Serbian edition of The Zoo Father with illustrations: Belgrade Poetry Festival

This is the cover of the Serbian edition of The Zoo Father, published by Treci Trg and launched at the Belgrade International Festival of Poetry, May 30 – June 3, which Treci Trg also organised. I was astonished when my translator Milan Dobricic emailed me the images designed by Dragana Nikolic. She seems to have captured the spirit of my book and to have added something extra. There was an exhibition of the cover and the eleven illustrations during the four-day festival.

Apart from the chance to visit Belgrade, which I'd not seen before, this was also an opportunity for me to listen to the other guest poets, and make new discoveries, such as Vladimir Martinovski from Macedonia and Turkish poet Gokcenur C, both so fresh they made me want to write then and there, if the programme hadn't lasted until the early hours each night. Martinovski is not yet translated into English but he should be.

The Zoo Father, which was published in the UK by Seren in 2001, is currently out of stock but about to be reprinted and made available as an e-book. It has also been published in Mexico in a bilingual Spanish/English edition by the publisher El Tucan de Virginia in 2004.

 Illustration for 'The Strait-Jackets'

 'The Strait-Jackets' to read the poem in English click here

 Illustration for 'My Father's Voice'

 Illustration for 'King Vulture Father'

 'King Vulture Father'

 Illustration for 'Trophy'

 'Trophy'

 Illustration for 'My Octopus Mother'

Illustration for 'My Father's Clothes'

Chateau Ventenac poetry course 2012

Minerve on the Gorge du Cesse (see tiny people on the dry riverbed)

One of my top places in the world is the Languedoc Roussillon in the south of France, so teaching a poetry course there is a dream. Last week, for six days, eleven poets joined me at Chateau Ventenac for Making Worlds, my third course at the Chateau. They came from London, Palm Springs, LA, Colorado, Stafford and Herefordshire. We spent the mornings in creative workshops, the afternoons free (though everyone had two tutorials with me so I was busy), and in the evenings there were writing games and readings. Unlike Arvon courses we were catered for – the meals were exquisite.

It was during the afternoon tutorials, while we sat under the awning by the pool on the bottom terrace, that a nightingale perched over us and sang. I knew instantly that it was the bird in Keats' ode (the poem that switched me onto poetry when I was a teenager). The notes sounded like gurgles blown in glass, breaking through to our world from another dimension – they were piercing and ecstatic. The next day he returned and sang for longer. Justina wrote that it was "like a star running down your throat". The phrase is one from a series of lines from cosmological myths that I supplied the first evening, for them to incorporate into a short poem.

I also brought along a hoard of surreal contemporary art cards to kick-start poems, and animal fact-files which I bought from Oxfam, meant for children, but those have the most fascinating facts! These included info about the hoopoe, who also sang for us regularly, pipistrelles, which swooped over the veranda each evening, the grass snake, hares and owls. Inside each file I'd inserted another sheet about myths associated with each animal. The prompt was to write a poem which included some biological facts about the creature (handed out to everyone at random), which somehow resonated, some mythological aspect, and something personal (as well as free-associations). Perhaps the poet wished to tackle a difficult subject they could dress in an animal mask. One of the examples we discussed before starting was Joy Harjo's poem 'She Had Some Horses'. They could also try her use of repetition and hypnotic chant to build momentum.

On the third writing morning we changed tack and stopped using images and texts to generate poems, and instead went for a walk along the Canal du Midi, with the golden rule that although they could chat en route to the Pont-Canal two kilometres away, they had to be silent on the return. The process was to be like the contrast between Gauguin and Van Gogh's working methods: Gauguin painting from his imagination (as we had been doing indoors so far) and Van Gogh from direct observation outdoors. The group could respond to one object along the way back through all eight senses, paying close attention to it.

Midway through the week, we had a day off and went to the medieval Cathars cité of Minerve, which leans over the intersection of two limestone gorges: the Cesse and the Brian. After a leisurely lunch in the Troubadour restaurant overlooking the gorge we wound down to the stony bed, hoping we could wade through the cave which connects the two almost-dry rivers, to a secluded valley the other side, but the water was too deep. So they explored the limestone cliffs and listened to the birds. I sat on a bank and read work for the following day's tutorials in this idyllic setting. Next year's course will also be in May, and I've already bagged my tutorial space down by the 'nightingale' bush.

 Taking notes along the Canal du Midi on Wednesday morning

 At the seventeenth century Canal-Pont, the first built in France, where the canal crosses a river

 The cave tunnel between the two gorges below Minerve

 From left to right: Maria Elena Boekemeyer, Stephen Linsteadt and Lois P Jones on the gorge bed at Minerve

 The Canal du Midi

 Moi in front of the bridge over the Cesse Gorge, entrance to Minerve

 Katrina Naomi with matching shutters and door at 1, La Caunette, another medieval village by Minerve

Apéritifs on the terrace each evening

 Writing game with the drinks!

 On the last evening a few locals and some of our helpers came to the reading by the group. Here is Jinny Fisher reading two of her poems from the week. Everyone read work written on the course. Next to Jinny is Julia Bristow (owner of the Chateau), Philip, Susan, Mary and Justina

 The residents of the canal. There were also otters and ducklings.

Justina Hart and Carl Burness on the terrace

Metamorphoses Translation Workshop in Algiers April 2012

Just before I landed in Algiers I could see the Kabylie Mountains hovering above the coast. They have a special significance for me because my father lived there for a few years, during the thirty-five years of his disappearance. He told me he stayed there with his best friend, in the mountains, and he loved it. Before he disappeared, when I was still living in Paris with my parents, they ran a brasserie and beer business just by the Jardin des Plantes, and their customers were mainly Algerians. This was in the late fifties. Later I was told my father was part Algerian, but it turns out that was probably a myth. I had been to Tunisia and Morocco but I always wanted to go to Algeria. So when the British Council invited me to take part in a translation project (organised by them and EUNIC) I leapt at the opportunity. Even though getting the business visa was a lengthy, fiddly process made even harder by my French passport having Israeli stamps on it. Initially, I was invited in March for nine days, then that was postponed and shortened to a flying visit of five days in April.

At the three-day Metamorphoses workshop I worked with two groups. One translated two of my poems into Arabic and the other translated the same two poems, 'The Strait-Jackets' and 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)' into French. Each group was composed of translation or interpretation students and was led by a professional interpreter/translator. The Arabic moderator, Lotfi Zekraoui, had flown in from New York, where he is on a Fulbright scholarship at Cuny but he is from a nearby city. The French moderator was Walid Grine, son of one of the Algerian writers joining me on the project.

We only had three days to work in and I was disappointed I did not get to translate Algerian writers, especially as during the final event we all heard everyone's work (inlcuding translations into French) and I was very impressed by a short story by the novelist/poet Mostafa Fassi. The subject of the story was a wartime incident, but what impressed me was the immaculate description of a very moving scene, so moving that the moment he started to read the original in Arabic, his lead translator Malika Benbouza began silently weeping, even though she was on the stage. I heard other stories about living through wartime and under terrorism from the students as well and gained just a glimpse of what it means to be Algerian.

I was also impressed by how hard the students worked. I don't think my poems have ever been put under such intense scrutiny. One of the translation issues that came up with each of the four writers and our translators was religion and how to translate one set of references from one faith into another. I became acutely aware of the Catholic iconography in my Frida Kahlo poem, including an ascension and a reference to Saint Sebastian (Kahlo's rain of thorns). The students pondered: how does this metamorphose into the Islamic faith? There was also an issue for the Arabic students that they didn't know what hummingbirds were, since they are only a New World species.

My hotel was at the top of the hillside Algiers is built on, in the Embassy district, so, as we wound down in the car each day, round the narrow zigzags to our art centre just above the port, I tried to take photos. But this soon proved unwise, as police were everywhere and they did not like cameras, especially when the presidential convoy was about. Although there was little opportunity to take pics, we took our coffee breaks on a veranda at the art centre, and most of the photos here are taken from there. On the second evening I was going to go to the Casbah but came down with food poisoning and acute sick/dizziness. I missed the tourist spot but did get an insight into emergency healthcare, which is free and instant. The hotel, which was not a grand tourist one, provided a driver for free as well, to take me to the clinic. This was just one example of Algerian warmth and kindness. On the last evening, after our readings and public discussions, I was accompanied by Amina (from the BC) and Lotfi on a walk downtown. It was quite intimidating, as there were only men about and no tourists.

 I hope the translation project continues and that British poets get a chance to get acquainted with Algerian writers and culture. If I can I hope to translate that short story by Mostafa. As the plane rose, I managed to take a photo of the Kabylie Mountains and I thought about my father living up there, probably under one of his many different names, and I warmed to him in his mountain home, remembering how fondly he had spoken of it before he died, and of the hospitality of his friends there.

 The port and harbour in Algiers

 Algiers La Blanche

 The French team, from left to right: Amina, Walid (moderator), Asma and Soltani

 The Arabic team, from left to right: Farouk, Aicha, Lotfi (moderator), Nabil

 Downtown

 The post office

 view down to the port

 lunch break with Lotfi and Nabil

 after the last event with discussions and debates, two teams, with Jeremy Jacobson, Director of Algerian British Council

The mountains from the air

Poetry from Art online anthology 2012, at Tate Modern

Alighiero e Boetti Mappa (Map) 1989 Embroidery on fabric 227.7 × 117.5 cm
Poetry from Art online anthology 2012
Edited by Pascale Petit

The anthology of poems by the poets who attended my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern this spring is now up on the Tate website. (My next course Shaping Poems: Image-Making, starts on 11th June). Here is the foreword to the spring anthology by Sandra Sykorova, assistant curator of adult programmes:

For over six years now, our Adult Programmes team has worked with the award-winning poet Pascale Petit on a range of poetry writing public courses inspired by works of art in our collections displays and temporary exhibitions. This online anthology is the creative outcome of the Poetry from Art: Starting Poems – Writing course that ran over six Monday evenings at Tate Modern in February and March 2012. 

Twenty-one course participants, from all walks of life, had the opportunity to explore and directly respond to works of art by Alighiero Boetti, Yayoi Kusama and Catherine Yass.

In their encounters with often challenging artworks, the participants discovered new thoughts and experiences that spoke directly to them. We are delighted to share these poems with you. 

The next poetry course begins on 11 June 2012 and you can find more details and book here.

Goodbye to rue Hautefeuille, Paris

Here is the view from my balcony on the sixth floor, over the high plane trees in the square St André des Arts, just behind Place St Michel. The trees are swaying in the wind this morning. The leaves are almost fully out but they were just buds when I arrived ten days ago for my writing retreat. I've never had such a close relationship with the tops of plane trees before. I didn't even know they had globular female flowers. There are about nine trees in the square, sharing the space with a metro entrance, a large restaurant which sprawls under them, parked motorbikes, and various vagrants, one of whom sometimes raises a small tent from poles at night. Bye-bye trees of Paris, bye-be sparrows who cheep on my balcony demanding more crumbs. Bye-bye Easter at Notre Dame and Emmanuel, the Bourdon bell only rung on Palm Sunday, Easter day, Christmas and when peace is declared or a pope dies. 

Every time I come to Paris I discover something new. This time it was Sainte Chapelle. How could I have not known about it? I was born here. Last time it was the catacombs. It's as if Paris, which is built on limestone, opens up more of its caverns on each visit. I went for a walk in the Luxembourg gardens yesterday evening, for the first time as an adult. I must have been there as a child, riding on a stag or giraffe on the old-fashioned carousel, or launching a toy yacht on the pond. I can't really remember. But what I do remember vividly is playing in the sandpit in another square, just behind where we used to live on the Boulevard de Grenelle. I went to see that sandpit again. I walked in the footsteps of a six-year-old, along the side of the park and sat and watched children playing in it. They and their parents looked happy, normal. That sandpit was the place I learnt to be an artist, a sculptor at first, then a poet. In it I created my world, a retreat from well, whatever it is I had to retreat from. I will always be grateful to it and to that simple material, sand. 

Sand and leaves. So simple they are hard to comprehend. As for Sainte Chapelle and its fifteen fifty-feet high stained-glass windows, epitome of High Gothic, how do I grasp that? Or the inside of Notre Dame, and its three rose windows, which I braved often on this visit. Or the ritual opening of the central portal, when I happened to be at the end of my first tour, just by the huge main front doors, which are always closed, when the cardinal and the congregation turned around, and the ritual was performed right under my nose, at the front of the cathedral, and after the organ had boomed out nine knocks, the bolts were drawn back and sunlight streamed into the incense-filled nave.

Alighiero Boetti's Maps: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern week 4

Alighiero Boetti Mappa Photo Lucy Dawkins Tate Photography

Last night the fourth session of my Poetry from Art course was in the map room of the Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan exhibition at Tate Modern. Twenty of us sat surrounded by huge tapestries of world maps embroidered by Afghan women in their homes. The stillness and poise contrasted with the noisy rooms of our last sessions in the Kusama exhibits. When the group was hushed and writing, I could almost hear the lapping of the oceans interwoven with the murmur of the embroiderers' quiet chatter as they sewed in their homes.

Boetti considered the women embroiderers as co-authors of these works, even though he never met them, as Islamic mores forbade contact. He outlined the countries and flags on canvas with Magic Marker, then handed them over to male clan leaders who passed them on to the women and girls who would have learnt their craft from an early age. I laid out photographs of the women at work on the maps, on the bench in the centre.  They were photographed by Randi Malkin Steinberger, who was allowed one day to take pictures of them for Boetti. She has since published a wonderful book of her photos.

I often ask the group to start by spending a few minutes quickly noting their immediate impressions of the art, before we discuss it or look at related poems. In this instance, hardly anyone had seen the show before the session, so I wanted them to have a chance to respond to the maps while they were still in the grip of that overwhelming awe and freshness I remembered when I first walked into the room and was surrounded by the colours of the world.

I laid out dozens of A3 photocopies of medieval map-views, complete with sea-monsters and wind-gods, on the second bench and showed them some images by two other artists who have worked extensively with maps, Guillermo Kuitca and Kathy Prendergast. We then read Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Map', Moniza Alvi's 'Map of India' and 'Topography' by Sharon Olds. These were examples of how the subject might be approached. Perhaps through close, precise, physical description of coastlines, as in Bishop's poem, intertwined with philosophical meditations on map-making, such as in her line: "are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?", or in Moniza's case, by focusing on one country which is significant for the poet, or they could try building an emotional and sensory map as Sharon Olds did, where a couple fly in from different continents to make love, still bearing the prints of those maps on their skins.

The group then had fifteen minutes to write a poem. I suggested they could assume the voice of the embroiderer, the artist, or even the map itself.  We had thought that Bishop's map seemed be alive enough to lift off the page. They could try using colour as their main motif, enveloped as we were by lemon, pink, silver, black, as well as kingfisher-blue oceans. They could use place names and their sounds. They could zoom in as Moniza had done, in to one country which was significant for them and write about a personal place, bearing in mind that even the most autobiographical voice in a poem is fictionalised, and not the author's quotidian self.

I wondered how they would manage, with so much information and little time to write. There are mostly women in the group, which may account for many choosing to write in the voice of an embroiderer. Needles flashed in and out of their lines as they read back. I'm always amazed how well they write under pressure, after being reassured that they are only expected to produce 'material in progress' and not poems yet.  Hearing them read their responses, as we were bathed in the glow of the tapestries, made me feel as if the world was constantly being remade. Some of the results will later be published in an online anthology on the Tate Modern website.

Yayoi Kusama 2: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

For our third week and second Poetry from Art session in the Yoyoi Kusama exhibition we focused on two works: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats and The Clouds. Kusama scavenged the boat from Manhattan streets and covered it with what she called phallic shapes made of stuffed cloth and painted white. The boat glows, spotlit in a darkened room, and is surrounded by one thousand print copies. We wondered if it was beautiful or disturbing, dark or light-hearted. Someone saw it as child-like, someone else found it upsetting. We talked about how art can change traumatic experience, as Kusama has said, that the obsessive phallic shapes she covered her sculptures with are her way of working through the childhood trauma of her mother forcing her when she was four to watch her father with his many mistresses and report back to her. We agreed that the 'shapes' also look like coral encrusted on a wreck; perhaps Kusama has succeeded in rendering those shocks harmless?

We read Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre in the best translation I know, Drunk Boat by Ciaran Carson, and compared the French child prodigy's drunken boat with Kusama's. The original poem is stuffed with words that rock against each other in long alexandrine lines which chart 'a systematic disordering of the senses'. I encouraged people to let rip with their imaginations and language, and write a poem responding to the boat in fifteen minutes; they could use Carson's expansive long line if they wished.

But they had a choice, they could either write about the boat or The Clouds, which we also went to see, carefully avoiding leaning over the laser alarms. If they chose  to write about The Clouds then their homework was to write about the boat, and vice versa. These 'clouds' are also made from  stuffed and painted cloth. We looked at them and said what shapes we could see in them. To help write a poem responding to this installation, we discussed 'Falmouth Clouds' by Peter Redgrove, with its series of spawning metaphors, where he sees theatre-chocolates and cathedrals in the sky, bolts of silk unrolling, trapdoors, laboratories and tablecloths, and most unexpectedly, floating coal-mines. What unexpected images could they come up with if they wrote really fast, free-associating? And what form would they use to write a spacey sky poem? Perhaps Redgrove's airy short stanzas separated by numbered sections?

Next week we will be in the Alighiero Boetti exhibition and I think I know what room we will work in but I'm not saying.

The Clouds

We paused to look at Accumulation Sculptures on the way to the boat