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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.
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 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.
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?
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!
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 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.
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