great plateau Auyantepuy once, it took ages as it's so vast. I think it's the closest I've come to visiting another planet, the terrain was so otherworldly, with its criss cross of canyons and gullies, its quartz valleys and cities of columns, its jasper creeks. I often dream I'm living up there and am so sorry to wake up and find I'm not.



So what was it like on one of those sky-islands? I felt like an intruder. The first thing that hits you is the quiet, and the way your voice bounces off the prehistoric rock formations then seems to echo out into space over the Gran Sabana and riverine jungles below, a line of cliff-bordered plateaus rising out of the mist. The surface is made up of the oldest rocks on the earth, eroded and twisted into monsters. There's cushions of carnivorous plants bordered by pink quartz sand, and rockpools inside rockpools, concentric circles of them. I bathed in one alone, away from the group, while they went searching for the oilbird cave, led by Pemon guides who got lost in the labyrinths and quagmires and had to return as the mother of all storms started up. Night was spent in 'El Hotel', tents pitched under an overhang, but it was impossible to sleep with the dinosaurs running rampage (their roars and lightning tongues). According to the Pemon we had talked too loudly on their 'Mother of all Waters' and stirred up the local dragon.

I've tried to write about the experience in my first collection Heart of a Deer (Enitharmon, 1998) which is out of print though there are some copies on amazon.com and at the Poetry Book Society. As usual I'm not satisfied with the results. I'm writing a novel now, part set in Paris, part in the Lost World. Which has plunged me back into this hard-to-capture-in-words landscape.

The International Literary Quarterly editor interviewed

The prestigious webzine The International Literary Quarterly has only published seven issues but has already established itself as a leading literary journal. It was founded by editor Peter Robertson and has a dazzling panel of consulting editors. Contributors have included Meena Alexander, George Szirtes, Irina Ratushinskaya, Gao Xingjian, W.N. Herbert, Mimi Khalvati and Marina Warner. Each issue features a guest artist, among these the fabulous Tom Phillips. Peter generously published five of my poems from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo in Issue 6 .

Peter Robertson was born in Glasgow and lives in London and Buenos Aires, having spent more than ten years in Latin America. He has published fiction, literary translation of Spanish and French authors, and critical articles. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2007, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2008. He launched The International Literary Quarterly http://www.interlitq.org in November 2007. Here he answers some questions about this exciting new publication and the context from which it has sprung.


Why did you start The International Literary Quarterly?

All of my decisions are dictated by instinct. I wanted to create an international review, a literary broad church that would shun any idea of ethnocentricity, that would carry both creative writing and more academic writing, that would break down distinctions I consider to be artificial, for example by bringing literature and the plastic arts closer together, and that would be a vehicle that would eventually publish literature in many different languages.

What did you edit before and why?

Before I founded Interlitq, I was an Associate Editor of Mad Hatters’ Review, a New-York based webzine. In that capacity, I conceived and edited two features for MHR: “Viva Caledonia”, a feature that showcased work by many Scottish writers alongside artwork by Calum Colvin; and the first part of “Eclectic England”. I had planned to do a second part for EE but, for a number of reasons, I decided to branch out alone and start my own literary review. Having pulled off the two features I mentioned, I believed I could be successful in such a venture. I had a clear vision of what I wanted a literary review to be and set about making it become a reality.

Why did you decide to edit an online magazine?

Because the Internet is not the future but is, in fact, the present. Its massive reach is such an advantage. Potentially, the review could come to be read by vast numbers. One of our priorities as I speak is to build up our readership which is increasing every day. My overriding objective is to ensure that the best literature is made available to an ever greater percentage of the reading public all over the world. It is heartening to know that, if we publish, say, a story in the review, it could be read by many thousands while, in many paper publications, it would only be read by hundreds. I know that there are those dissenting voices who still find Internet publication anathema but it seems to me that such a position is more and more out of touch.

How did Interlitq get so high quality and so international so quickly?

Thank you for your kind words, Pascale. I have worked very hard and continue to do so. As I mentioned before, the review’s particular brief was to be international and I approached authors, who might prove to be potential contributors, from many different continents. Also, once Issue 8 comes out in August, the review will have over sixty distinguished Consulting Editors and, once again, these editors reflect a rich diversity of different cultures. With regard to quality, that is what I have always aimed for and, I assure you, our standard will not go down.

What are you after in submissions?

Fluid, intelligent, original and trenchant writing, whether this be prose, poetry or literary criticism.

What is life like in Buenos Aires and can you tell me more about the literary life there?

After ten years here I doubt I can be objective as I guess I’m quite “Argentinized”. It’s a process that’s bound to happen whether one wants it to or not. For all his remorseless intelligence, and limpid yet strenuous prose, I think that Naipaul is slightly severe when he says, with regard to Argentina, in his essay “The Return of Eva Peron”, “if you can live there you can live anywhere”. Mind you, I can see what he is getting at as this country is very far from being stable, either in political or economic terms, and there is still a tendency to authoritarianism and machismo. I believe that anyone spending a significant amount of time here will see beyond the decadent facades of the once-elegant avenues and perceive that this is not a diluted European culture but essentially a Latin American country. On this note, and taking certain of these considerations into account, Huntington, in his magisterial book, “The Clash of Civilizations”, does not consider Argentina to be “the West”.

With regard to literary life here, while I do know some Argentine writers, it is strangely the case that my links with Chile happen to be much stronger. I visit Chile, a country I feel passionately about, whenever I can, and I will in fact be back there soon, and, as I say, I know a great many writers and publishers there. As it happens, I have been working as the Translations Editor on an anthology of Chilean literature, to be edited by Marjorie Agosín, and which I expect will be published sometime in 2010. I would hazard that, at least as far as prose is concerned, in general terms Chilean writing is more precise and concrete, less concerned with abstraction and the labyrinthine. I wonder if this is due to the fact that, in cultural terms, English influence is stronger in Chile whereas in Argentina French aesthetic models are held up as the ideal.

Poems from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo

My next collection is called What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, to be published by Seren in May 2010. I've more or less finished it, just tinkering with a few last poems and editing the manuscript. It's taken me ten years to write, around other collections, and I've really enjoyed it. I trained as a visual artist so it's been like slipping into that previous alter-ego. Her range is quite narrow, mainly self-portraits, and that's been a challenge I've relished, while being aware of needing to make enough variety in the poems so they are hopefully distinct from each other. A few of the poems are fairly close representations of the paintings but most I think of as versions or parallels (as if I were painting my own after hers), and some of her paintings are represented by several poems. There are six versions of the title poem 'What the Water Gave Me'.

I'm sometimes asked why I write about Frida and how it all started. When I was at the Royal College of Art studying for my sculpture MA, a visiting Fellow said my studio reminded him of the Blue House and had I seen it, did I know her work. I didn't really, just one or two paintings. We weren't taught about women artists then, but I investigated her and felt an affinity. I'd been making lifesize transparent women out of epoxy resin and fibreglass and clear embedding resin casts of women with thorns and birds embedded inside them, iridescent metallic beetles on their wombs.

After I wrote The Zoo Father (my second collection) I wanted to write poems about sex but couldn't see how to. Then I looked at her painting 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird' and that's what I started to do, in her voice, except the sex was merged with the accident she had suffered as a teenager when a tramcar crashed into her bus and a handrail pierced her back and exited through her vagina. That accident pierced her whole life. I went to the Blue House several times and wrote 14 poems which are in The Wounded Deer published by Smith Doorstop in 2005. I didn't know about the planned Frida Kahlo exhibition at Tate Modern then but was invited to do a launch reading in the gallery which was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, reading next to her paintings.

I didn't expect to write any more Frida poems but a few years later another cluster emerged, then more. I thought I'd be lucky to have thirty but now there are around fifty. Like The Zoo Father, the poems came in twos or threes a day when they came. One of my favourite paintings is 'The Wounded Deer' or 'The Little Deer'.




I've written two poems about this. The first 'The Wounded Deer', which is the title poem of my pamphlet, is a fairly close interpretation of the painting:


The Wounded Deer

I have a woman’s face
but I’m a little stag,
because I had the balls
to come this far into the forest,
to where the trees are broken.
The nine points of my antlers
have battled
with the nine arrows in my hide.

I can hear the bone-saw
in the ocean on the horizon.
I emerged from the waters
of the Hospital for Special Surgery.
It had deep blue under-rooms.

And once, when I opened my eyes
too quickly after the graft,
I could see right through
all the glass ceilings,
up to where lightning forked
across the New York sky
like the antlers of sky-deer,
rain arrowing the herd.

Small and dainty as I am
I escaped into this canvas,
where I look back at you
in your steel corset, painting
the last splash on my hoof.

But the later poem, 'The Little Deer' plays more with the deer as nahual (Aztec alter ego) idea I think. I wrote it very fast one evening just as I was getting up from my chair and drinking a glass of wine before cooking (perhaps the only poem I've written under the influence!). The first lines came into my head with a certain feeling about wanting to write a poem about all illness. It's in the current issue of Poetry Review which is a fantastic issue full of juicy poems so I'm very pleased to see it there.


The Little Deer

Little deer, I’ve stuffed all the world’s diseases inside you.
Your veins are thorns

and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods
of your organs.

As for your spine, those cirrus-thin vertebrae
evaporate when the sun comes out.

Little deer too delicate for daylight,
your coat of hailstones is an icepack on my fever.

Are you thirsty?
Rest your muzzle against the wardrobe mirror

and drink my reflection –
the room pools and rivers about us

but no one comes
to stop my bed from sliding down your throat.

The Bird Artists by Laurie Byro

The Bird Artists is Laurie Byro's first chapbook, and I urge you to buy it. She received both 2nd and 3rd place for the 2008-9 IBPC Poems of the Year. She lives in New Jersey and I first encountered her work when I judged the IBPC competition for three consecutive months and she won (anonymously) twice, with 'Wolf Dreams' and then the title poem 'The Bird Artists'. You can order it online at: http://lauriebyro.com

"In this spellbinding debut, Laurie Byro creates a magical world of rituals against harm. Precisely textured, transformative and feral, The Bird Artists has the force of myth and folklore but is firmly anchored in the quotidian. These richly wrought poems linger on and draw me back to marvel at their compact power."

That's what I wrote on the back cover. Mark Doty wrote of 'Wolf Dreams' when it won a prize he judged: "Appealing sexy and strange, it's a pleasure to read these images of transformation, which create a vivid physical sense of an animal body."

Wolf Dreams

I wasn’t sure what he wanted of me; the ice
in winter birches had made the forest slouch
into spring. All that winter I peeled

and sucked papery bark for the sweet taste.
I recognized him from his red tongue,
the furtive runs when I entered his dream

and we crawled along the forest floor, repenting
the dark. I had nothing to bargain with,
no deal to make him human. The night

was filled with briars and salt. In the summer
the air became thick with honeysuckle, slick
with mating. Beetles droned in messy beds

of clover. We slunk along, weeds stroking
my belly. I hadn’t yet decided which life
was better. Grass combed the plume of my tail.

The nights were crystal sharp. I waggled
my slit high, what was left of my breasts pushed
into a pile of decaying leaves. Who cared

how many and how often, I was not entirely his.
Eyes of owls glittered in the sleep of trees, tree frogs
sang in a green-robed choir. The moon clamped

its yellow tooth into my shoulder. I took the whole
night inside. What was to become of us? I had
packed away my white Juliet cap and veil for just

such an occasion. I held him like a warm
peach in my palm, longed for his juice to run
down my chin. Most nights I didn’t care about

the names they gave me. I held my fingers
out to him, felt the tug as my ring fell off, carried
my limbs down to the entrance of his den,

planted a birch just outside his home
as a token of my loyalty. I was free
of the chains of consequence. I gave birth

to his amber-eyed bastard who without hesitation
he devoured. When he becomes old and says
he always dreams of me, I shall make myself

a meal of him, savor his voluptuous tongue,
and suck all the bitterness from his bones.
He will not make such promises again.

Translating Yang Lian's 'The Valley and the End: A Story'

Yang Lian is an internationally acclaimed Chinese poet who was born in Switzerland and grew up in Beijing. He was one of the group of ‘misty’ or ‘obscure’ poets who published the literary magazine Jintian (Today). His poem ‘Norlang’ was criticised by the Chinese government during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution campaign. He became an exile after the Tiananmen massacre, first lived in New Zealand, and now in London.

He has a new extraordinary collection coming out from Bloodaxe this October, Lee Valley Poems, about the Lee Valley where he has made his home. The poems have been translated by W N Herbert, Arthur Sze, Polly Clark, Antony Dunn, Jacob Edmond, Brian Holton, Fiona Sampson, and I have translated five. In 2007-8 Lian devised and organised the first Yellow Mountain Chinese/English Poetry Festival, in China and the UK, and I was fortunate to take part, in particular to climb Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), with Tang Xiaodu, Wang Xiaoni, W N Herbert, Robert Minhinnick, Kate Griffin and others.

Lian is reading at the Lemon Monkey Cafe on Monday 29 June with Katy Evans-Bush, Rob Mackenzie and Andrew Philip, 7pm at 188 Stoke Newington High Street, London. Do come. I will be reading my translation of another of his fabulous Lee Valley poems 'The Journey'.

Here is my article about translating 'The Valley and the End: A Story' followed by his poem. This article was commissioned by Patricia McCarthy and appears in Agenda – the Welsh Issue Vol 44 Nos 2-3, May 2009, accompanied by the poem:

Translating Yang Lian’s ‘The Valley and the End: A Story’

“You close the book then close the riverbanks”

The history of Chinese poetry is rooted in the Chinese landscape. This is why we’ve come to the legendary Yellow Mountain to translate each other’s poems, a whole group of us, including W.N. Herbert, Robert Minhinnick, Wang Xiaoni, Yang Lian and myself. This is where the Yellow Emperor sought the elixir of immortality from an islet in one of the misty ‘seas’ that form in the valleys between peaks.

To the ‘deep-reality’ poet Yang Lian, the Tang Dynasty tradition cannot be ignored. His images are loaded with it. It’s as if Yellow Mountain, this mist-enshrouded idyll so familiar from scroll paintings, lies as a wash on each blank page as he starts to write. And from each page, fog swirls to form ghost-valleys, rivers of exile. Peaks rise with names such as Bookcase Peak and Writing Brush Bursts into Bloom. In the ‘seas’, images flower then fade. The fog is thick as cocoon silk – opaque enough to hold memories of London in its weave. On a bank of cumulus Walthamstow Marshes floats. I glimpse dragon-boats, an iron bridge, a marina café where a couple confront one another. No sooner do they appear than their faces melt like sugar lumps in tea. There are photos on the wall, faded sepia shots. Outside, a swan slices the water and it starts to rain. The café vapourises with a furnace-hiss.

The long raindrops are chopsticks stabbing the surface, breaking it up. A bath floats between the fish-rings. The woman’s six-year-old self lies inside the white enamel, and as the sun sets, its rays tint her bathwater red. A flock of birds are nailed to the sky by the clock’s hour hand, which in Mandarin is a needle not a hand.

So while I wait on the mountain steps, wedged in the crowd, I mull over how to make this image work in English. There’s plenty of time, the queue waiting to climb Celestial Peak is packed with Chinese tourists. My task is to render the original poem as naturalistically as possible, as if it had originally been written in English, yet preserve those images, now stone, now mist, that merge into one another. A small white moth lands on the twisted lower branch of Welcoming Guests Pine. He has a tiny black-and-gold striped mountain range painted across his wings, and as I wait for the queue to move, he soars back up to the sky, taking his miniature Huangshan with him.

And now I’ve climbed the crag of the highest peak, and it’s time to descend the too-narrow stone steps carved into black rock with buff stripes, this sky-tiger I’m riding through the haze, and I have to concentrate on each step so as not to fall off the unfenced razor drop on my right. I chant the names to myself to fight off vertigo – Lotus Pistil Peak, Cloud-Dispelling Pavilion, Echo Wall. I reach the rock where a monk once drew the character for lightning and made it crack, and I have to pass right through this slit towards Jade Screen Peak. At times the striated rock sways like the banks of comfrey and chamomile I’ve squeezed through on the Marshes, the scent of meadowsweet making me giddy. Over the Carp’s Backbone to the Gold Cock Crowing at Heaven’s Gate and I’m pushing harder now as it’s getting late and the telpher shuts at dusk. The mountain will close and press me flat as a flower in a book.

Flat as Walthamstow Marshes, my neck of the woods, now Lian’s locale, only he lives on the Hackney side and I in Walthamstow. We might as well be on Yellow Mountain in this desolate poem where mouths hang from walls, where light flashes off the river Lee like a tiger’s pelt, one stripe in London, one in China.

Imagine my surprise as he sits in my tiny study, the mournful cries of geese crossing the window’s sky, while he conjures the marshes in faltering Yanglish, and I search the clouds for the right words to translate his lines. Geese, which have flown over my house all these years, suddenly are the wild geese of exile, their calls evoking homesickness as potently as they did in the time of Li Bai writing poems on Celestial Peak.

I’ve lived in North East London for over twenty years now and would have moved away long ago except for that nearby sanctuary, with its head-high wildflowers and the Springfield Marina where ‘The Valley and the End: A Story’ takes place. I’ve often stopped at the small riverside café for a cup of tea and a cake to warm me during walks. Last time I passed it was closed, which was a shame because I wanted to check out those old photos in his poem.

Lian’s images are collages of strangely juxtaposed objects, but he considers his surrealism to be ‘deep reality’ – imagery with roots, rather than a surrealism that might just be obscure or playful ornament. As a former sculptor I am interested in image-making in my own poems. The pictorial aspect of the Chinese characters fascinates me. Yang Lian’s poetry is a new kind of image-making for British poetry, which tends to stick to straightforward narrative. He isn’t just conjuring the world but remaking it into a system of concentric symbols, an organic collage of deep reality. I question him about every phrase, its sound and sense, until it starts to root in my imagination and re-grow.

In his essay ‘A Wild Goose Speaks To Me’ (Poetry Review, Spring 2006) he wrote: “Give me a single breath, and I will grow roots, penetrate the soil, probe shingle and magma, and hear the sea through every artery and vein of groundwater”. He went on to say, “ ‘local’ doesn’t at all signify a specific site, but must point to all sites, as being the ability of the poet to excavate his own self”.

In writing his new collection Lee Valley Poems (Bloodaxe, 2009), Yang Lian makes Lee Valley’s waters turn twelve hundred years upstream to their source, which for him is the Tang Dynasty. The further they flow, the nearer he accesses his innermost self. This poem ‘The Valley and the End: A Story’ occurs in a non-time implied by the tenselessness of the Chinese verb, which is a challenge to translate into English. That couple waiting for the end are always on the marshes, sitting in the café, which is simultaneously a Huangshan path. To Lian’s eyes, the café walls are banded Mesozoic rock where Li Bai and Du Fu’s shadows pass, each drunk on their own solitudes. But however heavy the theme and weighted the history, the lines must fly. Like that Huangshan moth bearing a mountain on its wings.

Yang Lian

The Valley and the End: A Story

1.
The days blend into each other – we keep saying the same old things.
The sky is a raincoat with a dripping hem.
Rain taps on white tables in old photos
and on two cups of half-drunk tea. All afternoon we counted the upturned chairs.
Our mouths have hung from the wall for fifty years.

2.
Everywhere is ending. When you stop reading
light leaps from the water’s pelt. When you pull back your hand,
no longer touching the beast’s gorgeous stripes,
your name is the same but sealed off by the weather,
like that loud green on the far bank gradually departing.

3.
A pear tree blocks the balcony
and its spring bedroom full of naked flowers.
On the grass, birds hatch opalescent light.
Our bodies accept the coldness of a past life
by the way they touch and this still makes you wet.

4.
A sugar lump melts an old woman’s squeaking bones –
we can watch her machinery, drop by drop,
leaking tea, swathing her groans
in vapour. Time begins at the next table,
passes the sweetness of the end through our guts.

5.
Fish-rings wait for us outside the window.
We walked over that pale gravel path
to where a million fish eye-socket circles
are pierced by chopsticks of rain – the circles’ centres
choked by the softest diameter.

6.
You close the book then close the riverbanks.
Swan-stares carve this view –
the house, the iron bridge, that silently emerge –
their paddling feet are russet leaves under the water’s surface
where our presence secretly shatters a cloud.

7.
Dive back into the six-year-old’s bathtub.
Just six years old, the body, already smashed open
by a blood-red torrent, has become a dirty word,
the air made even thinner the further back time reels.
What dives back into the girl’s eyes is raw poetry

8.
but it’s not love poetry. Why waste time
by talking about time? We are the valley’s delicacies.
We listen to the weightless horseshoe of the crescent moon
splashing mud on our faces – so cold a reunion
forces us to sink even deeper.

9.
History gradually darkens, replicating our organs.
An old filament secretes a film of twilight.
That gas ring pierces thin fingers,
the flames spurt, hissing five o’clock with a furnace roar –
the entire sky of homing birds, each one nailed to the clock’s hour hand.

10.
Two ends – either yes or no.
Two ends like two people face to face, holding up the same cup
to keep warm – a present tense you spill from your clothes.
Two memories glide between stars at the speed of light,
a black umbrella lifted by a disembodied hand orbits

11.
all sorrow and joy – just to be alive.
While we sit at the table against the blankness of water,
water flows away unnoticed.
The end is never like the sea, rain snuffs out one second
then we forget our past.

12.
Naked sex converges on one point in the sky,
licks the emerald breasts of wild ducks.
Trees in fog are truly beautiful. That old photo
bathed in moonlight is the park inviting you for a stroll.
The night sky is so close, hiding at your back, inviting you to moan fiercely.

Translated from the Chinese by Pascale Petit and the author