I treated this writing month as a writing retreat. Reading up on haiku technique, enjoying other people’s haiku and getting into the habit of observing my own personal responses to the world. It is like learning to frame in words moments, like a photographer captures them in pictures or an artist sketches them. It is a form of mediation of experience and meditation in one.

Now that it is over, while I miss the discipline of the writing challenge, the support and energy of the community, I also know I gained enough to continue the practice.

I was chaffed when one of my own haiku was one among those highlighted in Red Dragonfly by Melissa Allen. You can read her whole post and enjoy her selections; better still, read her blog!  By the way, she writes great experimental as well as ‘normal’ haiku.

While the actual NaHaiWriMo is now officially over, Alan Summers of With Words and Area 17 has agreed to continue prompting eager haiku poets for the month of March. I look forward to responding to the prompts as well as Alan’s, and the participants’ most helpful comments

I am finding out about the plethora of haiku groups and communities writing and commenting on each other’s work. I will be catching up with them soon. Meanwhile, I am exploring The Haiku Foundation’s site and blog: a vital resource for those bitten by the haiku bug.

As of today, I will be posting my haiku in my main blog, in my growing collection of haiku and also in Stella’s Stones; as usual, I will tweet it as well! Haiku published elsewhere will be presented with fanfare!

The file NaHaiWriMo (National Haiku Writing Month) will be active again next year, in February, when the next official NaHaiWriMo will be taking place.

I quote from “virtualnotes,” where this particular blog carnival originated:

“The idea of “> Language > Place” is to create a collaborate virtual journey through different places, in different formats, and with different languages included – the main language is english, yet the idea is that every post also includes snippets or terms of other languages, and refers to a specific place, country, region or city.”

For more information and how to join this monthly event, here

Oh, yes, and I took part too!

15 November 2010

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I was sent the following information about the City Breath project:

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“Through their common city theme, these short video ‘gasps’ or ‘breaths’ of South African cities give voice to the private dreams and nightmares of local poets, dancers, performance artists and filmmakers. They interrogate, with or against rational logic, the way South Africans understand their cities and urban life. Rebellious in their nature, under 4 minutes each, the films represent a genre seldom seen in South African film and television.

“Inspiring, sometimes beautiful, sometimes challenging, and over-all very impressive.” (Trevor Steele-Taylor, Director of the National Arts Festival Film Programme)

The City Breath video poetry project was shown in several cities round the world – Johannesburg being the most recent, after Berlin, London, Cape Town, and Vancouver. Curator Kai Lossgott is looking for more venues and festivals around the world interested in showing the project. She can be contacted directly at info@kailossgott.com

Apart from selecting existing works, the CITY BREATH project has initiated and developed new collaborations in the areas of the video poem, screen dance and experimental film.”

For more information and a fab blog see http://www.citybreathproject.blogspot.com

I was impressed and inspired!

I happen to know the work of one of the poets quite well: the immensely talented Tanya van Schalkwyk’s work, fusing imagination with sensitive observation and dynamic expression.

But watching the trailer (a few times!) made me want to see the whole thing!

Tania’s contribution to the video project is her poem “The Electrician“  included in her book Hyphen. It can be seen here

Winter Picture started its life at the North London writers’ workshop Word for Word, after a writer circulated photographs she had taken of a snow sculpture: two human-like figures made of snow on a Hampstead Heath bench. In my poem, the sculpture became a war-torn couple… read it and see.

Mystery Train was inspired by a photograph used as a writing prompt in the Tuesday poetry group of Word for Word. The photograph was of Elvis, on a train platform at the beginning of his career in the 1950s… so soon after the War…

The refugee grew out of a scene in my novel “Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree.” A refugee from Smyrni lies in her hospital bed in Athens, unable to join the other patients; she is forever caught in her own private despair.

Check out this link.  And feel free to comment!

5 October 2010

Olive

The Festival of the Trees is “a periodical collection of links to blog posts and other online sites, hosted each month on a different blog.” Bloggers, poets, writers with an interest in arboreal matters post related material on their own blogs and submit the links to the host of each month’s co-coordinator. This month’s host was Arati, of the Bangalore-based blog Trees, Plants and More.

My own contribution to this month’s Festival of the Trees, I wrote some time ago. In “If Trees, then Olive Trees,” I use the olive tree, a precious, almost sacred tree in the Mediterranean, western Asia, and northern Africa countries; a symbol of peace and hope, connecting to the “olive branch,” and the sighting of land after the biblical flood.

Short, gnarled and twisted, the olive tree even looks appropriately old. It is said to live for hundreds of years, as its roots are capable of regeneration even if the trunk above ground is destroyed. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed 2000 year old trees in several countries! A tree known to be situated in the grounds of Plato’s Academy, in Athens, lived till the 1970s. An olive believed to have been planted by Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens in the 6^th century BC, is still to be found in Athens. Even older trees have been found in Israel and Arab lands, dating from 3000 and 4000 years ago. The trees of the Garden of Gethsemane are said to be dating from the time of Jesus.

In literature too, we know of several millenary trees: Homer featured olive trees in his poetry. Remember Odysseus bed?

My own poem is about putting down roots, both literally and metaphorically. You can read it here.

My novel “Alexandrias 40: In the Shade of the Lemon Tree” is also set around a tree, and it includes a number of surprising uses for its fruit. Not long now till the book is out. Watch this space.

For instructions on how to submit to the next Festival of Trees here.

“Poetry helps us to revive, heal or endure” and the official website for this day provides a number of resources to help celebrate this poetry day 2010.  There is a small selection of poems on this year’s theme of Home here

Andy Jackson, of North Carr Light, “A newsy blog for creative writers in Dundee, Perth & Angus” set out to create a

Patchwork Poem for National Poetry Day 2010

Poets of all shapes, ages and sizes sent in work; 43 of them “from established Scottish poets such as Sheila Templeton and Eleanor Livingstone to a group of schoolchildren from Aberdeenshire and attendees at an Adult Learning Centre on the West Coast…to south of the border and as far away as Germany…” Andy Jackson, who edits the North Carr Light blog, writes. (Indeed, myself included!)

This is how the tourism office describes Murnau:

In Murnau nature, art and culture form a special bond. World-renowned artists like Kandinsky, Münter and Horváth lived here and found inspiration in the picturesque landscape at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps with its romantic lakes and unique moorlands.

The moor, Murnauer Moos as it is called in German, right next to the town of Murnau, is an enormous nature reserve, the largest in Central Europe and, surrounded by the Bavarian Alps, benefits from a micro-climate that supports an extraordinary range of animals and vegetation.

Meadows, marshes and mires; bog and creeks invite and nourish butterflies, insects, and rare birds. The light is translucent, the air uplifting, and the colors of the wild orchids, irises, grasses, and innumerable other plant varieties are thought to “sing.” Painters, photographers, art, nature, and bird-lovers make their pilgrimage to the moor to hear these songs.

Whenever I can, I go for walks there. My poem Murnau, published in escarp.org on the 8^th of August 2010 is a twitter-sized attempt to condense the experience of walking on the moor without losing sight of some of the cultural associations of the area.

This poem is a suicide note addressed to a number of unusual addressees, leaving the content of the note to the reader’s imagination. It puzzled and haunted me for the last few weeks: its exquisite, lyrical tone, its mysteries and the ways it brings nature alive through its lines.

A Critical analysis by Tammy Ho Laiming and Jarno Jakonen appeared recently in A Cup of Fine Cha. I thoroughly enjoyed reading both, poem and analysis, and kept them with me for weeks, chewing on words, mulling over the subtle allusions.

Tammy Ho Laiming and Jarno Jakonen’s analysis of the poem, as well as the comments, provide a beautiful and multi-faceted context to the poem. There is whole list of addressees in this “Suicide Note”: “frog, cicadas, rain clouds, gardens, worms, grass, deer, curtains, noise, lights, glass trails, heart, hands, ink, bruises, rivers, summers, monsoons and thunderbolts,” which the analysis and the comments fully and thoroughly explore.

I have nothing to add, except one question: Where are the people? Where are the relationships with people? The nature described in the poem is giving, generous – though providing what is usually offered by humans: warmth is offered by glow worms, for instance. And as if to emphasize the point, neighbours and strangers appear only impersonally as in “the shining lights of the neighbours and their last ashen cigarettes.”

So, for me, there is so much loneliness and sadness in the persona pouring out every time nature stands in for the human touch: friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, or even kind strangers. What could be more indicative of sadness, and indeed despair, than the need to use “broken glass trails that will show the way to strangers”?

From this perspective, what if, in a well-encrypted way, we are led to ask: does the poem take the line of praising nature instead of criticizing fatal failings of the human heart?

The poem “Where were you last night?” was written for a photographer friend; his photograph of a pair of bedroom slippers with the words “Her bedroom sippers,” used for inspiration.

The poet rose to the occasion, a difficult one, since it does not simply involve writing in response to a photograph, but a picture by a photographer and friend. How close is the friendship, one wants to ask, how much information is one not privy to, why bedroom slippers, what is the artist’s intention? And yet, on reading the poem, these questions lose their urgency, as we enter, or rather are led into, a world we feel we know, which however appears magical at the same time. From a book launch, to fairy tales, to Moscow, to Chelsea, to hotels and linguistic stops, we are taken round the world and back into the poet’s arms.

There are so many things I like about this poem that to single out one thing would do injustice to the rest. Nevertheless, I will pick out a theme which resonates particularly strongly with me.

The first stanza gives a clue that serves as an entry point. The narrator might be asking herself the question “Where were you …?” The book launch she attended was a boring event, too many writers’ egos, neat piles of books and lots of wine on an empty stomach! But we know you can’t judge a book by its cover. This leads the narrator to crack open the book pile, and the stories, fairy tales, metaphors, characters come tumbling out in the subsequent stanzas. The writer is never bored, or alone… and the reader is certainly entertained and amused, but also puzzled.

At the same time, a sense of longing and loneliness comes across in the poem. “Where were you last night?” might also be a question asked of the “you” in the poem – as if the narrator wished the “you” had been with her. The repeated question suggests feeling excluded, or left; and all that within the context of closer intimacy claimed by the words in the photograph “Her bedroom slippers.” In asking the “where were you” question, the narrator implies “you” could have been with her, “at home,” in her own arms, with her wearing “her bedroom slippers.” Perhaps, the fact that “you” were not is just as well, as one might imagine that, had that “you” been at home with her, the poem might not have been written!

In this sense, for me, this poem also explores the source(s) of creativity: is the feeling of a lack, of longing and of loss an essential ingredient of creative work? What other ingredients are there? And why is inspiration and creative effort so often experienced as capricious, and fragile, needing to be nursed and safeguarded? There is a powerful hint in the poem at our anxieties about the fragility of the creative process: one snowflake and we can be blinded for ever… There is a display of poetic force in this poem which transcends and transforms the longing into a poetic journey well worth embarking on.

It is a brilliant self-reflective poem, based on experiencing the human body as a thinking as well as a feeling person.

Winner of the 2010 Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly award, she made the news at a time when she was almost forgotten.  Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman, commented on her “sober and clear-eyed serenity,”  and her strong reserve. “We live in a time when poetic styles seem to become more antic and frantic by the day, and Taylor’s voice has been muted from the start,” The Guardian reported.  Others, commenting on her award, made strong references to her age.

Her poetry, though, speaks for her talent and originality; her making us see the world anew – in this case, our own body.