Review of What the Water Gave Me and an essay

 This is a quick post as I'm laid up in bed with flu, but very cheered up today by Ros Barber's review of What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo and Val Robert's essay about my work. I find it encouraging to be favourably reviewed by a poet whose work I admire. Ros's latest collection Material, from Anvil in 2008, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This is her author photo. You can become a fan of her work on Facebook. Here is an excerpt from her review:

"the book is as vibrant, and somehow life-affirming, as the paintings that inspired it. Petit’s Kahlo embraces life with all the joy of one who experienced being laid ‘on a billiard table’ while doctors ‘saw to the wounded, thinking me dead.’  There is an ecstasy in the agony."

There have been a lot of reviews and blogs about What the Water Gave Me since it came out last May, including one by Ruth Padel in The Guardian, one by Zoë Brigley in New Welsh Review and another by David Morley in Magma – three other poets whose work I admire. If you go to the book page on my publisher Seren's website you can click on links to read many of their reviews. WtWGM was also Jackie Kay's Book of the Year in The Observer. The collection was reprinted after only four months and I'm very excited that a US edition will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011.

Val Roberts is a third year creative writing degree student at Liverpool John Moores University. In her post 'The Wonderful World of Pascale Petit' she analyses two of my hummingbird poems, 'The Strait-Jackets' from The Zoo Father and 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (I)' from What the Water Gave Me. I love it when people tell me things about my poems that I didn't quite register myself, but that's what she manages to do, especially in her study of the sonic echoes in both poems, and indeed, in her study of the thematic echoes, which she does very precisely, as shown in this excerpt from her analysis of 'The Strait-Jackets':

"For the first time since she arrived he starts to breathe more easily with that hummingbird metaphor, which is a soul of an injured person.  Notice the subtle internal rhymes with the words ‘breathe’ and ‘easily’ and the echo of ‘recycler’ and ‘cannula’ which is attached to his nostrils as it almost slips out.  This is an important part of the poem as the cannula almost slips out.  This is perhaps where realisation may hit.  It makes one wonder what else almost slips out.  Perhaps Petit has spoken some truth about her and her father’s relationship.  This is the pure brilliance of Pascale’s poetry.  She says I don’t know how long we sit there, such a powerful line and in particular with the internal half rhyme and echo of language.  One does not know how long she has sat there.  One does not know what has gone on." 

Here is the poem 'The Strait-Jackets'. I love how she's accurately connected the hummingbird theme in this poem to the Frida Kahlo poem, where I am both writing about Kahlo's efforts to overcome her bus crash but am also coming to terms with my own childhood trauma through Kahlo's painting 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird'.

This is the photo of forty hummingbirds in a suitcase which inspired 'The Strait-Jackets'. The Brazilian ornithologist Augusto Ruschi's stowed his birds in a suitcase to transport them on plane flights, by lowering their temperature and placing them in a torpor (which hummingbirds go into at low temperatures to conserve energy).  While they were asleep he wrapped them in pyjamas to protect their wings. Then he used to warm them up before releasing them once he reached his destination.

And here is Frida Kahlo's painting 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird'. It's the first painting I wrote into a poem in What the Water Gave Me. The whole book grew from this defiant self-portrait with a dead hummingbird hung from a necklace of thorns made from Christ's crown:

Mir Mahfuz Ali and the Ten anthology

Mir Mahfuz Ali is shortlisted for the 2010 Picador Poetry Prize and is included in the groundbreaking anthology Ten from Bloodaxe. Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra, is the culmination of Spread the Word's two year initiative to support talented new black and Asian poets. I had the good fortune to mentor Mahfuz for this project, and what a dream job it was. 

Mir Mahfuz Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1958. He grew up during the war of liberation and came to England in 1973, after being shot in the throat by riot police during an uprising. As a performer, he is renowned for his extraordinary voice – a rich, throaty whisper. His poetry has appeared in PN Review, Poetry London, London Magazine and Ambit. He has also been shortlisted for the New Writing Ventures Awards in 2007. His poetry combines a luxurious Bengali linguistic richness with the trauma and first hand testaments of the atrocities of war.

Read his poems in Ten, and all the exciting poets in this anthology, described by Carol Ann Duffy as "ten sparkling new talents who demonstrate the richness, energy and confidence of the poetic voice in our multicultural country". This book is groundbreaking, necessary, but most of all, an enthralling read. Here is one of Mahfuz's poems:

Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971

I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight.
I have caught it all – the screeching tanks
pounding the city under the massy heat,
searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets.
Kalashnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers,
vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements.
I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust
scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye,
at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside,
at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs,
throwing them into the back, hurling
them one upon another until the floor
is loaded to the sky's armpits. The corpses stare
at our star's succulent whiteness
with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation.
Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs.
I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead:
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU
SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Ana Mendieta

Tonight at Tate Modern we'll be working in the Ana Mendieta room in the Energy & Process wing on Level 5. As Ana Mendieta is from Cuba, we'll read the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón’s poem ’Ana Mendieta’, which celebrates her spirit and mourns her early death.  We’ll watch the artist's video Blood and Feathers #2, where she pours animal blood over herself, rolls onto white chicken feathers, then stands with arms outstretched like wings, on the riverbank.

Mendieta was influenced by indigenous Tainan myths of Cuba and the Caribbean and the writings of Carlos Castaneda, particularly The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I've always been drawn to rituals about transformation into a bird and have written about Amazonian transformation rites in my first and second collections Heart of a Deer and The Zoo Father. Amazonian peoples stick white harpy eagle down feathers in their hair for journeys to their sky worlds.

Tonight we'll also look at the poem 'Animal Dress' by Sharon Olds (from One Secret Thing) and ' The World's Entire Wasp Population' by Selima Hill (from Violet), as alternative takes on ritual dress, the former celebrating her daughter's coming of age by dressing her in the world's animals, and the latter enacting a ritual of revenge by covering a rival in "this feeling...like jam" then inviting wasps "to enjoy her".

The thirty poets in the group will read the results from tonight's session and their poems from the six week course next Monday, 29 November, at 6.45pm, in the Poetry and Dream gallery at Tate Modern. Everyone is welcome and entrance is free. The other art they responded to are paintings by Gauguin, Joan Jonas' fairytale installation The Juniper Tree and the surreal works in Poetry and Dream. The still below is of another piece by Mendieta Bird Transformation.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: a public reading

Monday 29 November 2010, 18.45 – 20.45

A poetry reading by the poets who attended the Poetry from Art autumn course, introduced by Pascale Petit. All welcome.

A group of poets has been working in the magical setting of Tate Modern, when the galleries were quiet and closed to the public. Led by award winning poet Pascale Petit they wrote poems in response to works from the permanent collections – Surrealism, Joan Jonas' The Juniper Tree, Ana Mendieta's Blood and Feathers – and from the current exhibition Gauguin: Maker of Myth.

You are invited to hear their poems in the unique surroundings of Tate Modern's Poetry and Dream gallery on Level 3. This event is open to the public.


Tate Modern Level 3 West, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
or call 020 7887 8888

Admission free, no booking required


A publication by the participants from the previous term is for sale in the Tate Modern bookshop. Look out for it in the Art History section of the main shop.

Poetry from Art autumn 2010: Gauguin & Joan Jonas

The theme this term for my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern is myth and fairytale. Paul Gauguin made up his own myths, part derived from Tahitian ones. He created this goddess Oviri as his alter ego. In Tahitian, Oviri means savage – she's stamping on a she-wolf and clasping a stolen wolf cub. Here's the suggestive shape of her back:

We started the course in the Gauguin exhibition and will return there for one more session. It was amazing to work in the galleries when the crowds had left! In the opening class I supplied lines from Polynesian myths, read out the myth of Hina the moon goddess, which forms the basis of his painting Hina and Tefatou (Moon and Earth)
 

and read out quotes by Gauguin on the genesis of his painting Manao Tupapau: The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, where he wrote about his use of colour and Tahitian ghost god myths:

This is what he wrote in a letter about how he painted it:
"Here is the genesis: General Harmony. Dark dull violet, dark blue and chrome 1. The draperies are chrome 2, because this colour suggests night, without explaining it, however, and furthermore serves as a happy medium between the yellow orange and the green, completing the harmony. These flowers are also like phosphorescences in the night (in her thoughts). The Kanakas believe that the phosphorous lights seen at night are the souls of the dead. In short, it is a fine bit of painting, although it is not according to nature."

In his journal Noa Noa he added:
"One day I had to go to Papeete. I had promised to come back that same evening. It was one in the morning when I got home. Having at that moment very little oil in the house . . . the lamp had gone out, and the room was in darkness when I went in. I felt afraid and, more still, mistrustful. I struck matches and saw on the bed motionless, naked, lying face down on the bed, her eyes immeasurably larger from fear, Tehura looked at me and seemed not to know me. I too was caught for several moments by a strange feeling of uncertainty. Tehura’s terror was contagious. I had the illusion that a phosphorescent light was streaming from her staring eyes. Never had I seen her so frighteningly beautiful. I was afraid to make any movement which might increase the child’s paroxysm of fright. How could I know what at that moment I might seem to her? Might she not with my frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres, one of the Tupapaüs, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights? Did I really know who in truth she was herself? The intensity of fright had transformed her into a strange being, entirely different from anything I had known before."

I asked the group of 30 poets to choose one painting, drawing, carving or ceramic and write a poem about it, responding to the colours, and to incorporate one of the lines from Polynesian myths I had compiled. This could be used anywhere in the poem, and could be altered to suit. They were invited to make up their own myths if they wished, but had to make the poem contemporary and were to be ruthless in writing about something that mattered to them, to be free in their interpretation. 

If myth was our focus with Gauguin, for our second week we discussed Joan Jonas's magical but grisly The Juniper Tree installation based on a fairytale. It's a darker version of the Snow White story, and involves a boy who is beheaded then cooked by his stepmother. His bones are absorbed by the juniper tree and transformed into a shamanic bird who sings his story and eventually returns to kill his murderer. The installation is dominated by red and white and a haunting soundtrack. Originally The Juniper Tree was a performance (in 1976 in the US then 1979 in the Whitechapel Art Gallery). 

I asked everyone to free-write a response to the installation then offer one of those lines to the rest of the group. We discussed the Grimms brothers' 'The Juniper Tree' fairytale and studied Moniza Alvi's poem 'Mermaid' (from her latest collection Europa) which is based on Tabitha Vevers' painting When We Talk about Rape – two responses to a fairytale and equally dark subject matter. We paid particular attention to the form of the poem, with its deep indents, the extra space between the spare lines evoking a feeling of shock. Everyone could select one of the group's gift lines to include in a short poem, with attention paid to the form and how it might hold powerful subject matter.

Next week we will work in the permanent display Poetry & Dream. Then we'll be back in the Gauguin exhibition. Our fifth writing session will be in the Ana Mendieta room, responding to an artist who made performances influenced by Frida Kahlo and rituals of indigenous South Americans.  Our last session on November 29th (at 18.45) will be a reading open to the public in Poetry & Dream on Level 3, when the group will read poems written on the course. Entrance is free. Everyone is welcome, so please come to listen and enjoy the stunning surreal paintings which inspired some of their poems.

Preview of two poems from Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

Here is a preview of two poems in the Poetry from Art pamphlet anthology, launched at Tate Modern this Saturday 25 September. The poems by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Seraphima Kennedy both respond to installations by Francis Alÿs in his recent exhibition A Story of Deception.

The Tornado Chaser
after Tornado by Francis Alÿs

The tornado chaser is superstitious.
He wears a tornado like a cloak of lightning.  
His dreams are dark tunnels with stars slipping down them.

He can find a tornado blindfolded.
He smells the fresh-torn redbud tree, the earth’s spores offered up to
      the elements.
He catches the vacuum with his bare hands, wrenches sap from flying 
      timber.

The tornado chaser sleeps with sand in his eyelashes.
His foxbrush hair has been drowned in Florida saltwater.
He has been baked in mud in the Mississippi.
He has tripped through scrubclaw in the Texan panhandle and been 
      thrown to the sides of the orange-dust caldera.

He has seen a tornado unwrap the night sky like a handkerchief.

He has been in red and turquoise and gold tornadoes.
He has been in tornadoes made of ocean.
He knows tornadoes that spin him in different directions above and   
      below his fault lines.
He knows the heart of the sky is the dark back of the mirror, and the 
      space between constellations.

He has known tornadoes shimmer like sirens.
He has known tornadoes slice him open like crazed turbines.
He knows one day a tornado will strip the flesh from his bones.
He will feel his skin split open, his eyes spread out wider than his skull.

He has looked up the length of the tornado in fear.
He has looked up the inside of the tornado in longing.

He has seen the dark vaulted cathedral above the tornado and prayed.

Seraphima Kennedy

Three Inches Closer
after When Faith Moves Mountains by Francis Alÿs

All we want to do is go backwards,
like the toy cars the kids make
from old mantequilla de cerdo cans

but I've got my foot down on the pedal
driving into a mirage that disappears
every time we get nearer; it's a river

not a road, wet and shimmering, white
on the horizon, with unknown currents
that curl around our ankles

and what looks like it's on a loop, no what
feels like it's on a loop isn't, each frame
is very slightly different, so we know

it must be real and having another baby
is a mythic type of effort,
like the five hundred men in white shirts

an artist asks to move a sand dune
three inches closer to the sea, across a desert
with plastic buckets and spades.

Karen McCarthy Woolf


Everyone is invited to the launch  at 6.45–9pm this Saturday 25 September, in the East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern, Bankside SE1 9TG. Free entry, wine, illustrated readings, great views. The booklet contains poems by 24 poets who attended my Poetry from Art summer course in the galleries and costs £4.95. It will be for sale at this event and only available from the Tate Modern bookshop afterwards.

The contributors are  Karen McCarthy Woolf, Naomi Woddis, Malika Booker, Rowyda Amin, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Sarah Salway, Rebecca Farmer, Zillah Bowes, Cath Drake, Rishi Dastidar, Beth Somerford, Roberta James, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Lynn Foote, Seraphima Kennedy, Ali Wood, Julie Steward, Elizabeth Horsley, MJ Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri.

Launch of Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

Launch of a pamphlet anthology: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern edited by Pascale Petit

18.45 – 21.00 on Saturday 25 September 2010

East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern

Free entry, there will be readings, great views, wine. All welcome, booking not required.
(Tornado by Francis Alÿs)

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/22322.htm

This pamphlet anthology of twenty-four poems was written on my Poetry from Art summer course in the galleries at Tate Modern, the third of three six-week writing courses this year. The pamphlet includes poems after Mona Hatoum, Francis Alÿs, Joseph Beuys and Mike Nelson.

In the Francis Alÿs exhibition A Story of Deception, we sat in the darkened and at times ear-splitting Tornado room, watching the artist running into tornadoes in the Mexican desert over a period of ten years, searching for the calm at their core. There are six responses to this included in the anthology, as well as responses to his other video installations. 

Working with Mona Hatoum's Home was an equally intense experience, where a gurney-style kitchen table was laid out with cooking implements, all wired up to a live electric current. This, and two other disturbing pieces which accompanied it, also inspired another set of poems in the booklet, some dark and some humorous. 

We spent one session at Tate Britain, in Mike Nelson's labyrinthine The Coral Reef – a network of fifteen interconnected rooms for the dispossessed, and everyone did get lost in it before emerging to write a poem in fifteen minutes, using Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' as a possible approach, focusing on one object in the rooms, as he did in his shed, to tackle such a big theme. 

There are also poems in response to Joseph Beuys' The Pack, Sophie Calle's The Hotel series, and more (see below for more images). The publication will be available to buy at the launch then for sale only in the Tate Modern bookshop for £4.50.

For more information about the launch see the Tate Modern website

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Phone 020 7887 8888.

The contributors are:

Karen McCarthy Woolf, Naomi Woddis, Malika Booker, Rowyda Amin, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Sarah Salway, Rebecca Farmer, Zillah Bowes, Cath Drake, Rishi Dastidar, Beth Somerford, Roberta James, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Lynn Foote, Seraphima Kennedy, Ali Wood, Julie Steward, Elizabeth Horsley, MJ Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri.

Francis Alÿs Tornado

Mona Hatoum Home (detail)



Mona Hatoum Home


 

Mona Hatoum Incommunicado



Sophie Calle The Hotel Room 47

Mike Nelson The Coral Reef (details)

Joseph Beuys The Pack