Jackie'spoetry

Portraits and poverty

2012-01-09T07:32:00.001Z

Frans Hals Gypsy woman

Research into portraits for my ongoing collaboration with Jane Fordham resonated strongly this morning when I was reading 'The Art of the Portrait' by Norbert Schneider. In a section on the 17th century painter Frans Hals' and his work, The Governors of the Old Men's Almshouse at Haarlem, Schneider notes:

'...the ruling strata began to view persons who were suffering hardship, or who were socially marginalised, as lazy and unwilling to work. The upper classes, whose economic interests, based on the principle of wealth accumulation, had led to the widening of the gulf between rich and poor in the first place, thus tended to see the resultant misery as deriving from a congenital ignobility of character in members of the lower classes....'

As I am reading, Radio 4 is reporting record sales of Rolls Royce cars, Aston Martins and Jaguars in the UK while another news item is suggesting the poor are having larger families in order to obtain more benefits.

The workshop book for writers

2012-01-07T10:50:00.002Z

The workshop book for writers begins on my new blog

After more than 20 years of running workshops I'm digging out exercise books, files and rooting around on the top of the wardrobe to write a workshop book for writers. I'm going to share the best and worst experiences in schools, the community, business, reflect on what works and why, share exercises. Look at the sidebar for a link.

The crow, seal pup and Russian doll

2012-01-01T11:43:00.001Z

In my bag on New Year's Day, these treats, tokens, talismans came home with me.

Quiz prize seal pup

Crow eating holly by Jane Fordham

Russian gingerbread doll, handpainted
with food colouring by Jane Fordham

Between then and now

2011-12-31T09:22:00.001Z

Dawn and the elm outside my window

Almost catatonic from the Downton Abbey two series set, I donated a box of Milk Tray to my son, knowing he'd eat it in a sitting and save me.
This was after the first detox dream in which I am trying to pack shelfloads of dictionaries and encyclopaedias into two suitcases so I can catch a bus to the Eurostar. I miss it and cry. I am sensible enough to discard the make-your-own paper suitcase that I'd bought for emergencies.
Generally I am awake before dawn and amazed at how relaxed I feel again, post-lodger. It was a financial experiment and the results were conclusive - for the five out of seven days when I am mostly at home, I do not want to deal with a stranger's neuroses.
I heard someone on the radio exhort the value of reasons to be cheerful. Ian Dury made a song of them:

"A bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it
You're welcome, we can spare it - yellow socks
Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty
Going on 40 - no electric shocks" (Ian Dury, Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3, 1979)

Today's reasons to be cheerful: a Russian Christmas tonight with summer pudding made of vodka soaked raspberries, another year's MOT, walks with Roxy, Giya's wall of pics, Mrisi singing in the cellar, a notebook and pen, la Fontasse, Italian kale on the allotment, a line of parsley, the three Janes, Maude, Julie, Catherine, Hilary, new brogues (a present from my mother), Smokey Robinson, listening again to Joni Mitchell, as well as the elm and looking at cliffs with Giya in the rain.

Dusk and the coast road from Brighton Marina wall

The North comes south

2011-11-30T10:34:00.002Z

l to r: Sarah Salway, Liz Bahs, Peter Sansom, Ann Sansom,
Lin Lundie, Michaela Ridgeway, Rebecca Farmer

The Poetry Business, publisher of iconic magazine The North, is celebrating its 25th anniversary and its two directors, Peter and Ann Sansom have been on the road for months.
Their tour included a weekend masterclass at Chesworth Arts Farm in Horsham to bring November to a brilliant conclusion.
Both are inspirational poets and workshop leaders. Peter's book Writing Poems (Bloodaxe) is a classic. Many of the UK's leading poets have been published in The North, often at the start of their careers. The Poetry Business pamphlets, too, offer a good representation of the state of British poetry.
What made the masterclass work so well? 10 willing participants, lots of writing, intelligent reading, logs, biscuits, coffee and tea, the quiet of Chesworth - stepping out of the everyday and seeing it differently.

http://www.poetrybusiness.co.uk/
http://www.artsagri.com/site/index.php

Unknown artists

2011-11-29T07:37:00.000Z

Detail of a painting by Kate Rook

You find them in jumble sales, charity shops, car boot sales - paintings by unknown artists. You might buy one for its frame, for the cat's face staring back at you. I have a woman who reminds my mother of her awful aunt, another a line of cottages by the sea where I've always wanted to live. The cat's face is perfect but the robin sitting close by is way too small. The snow on this boy's wellies and coat only shows in a digital photo - in the print itself you'd need perfect eyesight to notice. Each of the childrens' faces in this large painting of a school and playground on a snowy day is individual. Intriquing, isn't it, that an artist can pay such attention, be so precise and be untraceable. What happened to Kate Rook?

Neighbourhood of knowledge

2011-10-31T10:29:00.004Z

Lewes Road reminds me of Shakespeare's second best bed in its ranking as second most polluted road in Brighton.
Stuck for how to describe this jammed up, run down source of underage booze and fags, the council's opted for 'neighbourhood of knowledge'.

What student quarter (or increasingly, rich kids' playground) means is off licences and takeaways, chalk invites on the pavement to Victoria's birthday, parties in conservatories, hammering on doors, public status updates at 4 am, no room on the morning bus, seagull-pecked bin bags.

When the big cars come cruising in September, it's the landlords checking their investments followed by mummy's 4x4. So many homes have been turned over to students round here Brighton and Hove council is starting to panic. Why? The dent in council council takings is showing.

Instructions for how to make a student house

You buy a 3 bedroom house with living room. You divide the big bedroom and living room. Now you have 6 bedrooms. You convert the attic. Now you have 8 bedrooms. You put a conservatory in the garden - that makes a living room. You charge each student £400 a month and your income is £38,400 a year. You don't have to register as a house in multiple occupation. You don't pay council tax.

Instructions for how to move in
Get so drunk you can't remember your address. Stagger to the neighbour's. Threaten the girl inside, hammer on her door until the police turn up. Speak with a posh accent. You're rich and white - they won't arrest you.

Sunday

2011-10-17T11:18:00.001Z

Start of my walk with Roxy, a friend's Springer

Stanmer woods

Towards Stanmer village

Mrisi and Giya harvesting Bramleys

The harvest!

Autumn is an executioner - a game involving tea and poems

2011-10-06T09:27:00.012Z

For Autumn is an executioner and her hour is darkness. She is a warrior and her element is metal. Ou-Yang Hsiu (1007-1072)

The quote comes from a piece called Autumn translated by Arthur Waley. It's in an old collection More Translations from the Chinese that I bought from someone who was selling off his dead mother's books piecemeal years ago. I go back to it often, as I go back to Michael Longley's poems, because it reminds me that simplicity is a good goal. It reassures me that poets whose work survives talk to me because their language is simple, their thoughts universal.

This leads me to a poem of Longley's called Snow Water, the title poem to his 2004 collection from Cape. It's in the first person and a request for 'a gift of snow water' as a 60th birthday present. Longley delights in tea names - Silver Needles and Cloud Mist - and the stories they contain. But there's far more to this poem - its life below the surface is thrilling and testament to Longley's erudition and playfulness.

When I was doing research for Whittard re-branding work, I often had his poem in mind. Then I came across a painting by Wang Shih-shen 'Asking for Snow Water' from 1740. The story of the painting is told by Alfreda Murck in a Record of the Art Museum (Vol. 37, No. 2, 1978). I'm quoting it at length in order to show the game Longley is playing within his poem and with it too, but which many readers are probably unaware of. Effectively, Longley puts himself in a tradition, a conversation, a match between poets continuing through time. What is also so fascinating and relevant to the observations Murck makes and the content of the poems she quotes is the way Longley himself writes about friends both living and dead. How he places himself in many of his poems within a tradition and how he constantly refers to those he admires - classical writers as well as more recent poets.

Murck observes..."Eleven literati embellished the painting with reflective poems and comments. The intertwined lives of these men and the evolution of the document make a fascinating story. For whom was the painting intended? Who is the figure and what is being carried? What prompted the numerous inscriptions? The story unfolds through the inscriptions. In the first, the artist makes a plea to his friend Chiao Wu-tou for water melted from snow. We learn that it was for Chiao that Wang painted 'Asking for Snow Water', that the figure is a young servant carrying a crock of water to Wang, and that the mist clouding the thatched house is steam billowing from Wang's tea brazier…..

"...Of the many painters benefiting from the cultural florescence in Yangchou at the time some exceptional talents emerged to be called the Eight Eccentrics of Yangchou. Wang was addicted to tea and plum blossom. it was his addiction to tea that prompted him to paint 'Asking for Snow Water'....His first inscription, written in eleven lines of varying length below the scene, gently hints that a gift of water would be welcomed:

"If I were to get teeth-chilling water gathered by a mountain household,

My cloud-covered pot would echo all night with its icy soul!"

Murck continues: "He sent the poem to his friend, who sent it back with the gift of snow water. Wang replied:

"As Master Wu-tou has kindly sent snow water,

I have composed another poem in thanks for his elegant gift..."

Murck describes how poems were added to the scroll over the years by others:

"When I was in humble circumstances, I met one who became both my lasting friend and teacher,

Clasping the frozen snow to his breast, he had the bearing of a wild crane;

Who would have thought his pure spirit would go to the grave?....."

And another....

"By paper windows in a bright bamboo hut

A table spotless without dust;

There is a carefree brewer of tea,

And the man who sent snow on a clear cold day;

Their deep friendship is as pure as the water...."

Don't commit adultery - a poem of the decade

2011-09-21T09:39:00.006Z

Bruegel's Christ and the woman taken in adultery - I love its restraint

It's a weird list of places, contexts, partners. Once when I read it live a man told me afterwards (proudly) he'd done all but two. I read it to a vicar, bolt upright in the front row. Fortunately I didn't know he was there until afterwards. He'd been dragged along by his wife.

I've always liked list poems - Michael Longley's brilliant at them, as is George Mackay Brown. There's some brilliant ones by Fred Voss and a chilling one (A list of requirements for the end of the world) by Neil Rollinson. One of Carol Ann Duffy's most famous list poems is Prayer, using names from the shipping forecast and there's Moniza Alvi's beautiful poem, Indian Cooking that uses a list of spices.

Anyway, this poem is included in a Poems of the Decade anthology, published by Faber in October...and apparently ends the book. The poem's a pivot in Commandments - incredulous at people's ingenuity.

I'm in great company - Sussex is well represented, with Catherine Smith and Ros Barber also featured. Other locals too, I'd guess, but I haven't seen the book yet.

Re-orientation

2011-08-30T16:54:00.000Z

Two weeks since I left the low yellow house in France overlooking Europe's highest cliff and a 45 minute scramble to a turquoise sea. I didn't expect to get ill so fast. I felt I could face the winter after so much intense, welcome sun.
The time after a holiday is a re-orientation, back into whatever I might describe as normality. My normality has been fruit picking, jam making, catching up with friends and since being laid low, reading trashy novels. I read very little on holiday - a few pages of Ulysses that I'm revisiting after 35 years, half of John Fuller's compelling new book 'Who is Ozymandius and other Puzzles in Poetry?'
If I hadn't been ill, I would have totally detoxed from trash reading. People keep asking me about the disturbances. What a relief to be away from the chatter. I don't want to enter into the discussions anymore about politics. There is no honest discussion about modern life in the UK.
The distance is something I don't want to lose in my re-orientation. Distance is the way into autumn and winter.

Scrumping - stealing or not?

2011-07-28T08:31:00.004Z

The elm outside my window

Picking wild blackberries and plums has been renamed 'scrumping' by the Brighton Permaculture Trust, a worthy new organisation that runs courses in things we've all forgotten, like scything.
The Trust gets teams of people together with shiny aluminium ladders and buckets to collect unpicked fruit. I encountered a gang of them recently, off to climb some mirabelle trees.
I thought scrumping meant stealing fruit, specifically apples, so it seems an odd term to use for foraging.
Then if you look in the the urban dictionary its newest meaning is dry sex....which adds another perspective to scrabbling around abandoned allotments.
Some of the permaculture people's courses look interesting - I considered one on pruning old apple trees, another on mushroom hunting, but they aren't cheap.
And there's something about new enthusiasm for old ways that makes my toes curl. Is is that truth has to be reinvented by each generation? Is it labrador style slobbery gushing that puts me off? Or the language?
Take the first line of the information on Scything: "A two-day hands-on course held in a beautiful location..."
If people do not pay attention to language, it makes me suspicious of what else they might not be paying attention to. Like the Poetry Society, Arts Council and all the others too lazy to check what their announcements and reports reveal about them.

Morning carcasses

2011-07-14T07:53:00.008Z

The cat left miniscule guts on the stairs for me, too

I found two of the night's carcasses this morning in Sheepcote Valley - one defiant, the other already submitting to brambles.
They remind me of enormous surreal sculptures I saw in a club in Brixton in the 1980s. Was it the Academy? Sculptures made of metal, insect like, precursors of the fantasy worlds created in clubland now.
When I brought the dog back to my neighbour there was a circus van parked outside her house. Cirque Kinetique....probably off to Latitude where my son's selling donuts this weekend...and my daughter's at the Avignon Festival for the first time - a festival I went to three years in a row with Jane Fordham. It was that experience that gave rise to the work we are now doing together. We met yesterday again to complete two more books. These are one-off pieces that are the result of shared thinking, research, ideas.

It is, in fact, a unique collaboration - we are not illustrating one another's work, we are drawing from the same well, shaping one another's work, allowing circumstances, materials, instinct to direct us. We are being confronted with the consequences of chance decisions, seemingly random links and yet both of us know that there is a seam running through we can trust. We have produced several books and are mapping the experience in a private blog.

A brawl of poets or one love?

2011-07-02T09:02:00.007Z

One love, one heart
Let's get together and feel all right
Hear the children crying - one love 
Hear the children crying - one heart

From One Love by Bob Marley

Poets used to gather in a grand old mansion in Earls Court. It was a short stagger from the tube, close to the legendary Troubadour cafe and large enough to cater for the crush of a book launch with free wine. This was the home of the Poetry Society when I began writing - it was quirky, it had character.

I was there for a few launches. Eddie Linden was usually present, Matthew Sweeney, Lavinia Greenlaw and John Hartley Williams were regulars. I remember John Heathcote Williams reading from Sacred Elephant sometime in 1989.

There was a rift in the 1970s. Peter Barry's written a book about it (Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, Cambridge, 2006). He writes: ‘An odd thing happened in British poetry in the 1970s, but the full story has never been told. A small group of “radical” or “experimental” poets took over the Poetry Society, one of the most conservative of British cultural institutions, and for a period of six years, from 1971 to 1977, its journal, Poetry Review, was the most startling magazine in the country.’

One of those radicals was Eric Mottram, another was performance poet Bob Cobbing. I saw Cobbing above a pub in Farringdon when the place was rough. He was performing with maverick saxophonist Lol Coxhill and I'll never forget it although I have totally forgotten the name of the pub and the year. Cobbing silenced a group of heckling lads by discussing sound poetry with them at the bar in the interval. They stayed for the second half and were silent.

I was a member of the Poetry Society for many years because to me it was as important to poetry as the Arvon Foundation where many of us learned our craft on a residential course or two and met lifelong friends.

There's a standing joke among poets, guaranteed to fill an awkward moment - what is the collective noun for a group of us? The Poet Laureate once threw 'a paranoia' into the ring. I think 'a whine' is always appropriate. Few are complimentary. With all that's been going on at the Poetry Society, the resignations and the rumours, it appears 'a brawl of poets' might fit....or is it more of 'a bicker', or 'a distraction of poets'? It's certainly not a celebration or an exaltation right now.

When the Poetry Society moved from Earls Court into the centre of Covent Garden, Betterton Street, there was uproar. The space for readings, launches, gatherings was squeezed to a cramped, uncomfortable and mean little basement - a through route to the toilets - and a corridor for a cafe. I saw the offices recently and I wouldn't work in them. It's an organisation squatting uncomfortably in the centre of London without the means to benefit from a location that used to be impossibly trendy but is now very tired.

Poetry Review, the society's magazine, has an impossible task - to apparently represent the Poetry Society and at the same time pursue whatever editorial line the editor of the time feels is right. Anyone who thinks editors won't be controversial isn't living in the world. It's an editor's job to shake things up, to stamp their personality on a magazine...if you don't like it, you don't buy it. I think the sticking point is the question of whether it should be subsidised. I don't think so. Should the Poetry Society have a flagship magazine? I don't think so either. If Poetry Review was freed from constraint, it could survive or fail on its merits and an editor would be free to take appropriate decisions.

But when I look at the Poetry Society's website - that of our national representative and Arts Council funded organisation - I feel ashamed. It's as uninspired and lacklustre as the basement. I'm not a member anymore. I stopped my membership a few years ago when the 'benefit' of Poetry Review stopped being one.

Look at the website of the Academy of American Poets - its breadth, its professionalism, its value as a database and its worth. This website is well-researched, a resource for the public. It celebrates the differences between poets, it presents us as people who write differently about a range of subjects. You can search for a poem by keyword, by title...you can find poems about teenagers, funerals etc etc. You can search for a poet and there's a biog and picture. There are classroom resources, there are historical and contemporary features on aspects of poetry.

What we have is a website that appears to be more interested in Twitter, Facebook and what the media (selectively) is writing about poetry, a featured poem that's not updated often enough and a cursory diary of what's going on in London. The Young Poets Network is a good initiative, but even that could be more ambitious. Separately, there's the Poetry Archive, a database of poets with astonishing omissions and inclusions and the British Council's contemporary writers database that apparently only features poets who've won prizes.

Where's the blockage? Has no-one seen the Academy of American Poets? Does no-one want to aspire to that level of professionalism and inclusivity? Nah....it appears people are content to fight over turf on a small island and have neglected the need to communicate the diverse range of work being done, the importance of looking for innovation. There was mention of high profile poets. They don't need help! Spend time on the new Cobbings, the experimenters, the radicals, the neglected and ask why they are marginalised....

But where was the Poetry Society's campaign for publishers like Arc, Enitharmon, Anvil and others who lost Arts Council funding? No, weirdly there was barely a single threat of resignation.....

Melancholy

2011-06-15T08:18:00.002Z

Ovid describes the Lemuria, a May festival in Rome, when householders begged the ghosts to leave. Ancient civilisations understood the link between the seasons, our minds and bodies. It was a coincidence that I found a reprinted book by Jane Ellen Harrison 'Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion'. May was a bad month for me and many friends, packed with ghosts, and as I was reading I came across a phrase 'the natural melancholy of the spring'.

It was there like a gift, an insight waiting to be pounced on and the clouds of elderflower and cow parsley blossoms, swathes of poppies on the Downs, made sense too: sophorific scents, the colour.

Seven years ago this month, Sunday 27 June 2004, my brother Michael was killed in a plane crash. When there is not a chance to say goodbye, to make peace, I think we reconfigure these ghosts constantly and need to usher them out for a while until the day of the dead comes round again.

The scent of lilies

2011-05-16T09:09:00.007Z

Lilies in the front room

Orchids in my bedroom

Justine carried over a maroon glass vase of lilies, I carried the orchids, freesia and roses. The house was suddenly tropical as if the temperature had been racked up and I was not in my own home at all, but a hotel. Justine and Fi got married the other day and were off for a week's holiday - how kind of them to bring me the flowers. So every room was renewed and the front room was locked in the perfume of lilies.

I love the climbing roses that people train around doors and on fences. My mother's always had Alberic Barbier - it divided our house in Farnham from the neighbour, it scented the evenings but it dropped petals at a touch. When Justine brought the lilies, I had vases of tight buds that Vera gave me when I went round to help her trim her yellow rose. Like Alberic Barbier, Vera's climber has blossoms that are perfect as they open, then full-headed last a day. So these flowers, from florists and far away, have kept the ox-eye daisies on the allotment for a while longer. The roses are finished, some of the lilies, most of the freesia, but the orchid is still magnificent.

Mandela, roses, freesia in the kitchen

A fox at the Handmade House and a Green victory

2011-05-08T10:35:00.005Z

Chickens alert to the passing fox

I had my back to it, but Mum and Jane saw it flash past and the chickens flapped to the roof of their coop when a fox rushed through the garden of the Handmade House towards the sculpture trail.

We were having lunch after looking round, particularly at Jane's paintings (Jane Fordham) and Emma's jewellery (Emma Willcox). I've worn two of Emma's bracelets for years - never take them off in fact, and Jane's work is all over my house.

The Handmade House is on the outskirts of Ditchling, the village at the foot of the Downs made famous by Eric Gill. Last year I bought Mum a duck - she's mildly obsessed by them - and this year they're joined by crows, owls and a kingfisher. Jane's paintings on wood are intricate images of plates and cups, as well as two standing nudes and a line of intensely colourful individual fruits.

I'm not sure what open houses say about Brighton or the difficulties artists have promoting themselves. The approach is just like that in Venda, the north of South Africa, where artists sell what they can from their homes. It's a feature of the Brighton Festival, anyway and this year the success of the Greens in the city - 23 seats on the council, the single largest party - has added another layer of significance. Brighton, as always, ahead of the country, has a chance to distinguish the city, hopefully using its phenomenally creative population to make a mark on the future.

The Handmade House. Beards Place Farm, 98 Lewes Road, Ditchling, BN6 8TZ 01273 845355

Larks, poets and census

2011-05-05T11:02:00.002Z

This morning I walked Roxy, my neighbour's dog. The racehorses were out exercising and there was an exaltation of skylarks. Sheepcote Valley's one of their main breeding sites. It was bitterly cold but that didn't put off a bird watcher, pointing his lens between the elders. I wandered over to him to chat about red kites. I knew they were in Wales and the borders and didn't know they were in Sussex. But I was intriqued by a large bird of prey perched on an allotment shed the other day. Its wings were unmistakably russet. He told me there'd been sightings, so I checked... it seems I'm one of many who've been lucky enough to see one.

Yesterday I was in London for a meeting about the Young Poets Network which is being set up by the Poetry Society. I met some inspiring writers and my son performed in the evening. We talked about what young writers need, how we can help them. There were some brilliant ideas and we recorded a collective poem about what we wished we'd known when we started to write.

I returned home to another letter from the census threatening me with prosecution. I filled in my form. I sent it off. Apparently the organisation co-ordinating Census 2011 (run by the Office for National Statistics) is so incompetent my form has been lost.

This morning after my walk, I emailed Glen Watson, the 2011 Census Director. I asked if he'd read Kafka and Orwell. I promised to visit him at his office in Titchfield and sit in reception until he apologised for threatening me with a £1,000 fine and criminal record. I received a reply by return and he says he believes me. Will his reply stand the Kafka test? We'll see.

My mother's peony dress

2011-04-27T07:29:00.004Z

I think this is 1950s, possibly early 60s.

Original 1950s dress bought in Portsmouth 35 years ago

The peonies are early, just flowering. They remind me every year of my mother's party dress. But I can never picture it exactly. In my mind, it's strapless, floor length, printed with hand-sized pink heads, exotic and extravagent. It was always in her wardrobe, the full skirt taking up all the space behind my father's suits.

Even during punk, fashion was stealing from the forties and fifties. Was it to do with the elegance that comes from need? The inventiveness of making do?

Portsmouth, where I was a student, was a fantastic hunting ground. Poor, run down, it had as many charity shops as anyone could dream of. When I went back to Surrey to work, there were the jumbles in East Horsley that have almost mythical status in my memory. I jumbled in the afternoon to dress up on Saturday night.

A lot of my finds have gone, including ankle tight trousers I made from fabric printed with 50s scenes of Paris in a vague Bernard Buffet style. These two prints survived. They're not as loose around my waist but the blue one will see this summer again.

And of course my daughter now has her eye on the suitcase on top of my wardrobe. Her prom dress is a homage to the fifties in ironic Brighton style. And she's promised the sequinned sixties number I wore to the TS Eliot awards party that won a compliment from the delightful Mark Doty, just before the announcement that he'd won it that year.

Arc: poetry of the world

2011-04-04T08:36:00.015Z

Tile in a clay poem made by children

Who'll find me the word for birch in the world's languages when I need it? A translator. A poet.
Birch is paper and wine. Some trace the word to Sanskrit (bhurga a tree with bark used to write on). Coleridge called it Lady of the Woods.
Arc Publications is one of the UK's leading presses for poetry in translation. Its Arts Council grant was cut last week.
Arc's list brings us the poetry of the world, from places where the birch does and doesn't grow.
Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti is one of them. He told the Guardian, "I learn from trees. Just as many fruits drop before they're ripe, when I write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones."
Barghouti has twelve poetry collections in Arabic. His Collected works was published in 1997 and his first major book in English translation, Midnight and Other Poems, was published by Arc in 2008.
This is an extract from his long poem, Midnight. There is more on Arc's website.
"you stay wide awake, when all others go to sleep, 
afraid that the stars will fall 
without your hands to nail them 
to the ceiling of the night.
The weary sun's rays settle sugar in grapes, 
crimson in cherries, honey in figs 
and olive oil in jars.
War itself, 
leaning on its cane, 
strolls occasionally 
down the corridor of peace." (Mourid Barghouti, Midnight, Arc 2008).
Here are some of the poets on Arc's list from countries above and below the equator, whose work is available because of the work translators and poets do together.... and as a consequence give us the world view a language contains within each line, character, space and full stop.
Kunwar Narain, Amarjit Chandan, Meta Kusar, Doris Kareva, Regina Derieva, Ewa Lipska, Victor Rodriguez Nunez, Cathal O' Searcaigh, Tomaz Salamun, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Georg Trakl, Claude de Burine, Valerie Rouzeau, Cevat Capan, Kristina Ehin, Gabriel Ferrater, Mila Haugova, Soleiman Adel Guemar, Dorothea Rosa Herliany, Yannis Kondos, Sabine Lange, Inna Lisnianskaya, Bejan Matur, Larissa Miller, Miklos Radnoti, Tadeusz Rosewicz, Eli Tolaretxipl.....among the many others.

They don't like poets, those people at the Arts Council

2011-04-02T06:48:00.003Z

Arc publishes poets from all over the world
and many in translation, as well as the inimitable
Ivor Cutler and artist Glen Baxter.

Someone got very angry the other day when I suggested that the Arts Council has become irrelevant. I was talking about how support for poetry and particularly poets has been systematically destroyed by that same body in recent years and wondering why. Last night, at Fabrica's new show, I learned that animation's suffered a similar attack. Is it that poetry has no expert champions anymore in the funding places? That poets who've done so well for themselves won't speak out when the form they work in is under attack?

I tried to contact my south east regional council members recently with a complaint. The Arts Council no longer allows members of the public to do this. If the Arts Council chooses not to forward an email to a member of the regional council, it won't. It filters the content of emails and decides if a question about the arts in your region is appropriate for a regional council member to read. If an administrator decides it's not, you have to make your enquiry through a relationship manager.

I was talking to the tax office recently about a couple of letters I received. One arrived a month after the posting date, the other two weeks. It's too confusing to even attempt to repeat the sequence of events or conversations. I was in quite a good mood, though, and eventually I laughed and asked the person on the phone if he'd ever read Kafka. His reply was beautiful: no comment.

And I think that is where we're at with the whole lot of them who take our money and redistribute it, including the Arts Council. Perhaps we need to just change our idea of what they claim to do. Not listen to what they say, but look at what they do.

They take money away from Arc Publications and Enitharmon, two independent poetry publishers (independent being the key word) and give money to Faber & Faber.

According to the Bookseller, "Faber has reported a record turnover of £17.5m for 2010." Sales were up 10% and the chief executive and publisher Stephen Page said: “We are delighted with last year’s performance. Sustaining our profit and growing sales while investing in our digital future and launching new businesses was an excellent achievement. The momentum of our publishing success has carried through to this year and we have just completed a very satisfactory first half.”

Arc needs people to speak up for it and draw attention to this kind of strangeness. Was this what the Arts Council was for? To fund big business and millionaires?

Textures of a Sunday morning

2011-03-07T08:30:00.000Z

Sunday morning walk through Stanmer woods, down into the valley, through the village. Bluebells in waiting. Until then, these were some of the landmarks: a lopped tree, tractor path, mossy tyre, what wind does to plastic sheeting, the forge sign in Stanmer village.

Liberation literature and women's writing

2011-02-25T08:11:00.002Z

What is my daughter's future?

What do we admire in the literature of liberation and who are its loudest champions? I hear intellectuals elevating it again and for good reason - liberation from the state, class, economic repression, the individual at the heart of it, a hero.

And where does women's writing sit in the literature of liberation? It links democracies and oligarchies as well as distancing itself in the language it uses, the metaphorical landscape it paints. Liberation movements always create new aesthetics.

When I read poems of resistance, listen to the songs, I hear that the real struggles start in the home, classroom, workplace. They begin with how people treat one another, how they listen (or don't) to one another. They begin with how each of us feels taking the kids to school, growing vegetables, wandering into a cafe, cleaning the kitchen floor.

A woman, though, wherever she lives in the world is more likely to be paid less than a man, less likely to receive respect for her work. She is more likely to be beaten at home for just being a women. She is excluded from meetings, from stages, from newspapers and magazines by the very intellectuals who debate liberation theory because her language does not fit and her metaphors disgust or discomfort them.

Some of the so-called revolutionaries - in awe of revolutionaries of the past and worldwide - are actively resisting the most basic rules of freedom: equality at home, at school, at work...wherever people are because they do not want to hand over power to women. It is a theme some of the African continent's most impressive writers have focused on for years: Nawal El Saadawi, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Ba, Ama Ata Aidoo. Equality means the same numbers of women on those stages, in those pages....etc etc

"Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, because Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Men had nothing to do with Him," said Sojourner Truth in 1851.

A new anthology of liberation writing by women in African countries was published last month. Domestic violence is a dominant theme in many of the stories, poems and essays - a landbridge if ever there was one to the UK and the US.

Abena P. A. Busia writes the introductory poem, “If we don’t tell our stories who will speak out for us, when we claim our bodies for ourselves and weep no more... If we don’t tell our stories, hailstones will continue to fall on our heads.”

African Women Writing Resistance An Anthology of Contemporary Voices published by Fahamu Books and Pambazuka Press.

Faces of women poets

2011-02-20T09:45:00.001Z

Phillis Wheatley

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz

Sappho

Gwendolyn Brooks

Christina Rossetti

Faces of women poets are on my mind. The artist Jane Fordham revisits women's faces constantly. She goes back to icons, medieval madonnas and the vibrant faces of ancient Egypt looking straight at you from the past. Her work captures the essence of that direct, outward stare.

When Ros Barber sent me a preview of the website we're devising for women poets currently writing in the UK, I felt a similar impact.

There is no comprehensive list of women poets currently writing in the UK. There are lists based on quality judgements and prizes - all very limited. There are lists of women that others have decided to showcase in anthologies. But nothing based on simple facts: living/writing in the UK, alive, female.

So we began collecting names. Firstly from personal knowledge and our bookshelves, then from an email to people we knew, hoping it would become viral. It has. Most responses have been delighted, generous and helpful.

So we are building our wall of women's faces and those direct gazes assertive, engaged, will transmit the poetry being written today.

The swans of Littlehampton slipway

2011-02-10T10:08:00.004Z

A bucket of fresh water is kept on Littlehampton harbour slipway for a pair of swans and their cygnets.
I was hanging out of the Look and Sea Centre window, waiting to start a workshop for teachers on myths, when this one wandered over for a drink.
I should have called everyone to the window when they arrived, to list swan stories: Leda, The Children of Lir, the Norse swans that drink from the Well of Urd, the Finnish swan of Tuonela (the underworld), their association with the goddess Saraswati, the legend of Odette, the swan of riddle seven in the Exeter Book.....
Apart from looking at Ted Hughes' Crow, we didn't spend a lot of time on birds but we did focus on childhood and places associated with home that carry their own mythical quality - places we link with death, threat, escape and people we remember: eccentrics, the exceptionally kind, the odd and the damaged.
Kevin Crossley Holland's translation of The Exeter Book of Riddles was published by Enitharmon in 2008, Michael Alexander's Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book by Anvil in 2007. Both of them are small poetry presses with fantastic lists.
Da Vinci, Gericault and Michelangelo all painted Leda and the Swan. Da Vinci's preparation drawing is amazing but there's another painting by Jan Asselijn, The Threatened Swan, that shows the physical power of this bird and reminds me of watching a swan with cygnets seeing off a rottweiler by the Wey once. You can hear riddle seven read in old English on YouTube: http://wn.com/Exeter_Book

Funeral horses

2011-02-07T13:13:00.000Z

One afternoon nearly two years ago, I heard horses outside my window and saw four of them being taken out of their harnesses after a funeral and loaded into a horsebox.
It's taken this long to write about them in a way I felt came close to the memory. It's not that unusual to see horses outside. Lewes Road ended up being the spur. A week or so after I finished it I was on my way to walk Roxy and saw another pair being loaded up. The feather-topped bridles are hanging from a hinge near the ramp.

New butcher and grocer on Lewes Road

2011-02-02T14:24:00.002Z

If I could have chosen a mentor I'd have gone for Walt Whitman, printer's devil, poet and just as Alan Ginsberg imagined him in the supermarket, I'd take him for a wander along Lewes Road.
I think Whitman would enjoy the renaissance of this polluted spar out of the city, lethal for cyclists especially in winter rush-hour rain.
At the junction of my hill a new butcher's is opening. The big white tiles are on the walls, the sign - meat and poultry - is on the front. A few doors along, a new multicultural grocer (their description) advertising halal meat, fruit and veg. There's a new internet cafe too.
Lewes Road seemed doomed when Tesco forced the closure of the community garden but then pulled out, leaving developers to a digger and impenetrable fence decorated with signs like 'children don't play here'.
But some of its renaissance must be down to a brilliant Turkish grocer that opened a few years ago, perhaps in the wake of Taj's success in town. Its olives, haloumi and bread are incomparable.
And new shops are opening around it with names to dream on: Wizard of Ink, Charisma, Fellas. As cash is squeezed, maybe we're going back to shopping locally and daily?

Signs and augurs

2011-01-26T09:23:00.010Z

The year's worst week had passed by the time I saw this depressed van outside Worthing station. The far wall on a street corner shows the sun was out - all day, in fact. But during that trough that we name melancholy, misery, gloom, despondency, despair, desolation, doldrums, SAD, slump, decline, downturn, blues, hollow, standstill, dent, cavity, dip, pit, hole, trough, crater, basin and bowl, one Sunday, the sun came out. Brighton rushed to the seafront to double the effect - sun reflected off chalk and sea at Rottingdean so we were in a light tunnel.
I made lists during those days of what I could do to feel better, wrote letters, sent packages I'd had on my desk for days. And standing in the London Road post office, all that was left when the Co-op closed, I wondered what it reminded me of. It was pre-revolution Romania.
This is the view to the right as you queue. The next most constructive use of the Co-op was DreamThinkSpeak's installation last May where the poverty of consumerism was spliced with brilliance of the Cherry Orchard.
I took the depressed van on my phone from a distance. The linguistic brilliance isn't obvious because the business strapline is missing. It's an ironing service.

Bards of Brighton

2011-01-13T10:43:00.004Z

Elm and sunrise, January 2011, from my window

Before John O'Donoghue wrote his magnificent Mind Book of the Year, Sectioned, he put together The Beach Generation - word sketches of some of Brighton's resident poets.
Listing writers associated with a place is a minefield - so many passing through, so many perhaps in hiding, so many ignored. John's was a great idea but no-one has yet written the full story of Brighton's poetry and its poets. It could start in many places....
I've always thought of Bernadette Cremin as the Bard of London Road and its procession of the dispossessed.
Brendan Cleary has to be the Bard of the Gladstone and Bear Road, mourning lost lovers and charting a city's hallucinations.
In the absence of invitations to be a respectable visiting professor I've declared myself Bard of Lewes Road's funeral parlours, booze shops and hairdressers.
I'd vote Rob Hamberger and John McCullough Bards of the seafront and Kemp Town, Maria Jastrebska, Helen Oswald and Dave Swann, Bards of the exiled and allotments, Janet Sutherland and Lee Harwood, Bards of the places we'd sometimes rather be.
Ros Barber will always be the Bard of Embassy Court and Catherine Smith the Bard exploring what you half-see from the corner of your eye.
Catherine has nominated Tom Cunliffe Bard of Brighton Beach Huts and Rachel Rooney Bard of Preston Park and the Rotunda Cafe (one of my fave cafes in the city, actually...)
When I grew up in Farnham, the art school was the place we aspired to, although I was proud of William Cobbett for his sometimes harsh treatment of Surrey in Rural Rides. When I worked in Guildford I associated it with pop stars hiding in the villages, although it was home to Lewis Carroll and Aldous Huxley lived in neighbouring Godalming.
Brighton's associations are documented in diverse places but no-one's ever put cash up for comprehensive research on writers in Brighton.
A city should be proud of its writers and nurture them. Myriad's doing a great job of publishing novelists Sue Eckstein, Ed Siegle and Robert Dickinson - and Waterloo's supporting local poets like Naomi Foyle, John McCullough, Maria Jastrebska, Dave Swann. John Davies keeps PigHog alive and is branching out into videos of writers reading their work. But where's the city's writers' centre, the old Sussex Arts Club, where there were events, a bar, a sense of mutual respect and support?
A South Coast sleaze tour of Brighton mafia would be a worthwhile endeavour too.

Wishes

2011-01-04T10:12:00.011Z

In 2011, I want the grey parrot back in my apple tree but I read in the Argus it's already been adopted. I want to buy a block of Savon de Marseille in the same market as last year - yes, in Marseille. I want my broad beans to survive mice. I want to grow celeriac successfully.

Sheep in fog

2010-12-29T23:41:00.006Z

Sylvia Plath's poem sums up this afternoon on the racecourse, at least its title does. The urban flock on a single slope isn't as dramatic as Plath's hills and her sheep are merely hooves. But her dolorous bells became two foghorns, one bass, one treble, taking turns as the neighbour's dog raced into oblivion. I was disorientated, navigating by blackberry thickets. Other walkers were silhouettes - faceless, impossible to identify as man or woman until we were just a couple of feet away. It was my first walk since emptying a box of Milk Tray almost solo. I've been nurse, scribe, briefly a path clearer and mostly a cook and cleaner. As January sidles closer I dread the days of invoices, bank statements, receipts and accounts. I have shoved everything into the same shoebox under my desk for 12 months. Last night I watched Baraka and realised how little of the world I have seen. So Plath's dark water was ahead of me as I walked to the twin warnings pulsing from the sea.

The hills step off into whiteness

People or stars

Regard me sadly, I disappoint them

Sheep in Fog, Sylvia Plath

Hip hop theatre

2010-12-20T12:28:00.006Z

In the streets of Brighton, an agent provocateur and mischief maker, "a body without bones," cultivates arson and murder.

Dizraeli's rap drama, Bonfire Night, was reincarnated at the Pavilion Theatre last night, generating enough energy to power Brighton's Christmas lights.

The writer, a cast of teenagers and the relentlessly innovative youth arts organisation AudioActive earned their foot-stomping curtain calls.

There were a dozen young people in the play, first put on in 2009 with a cast of four. It's a modern morality play, a tale of the supernatural and its script has the satirical edge of Alexander Pope, interrupted by lyrical reflections on teenage life.

It would be harder to find a better example of arts for young people than this. Rappers Tom Hines (who did a guest appearance in the play as an incompetent copper) and Dizraeli work as tutors for AudioActive, a Brighton based organisation that's raised the status of hip hop in the city thanks also to the unremitting commitment of Adam Joolia.

I declare an interest. These men have given my teenage son life-changing opportunities. They prove the point of writing and composition, why you keep appointments, rehearse and what stage presence means.

Tom is one of the best freestylers in todays UK hip hop scene. He's been working with AudioActive for about 2 years. Two of the cast, Jamal and Mrisi, are also featured on the ITV Fixers Christmas single, Common Ground, downloadable on iTunes. Bonfire Night cast: Tom Sissons, Jamal Ali, Mrisi Makondo – Wills, Emma Blu, Sam Maryon, Jordan ‘Rizzle’ Stephens, Sami Doleh, Dizraeli, Tom Hines, Alex Lynch with rappers Ryan Jupp, Alex Massarella, Jermaine Heat, Jake Bradford, Seeya, Ro Ocean.

Links to AudioActive, Dizraeli, Hines & ITV Fixers:

AudioActive https://audioactive.wordpress.com/

Hinesy Hines http://twitter.com/hinesyhines

Dizraeli http://www.dizraeli.com/
ITV Fixers http://www.itvfixers.com/

The demonisation of 'No'

2010-12-10T09:41:00.002Z

In 1990, I went with Jane B to Trafalgar Square to protest against the poll tax. We were people watching from the National Gallery steps, making our statement quietly and enjoying the carnival. In an instant, it turned. Mounted police charged, people scattered and we managed to get into a pub before they locked the doors. It was later reported as a riot, with demonstrators painted as aggressors. That was not what we saw. We saw a wall of police on horses coming for us without warning, provoking panic and with it justifying almost any tactic the police cared to use.

In 1986, I was working for INS News Agency in Reading and was sent to Stoney Cross in the New Forest with a photographer because the agency was tipped off about a massive police operation to evict new age travellers. At dawn a line of police moved into this peaceful, problem-free settlement, forced whole families out of their vans which they then towed away. Thatcher's response to 'no' was bring in a Public Order Act and prepare the ground for her successor John Major to outlaw a whole way of life with the Criminal Justice Act.

So when a friend rang me last night in a state of shock after the student protest in London, the demonisation of 'No' was one of the things we talked about. Let's face it, when thousands of students walk out of college and school to demonstrate about their right to education, it's embarrassing, isn't it? Better not to have them on the streets.

I believe what I've been told by people in the protests about police being provocative, heavy-handed, offensive and aggressive because I've experienced it on countless demonstrations and in most other dealings with police. Hostility and rudeness is too often the first response to the most innocent question.

I believe the friend who tells me she was almost impaled on a spiked fence when police charged down Victoria Street with utter disregard for people's safety, because she has no reason to lie.

I believe my daughter when she tells me about teenage friends who were beaten up by police on two separate demos because I've been on picket lines and seen what happens when adrenalin runs.

You can write the script and apply it to almost any demo: David Meynell, deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, in charge of the operation, said a peaceful march had been "completely overshadowed by the actions of about 3,000 to 3,500 people in minority groups"....The Home Secretary David Waddington is expected to make a statement to the House of Commons on the rioting tomorrow. That was how the BBC reported the poll tax 'riot' in 1990. Sound familiar?

So, without wanting to join the conspiracy theorists, but bearing in mind all that we know about dirty tricks, unregulated activity in the name of national security and what the last Tory government did to the unions, the rights of assembly and trespass laws.....shouldn't we be concerned about kettling, allowing mounted police to charge children, keeping the streets clear for Christmas shoppers? If kids can't protest, we can wave goodbye to demonstrating about wars, national security, corporate culture, free speech, tax evasion, bankers and corruption.

Found in Marseille by my daughter

http://parfitt.posterous.com/low-orbit-ion-cannon-with-hivemind-loic
http://everything2.com/user/tifrap/writeups/Sussexians+have+31+words+for+Mud

Snow Pavilion

2010-12-02T17:52:00.001Z

Sometimes Brighton Pavilion finds itself. Today is one of those days.

Snow shrine, Sweats and a performance of Weight

2010-12-01T13:56:00.000Z

The African statue with his back to the wall has lost his legs to woodlice over the years he's been outside. Today he looks like a Beefeater guarding a glass of ice and a summer lantern.
Last year the teenagers were out the first morning of snow in the dark chucking snowballs, but this year the cold and the cuts seem to have inspired an adult weariness, fewer sparks of excitement.
I'm looking forward to moving slower, leaving the car, interrupted routines. The onslaught of increasingly mind-blowing Tory plans has been exhausting. And last week was busy - I read some of the new 'Sweats' series at the Red Roaster, an event with Brendan Cleary and Matthew Sweeney to launch Matthew's new book, The Night Post which brings together a selection of older poems. It's always good to hear Matthew read and always an honour to share a mike with him. He's a one-off and his influence has yet to be fully acknowledged.
I always look forward to a monthly workshop with other women poets. We get together in London to share feedback on new work, so I took a poem that has spun off from 'Sweats'. Trying to explore menopause has become a pivot for a certain kind of new work, much more pared down. This approach has undoubtedly been influenced by the comments of the excellent poets in the workshop.
Back to Brighton and a pit stop before going with my daughter to see Weight, a dramatisation of three of Catherine Smith's stories, directed by Mark Hewitt. It is great theatre, minimal and true. Two stories are disturbing, graphic and gripping. Catherine and I had discussed the explicit images in one of them and whether they were appropriate for a teenager. Neither of us was really surprised they turned out to be tame by teen standards.
The third story, surreal and uplifting, describes how a woman discovers flying, post 50, so I went into the Lewes night a few inches off the ground thanks to Catherine. The stories are from her new short story collection, The Biting Point, hot off the press and available from Amazon or Speechbubble Books: www.speechbubblebooks.co.uk

The years

2010-11-10T11:45:00.000Z

I began working as a journalist in 1978 immediately I finished my degree and I was lucky to find a job so quickly. Lucky, as well, to have been working ever since virtually constantly. I totted the years up - 32 of them and all spent writing or, more recently, encouraging others to.
Most of my working life I've been freelance. It's allowed me a four day week, even less, from time to time. It allows me to put washing in the machine while I'm working at home, be around at the end of a school or college day.
The downside is no paid holidays, time off sick and - an issue that may seem a luxury - no paid time to experiment. I gave myself three months this summer to concentrate on poetry and now I want more. It was overdue but I want more of it. In 32 years I've had just one other equivalent block of time, in my 30s, when I spent a summer in France after a relationship ended. The only other work breaks were when I had my children - I could afford about 4 months when I had my son, 5 when I had my daughter.
I wish I could convince myself that it's unreasonable to expect more, that the freedom I've had freelancing more than makes up for the absence of a pension and retirement time. I wish I could use scraps of time better.
But there is no substitute for prolonged thinking time, for what it can yield and the opportunity it offers for chasing a hunch, for daydreaming, for experimenting.
Someone once told me I should write down what I wanted. This is my desire. To find a way of funding six months uninterrupted by work of any kind to write more of the poems that emerged in the summer.

Pheasants and sunrise

2010-10-31T09:17:00.005Z

Ludlow butcher - shooting season

When I was 17 I worked at a chateau in Brittany teaching a 12 year old boy English and helping with domestic work. This Ludlow butcher dunked me momentarily into that Breton summer.
I haven't seen as many dead pheasants since (one of the main family occupations was rearing and selling them).
Ludlow was final stop on a half term road trip that started with Wales for a college open day, Cardiff to see Pete and Alison, then Ludlow to drop in on Jane. The drive towards Llantwit Major was drenched in autumn sun, a Dylan Thomas of a journey filling the car with light. Giya and I clocked up nearly 700 miles.
I'd almost forgotten it was possible to leave the house, I was so tied into post summer cleaning and clearing, waking before dawn and working or reading. There were advantages - autumn sunrise. When I was finishing Commandments I spent the first week of November in Gower. The light was still round and burnished, dawns pink. The drive west and this dawn reminded me I must find time to immerse myself in that way again.

Elms on Hartington Road - another October dawn

Our road trip ended on Friday in time to make a surprise joint 60th birthday in Guildford for Mandy and Nigel. I met them when I started as a trainee on the Surrey Daily Advertiser and needed somewhere to live. The problem was, I was on strike.
Those days seem impossibly long ago, written in black and white pics, re-made in films or novels. In a review of Made in Dagenham the excellent Telegraph critic Charles Spencer remembers the cameraderie of our long strike as well as the cold on the picket lines.
Mandy and Nigel took me in anyway and I was their lodger for many years. We were all so young.

The urge to clear

2010-10-20T08:29:00.001Z

Water's entering my cellar from the front garden and a broken soakaway and an unidentified leak next door. Damp wanders through the house with its smell and condensation. So there's a trench in the front garden and bags of earth and chalk from under the kitchen to dry it out. The dehumidifier's been going since the beginning of summer, the cellar hums constantly.
And I'm starting to associate this permanent drone with that recurring question - what is poetry for? I was reading recently at Lauderdale House in London with poets Lorna Thorpe and Shanta Acharya, plus George Hyde, translator of Mayakovsky. On the way from Brighton, on the train, Lorna and I were passing it between us. We didn't arrive at any conclusions, but maybe talking was enough to dispel some of the isolation that question induces.
Perhaps doubt is a motivator to write if it doesn't tip over into paralysis. The poet James Berry once said to me that writing was just about stamina. It is important just to keep going, not to worry about writing poems that don't make the grade - eventually they will.
I gave myself the summer to write and looking over the results I wonder how three months produced so little. But I guess anything is a bonus cradled in the autumnal urge to clear and re-arrange the furniture that this space also seems to have delivered - some basic need to prepare for winter, stack the logs, dig out the hot water bottles and stack up the recycled paper for another go at poems.

October afternoon Brighton

2010-10-14T12:26:00.001Z

Urban sheep - Brighton council's flock on Whitehawk slope

My neighbour's little springer has been wary of the council flock of sheep ever since she was a puppy and first saw them. Of course, they aren't totally free when they graze the slopes of Whitehawk - there's an electric fence. The now grown dog associates the sheep's baaing with that pain in her nose, the jolt backwards into brambles, and yesterday wouldn't go within a hundred yards of them. So I slogged up the steepest bit of the walk, masochistically, and she ambled up a much gentler incline. The sheep are a peripatetic curiosity - have even made an appearance at one of the local secondary schools - and at one point several of my friends were tempted to apply for the urban shepherd job advertised in the local paper. But Whitehawk's exposed - the wind comes straight off the sea and while it's still a great place to meander in autumn, by January it's a bitterly cold ridge. The compensation, in winter, is the clear blue frosty skies and the sort of display I caught yesterday, when the sun was forced through gaps in the cloud cover onto the sea.

Silver sea

Often up on the ridge with the golfers to my left and sea in front, I imagine myself a long way from Brighton. Whitehawk is a causewayed enclosure, a camp older than Stonehenge and one of a dozen in England although there's nothing to tell us dog walkers, wanderers or even the travellers who stop here every summer, about its history. Several ancient burials have been found here - it was apparently a place people gathered for big events and rituals. Now they gather for racing and bank holiday markets. There used to be a souped up car meeting at the racecourse and sometimes there are wedding fairs. In the summer, travellers left a small boat beached on the turf. Down towards the tip you can sometimes smell methane from the pipes sunk into the earth. And on hot days you can take a path and find tents in a circle among the brambles.

Project Gutenberg, pastries and poems

2010-09-25T08:39:00.002Z

An illustration from Banckes's Herbal 1525,
featured in Eleanour Sinclair Rohde's The Old English Herbals,
published by Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is what the internet's best at - creaking open the doors of the world's storehouses, offering a sample of random, bizarre, quirky and classic books on every subject since printing began in the 15th century. It hardly needs saying that the project is named after the man who invented moveable type and therefore modern printing.

Last year I spent far too much time browsing Gutenberg and I've returned to it recently because I'm researching an idea to slot into a sequence I'm writing.

I stumbled across this great work The Old English Herbals by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde published in 1922. This summer I was singing the project's praises to a French patisserie chef at the wonderful youth hostel in the hills.

I guess the research I'm doing is similar to that of a chef. So much of what we all do is similar, in fact. It's all about ingredients, timing, truth and state of mind. And while on the subject....when I'm reincarnated, I want the name Wynkyn de Worde.

Handmade

2010-09-20T09:03:00.003Z

Written by Lorna Wood, published by Harrap in 1948,
illustrated by Susan B Pearce 1878-1980.

"I'll manage," said Mrs Stiggins, and taking down the muslin curtains from her room, borrowed Nurse Bobberty's sewing machine and made Ameliaranne a perfectly lovely party dress.
Ameliaranne Goes Digging was a present from my aunt Mauya in Australia when I was five and became one of my favourite early reads for two reasons - the illustrations and the appeal of its ending: the hero doesn't have a dress to wear for tea at the manor so her mother makes her one.
It's a timeless conceit. Erykah Badu uses it in one of her films, except a cocktail dress is made from a tablecloth.
The idea in that book has been perhaps one of the most liberating of my life - if you don't have it, make it. I don't have the skills to apply that universally. I'm no carpenter or builder, but I bought a sewing machine for my 21st birthday and haven't been without one since. In fact, that machine is right now at the mender's - it's an industrial size Singer, built like a tank and magnificently reliable. I think it's why we still have a dressing up box and why I'm currently manically making jam/chutney/jelly/cordials...I thought about Ameliaranne when my son was showing me the Erykah Badu song on YouTube and then again when my daughter showed me a picture of Julia Roberts with a bright, hippy style bag and asked where she could get one. It was handmade, a one off, so I said I'd try and make something similar.
We were talking about this on Saturday at Chesworth Arts Farm open day - the conversation touched on what value we give to what we make in relation to manufactured objects made valuable by branding. And yet I remember, a decade ago, while helping designer Rasschied Din with his book, New Retail, we interviewedVittorio Radice, then CEO at Selfridges, who was convinced custom-made, unique, one-off would become increasingly dominant.
Of course he was right. And that's where those skills learned from having to make do with what's around us might be valued again. Anyway, my daughter liked the bag. It came from the sewing box, a pile of fabrics I always mean to do something with, a broken necklace, the button tin, a cushion cover I couldn't throw away and a scarf I found in the charity shop down the road.
Chesworth Arts Farm: http://www.artsagri.com/site/index.php

Tesco, society and Machiavelli in Lewes Road, Brighton

2010-09-10T07:40:00.011Z

Community garden, not Tesco in Lewes Road

Tesco is using property developer Alburn to secure land next door to a small and much loved Co-op in Lewes Road, Brighton.
It clearly intends to force the Co-op out. The site, once a garage, was derelict until local people turned it into a community garden. It has changed the atmosphere of Lewes Road, a choked traffic funnel in and out of the city that you cycle on with your life in your hands.
Perhaps policy makers at Tesco don't know what's going on here but they could take a trip down from Cheshunt HQ. Or maybe Sir Terry Leahy could get on National Express from his home in Cuffley. He'll be familiar with the issues, since his neighbours tried to say no to Tesco as well.
The police and diggers moved in before dawn to evict a sleeping man from the garden, put 6 ft barriers around the site so no-one can see in and destroyed everything in it by floodlight. Alburn took legal action against a founder of the community garden to stop the original occupation. People moved off but another group moved on - that's the strength of public opinion about how this site should be used.
Old style thinking, old style tactics, old style use of the police and legal system. Tesco is supporting night-time raids, destruction of a community garden and bullying tactics against an individual.
What will the community gain? Lorries, cement mixers, delivery vans.. Modern thinking is for greening cities, using urban space to grow vegetables and fruit, not feeding an old addiction to competition. It's a bit like a gambler not wanting to give up the horses. And that's another apparent use for the site - alongside Tesco, a betting shop.
"A prince, then, who would be powerful should have no care or thought but for war, lest he lose his dominions..." wrote Machiavelli in The Prince.
Tesco may believe Lewes Road, home of funeral directors, cut price booze, betting shops, Spar, Co-op, the Trades and Labour club, a high Anglican church, St Vincent's charity shop, the best Turkish deli, is part of its dominion, but Lewes Road doesn't need a Tesco.
Check out Tesco's corporate website for its green claims - they were quoted below but it appears my blog has been tampered with - I certainly didn't blot out the lines below.
And what a shame because I was about to write an update - Tesco has apparently now decided it's not interested in the Lewes Road site.........: As a global business we have an important role in helping to minimise climate change. To achieve this, in 2009 we committed to: (

becoming a zero-carbon business by 2050
reducing the emissions of the products we sell by 30% by 2020
helping our customers to reduce their carbon footprint by 50% by 2020
halve emissions from our 2006/7 baseline portfolio of buildings by 2020
new stores built between 2007 and 2020 to emit half the CO₂ of a 2006 new store
reduce emissions per case delivered by 50% by 2012... And its claims about supporting local communities: In every country where we operate, we work with local communities to provide jobs and services and support local causes. We are committed to being a good neighbour. At Tesco, we believe in society – the idea that people depend on each other and that, working together, we can support each other and achieve much more than we can alone.
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

August journal

2010-08-31T15:00:00.001Z

Hiding in the hills

I did my time - three years camping in Cornwall with four teenagers every summer. It was fun, but wet. This year I needed sun, preferably non-stop for two weeks. I was granted my wish. There was just one morning of rain from the moment I left Brighton on August 5 and returned on August 19. The mistral was blowing when the TGV pulled into Marseille, but it helped acclimatise me and Giya to southern French summer. In fact, it blew on and off throughout our stay.
We both loved Marseille, pitching up with our rucksacks and gradually finding our way further and further from the tourist routes around the Vielle Port. A day kayaking gave us our first sense of the calanques and this was where we were headed next - the wild maquis west of Marseille, stretching to Cassis, distinguished by precipices, turquoise bays and absence of water.

It was the place to hide, recharge, rediscover why I love France, the language, walking and wilderness and how could I have imagined six days was enough? Of course it wasn't, but there was another booking to adhere to, a train to catch.
Last night, sweaty with a cold whose only benefit is today in bed, catching up on all I've been meaning to do since arriving home, everything in my feverish dream was yellow. Not lemon, but a deep sunflower yellow- the colour of the place that hid me and Giya in the hills for six nights. Walls that barely show until you're up close to them on a dry, stony path. Walls that shelter aloes, pomegranates and figs, views of fireworks and double rainbows distorted into columns by storm clouds.

Returning to Marseille after the calanques could have set me against the city. The youth hostel seemed noisier, not such good value, lunch became a tussle with the voice that muttered 'rip off' constantly. It was easier to spend the day walking through the maquis, sitting on a pebble beach, staring at climbers, boys jumping off rocks. Easier to be satisfied with a ripe nectarine, yesterday's bread, because it was so far to walk to a shop.

Waiting for the cathedral to open in Aix
to see the Burning Bush triptych of
Nicolas Froment

But Marseille did acquit itself, of course - the stalls of honeyed pastries we came across one evening, covered in wasps, great wedges out of the baking pans....the Egyptian-run takeaway that had been recommended to us and was indeed where we'd been told, selling flat breads with chicken and a vegetable sauce that we ate on a pavement outside Monoprix....the mix of skin colours and languages, the wait for sunset because of Ramadan, the bag of over-ripe apricots we bought in Noailles that cost less than a euro because it was the end of the day, the tall buildings off the waterfront being done up, the balcony after balcony that set me dreaming and everywhere, reliefs of women jutting out of the stone like figureheads of ships.

And between walking, wandering, occasional moments of frustration, tiredness, being disturbed by strangers in the dormitory, I managed one or two ideas for a sequence I'm writing. It's been surprisingly hard to get back into the collaboration - the first two days work felt like Jane and I were starting again. But on the third day we had a breakthrough and are now working towards an installation that takes words off the page in ways that should provoke some thought.

Next summer I must have a month in those hills.

Borage time

2010-07-31T08:36:00.000Z

Borage is straggling all over the allotment now and its blue flowers are some consolation for losing all the peas to badgers. I've been writing and gardening - the two activities complement each other perfectly and I can see why so many writers I know do both enthusiastically. I've also been clearing out books to create space out of the clutter and dust that seem to have gathered since the winter. July's gone in a flash but has provided some poems and August will offer more, I know. It's good to have the focus of working with Jane Fordham at Chesworth - what a place that is for quiet and pursuing the thoughts that so often escape unnoticed. I want to be surprised. I've just finished a quirky novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard, After Julius. Written in a different time, with a totally different perspective on life, like the book Living in the Country I took to Chesworth with me that was all about self-sufficiency and first published in 1939. Both books seem strangely appropriate to this era we're in now, when I feel we're on the brink of terrible social division again - joblessness, poverty, prejudice and schisms - and it's being ushered in so enthusiastically by those with an interest in stopping any debate about just why so many individuals in this country are earning so much, even in retirement.

What can a doctor learn from a vet? Cats, appointments and waiting rooms...

2010-06-08T09:02:00.004Z

This mysterious graffiti appeared overnight on the sandy cliff at the end of the tiny road I was staying in for a week in Albufeira. At night, the cats wandered around on this precarious stretch of wasteland with its sheer drop to the beach. Netting attached to the base of the cliffs bulges with rubble and for the first time I saw a cat on a beach, stalking a small bird......

So the day after returning from Portugal my daughter goes down with the shits and is in real pain for two and a half days/three nights.

Now, it's easier to get an appointment for our cat to see the vet than it is to see a GP at our surgery. The system works like this - the phone lines open at 8.30 am and you sit with automatic redial immediately they open if you want to stand a chance of seeing a doctor.

I got through at 8.40 am and there was just one appointment left in the afternoon. Is that any good for someone who's been gasping with pain for the last two nights?

I don't know how many people our five GPs attempt to look after. It's probably thousands. I don't know, either, how much they earn because I can't find it out or find a way of looking for it.....but a friend told me recently that most Brighton NHS GPs who are in their own practice are earning at least £100,000 a year. I wonder if they have to file public accounts?

It's not good enough. The last time I was in the surgery, with my daughter, for a vaccination booster, the place was dead. It was more hushed and bereft of natural light than the church down the road. It doesn't add up. Receptionists chat behind the counter, the tv screen's silent and the sick public is kept as far away as is humanly possible, treated with contempt, suspicion and condescension.

By contrast, at the vet's there's a healthy and ongoing dialogue between friendly receptionists and cats, dogs, rabbits or budgies in the waiting room......there is natural light from the large windows onto the car park and a sense of helpfulness.

The Privilege of Rain

2010-05-13T07:23:00.004Z

There is a new book out with Waterloo press in Brighton - The Privilege of Rain by David Swann. It was launched last night at an intimate little theatre in the North Laines. Dave could have done with a larger venue, actually, for this book, because it is top quality and we were crammed in.

The book's a mixture of poems and prose which works very well, perfectly pitched - the poems pause you, keep you in the intensity of a thought and image, while the prose stretches you into reflection, conversation, the bigger environment that the work comes from. And that's the key - this is the result of a prison residency that Dave did for a year in Nottingham. Dave's now a lecturer at the University of Chichester and a thoroughly brilliant one at that - generous, dedicated, honest and charismatic.

So it was a good launch and one that also highlighted the richness of writing going on in Brighton right now. Squeezed around the table with me - Robert Dickinson who has a new novel and collection just out, Helen Oswald, whose new collection will be launched at the end of May at the Red Roaster. Naomi Foyle was compering.....and I was reminded of John O'Donoghue's brilliant collective name for what's going on in and around this city by the sea - he calls it the Beach Generation.

It's always rather dangerous doing a name check but here are some of us: Helen, Naomi and Robert of course, plus Lee Harwood, John McCullough, Catherine Smith, Janet Sutherland, Maria Jastrebska, Bernadette Cremin, Robert Hamberger John O'D himself, Lorna Thorpe, Ros Barber, Brendan Cleary, Hugh Dunkerley, Sarah Jackson, Tom Cunliffe and of course Grace Nichols and John Agard....and I'm sure I've missed some out. These are poets writing for the page, poets committed to the printed word and all that implies - rigorous editing, drafting, concern with form etc. etc.

There's a host of performers too that I wouldn't dream of trying to list for two reasons. One - they're essentially polarised into poets and MCs. If I had to choose, my sympathies there lean more towards the MCs, if only because my son's a rapper. And I have a problem with quite a lot of the performance poetry - it's either a carbon copy of what people THINK the beats were doing (and guys - Ginsberg did it best, he can't be copied....oh, and Patti Smith is a one off, too) or it's half-way towards stand-up comedy, half-way being the operative phrase. I used to defend performance poetry and try and resist the separation but two recent experiences have had me spitting blood.

At one of these I was a participant but left feeling like the aunt in the corner at the party, not quite sure why I'd been invited.

At another, all I could think of was WIGGER. White men have not yet earned the right to be satirically racist. When a man on a stage pretends to stick a bone through his nose and drones on in mock pidgin English about savages and penis size - apparently ironically - he's lucky his audience is too polite to drag him off stage. He was also lucky there wasn't a single black person in the audience. Bad move. Bad poetry. But he's apparently very popular.....now what does that say about standards?

Two weeks left of the Surrey fellowship

2010-05-12T11:37:00.002Z

I have two weeks to go at Surrey University and I'll be sad to leave my glorious, light-filled eyrie on the third floor of the library. I look over rooftops, down past the Senate building to the Surrey hills and layers of trees. It's felt like a very private year, so close to clouds and air conditioning vents, aerials and ladders.

Unknown woman poet wins prize

2010-05-05T08:18:00.009Z

Eleanor Ross Taylor apparently doesn't do readings, her work's been out of print for years but at 90 she's been recognised by the American Poetry Foundation and given the Ruth Lilly Award. I'll be buying her book.....she writes about my life in a way that feeels uncannily accurate. Reading her work on the web gave me the same shiver as when I discovered Selima Hill and Edna St Vincent Millay.

This is what Kevin Prufer writes on the US National Book Critics blog:

'Her speakers are most often mothers and wives thinking about their grown children, the complexities of marriage, and (increasingly in the later poems) their responsibilities to the dead and their own impending demise.'

Here are some tasters of her work:

from The Diary (Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems 1960 - 2008, Louisiana State University Press)

Contrary to belief, the word diary
means undivulged; clues trail
the pages and the trail breaks off,
scent's lost. Wandering is
the only way out of this place.

And you can read the next poem, Woman as Artist, at www.poetryfoundation.org

I’m mother.
I hunt alone.
There is no bone
Too dry for me, mother...

And another woman writer who deserves much more recognition is Stevie Davies, based in south Wales. Her latest novel, Into Suez is published by Parthian. It's one of the best contemporary novels I've read - it has an international sweep, it's honest, brave and emotionally wrenching. The plot is incredible and the characters walk off the street they are so real. It questions so much about world politics and modern life that I was bowled over by how she knitted it all together. This novel must be read and should win prizes.

What writing does to you

2010-04-15T06:43:00.004Z

In Wiltshire, around 1957

I woke up with a poem a week or so ago. It was one I'd been resisting writing. I'm not convinced it's a good poem and I wasn't comfortable writing it. But I knew I had to get to the end of it. It's a poem that takes me back to my first collection and the material that formed it over ten years or so. Writing can stop time and revive you, like, I imagine, meditation. When you are rearranging the words, making each one work, keeping the channel open to its fullest, it's life at its best. Then comes the crash. It's as if the material and the adrenalin of the composition keeps you going, keeps you sharpened and alert, but as it sits on the desk, in the folder, your moods begin to play. Satisfaction moves to doubt, perhaps, and sometimes the emotions that you recalled in the process are rekindled. It was like that with this poem I wrote recently.

Writing, though, can also make sense of a time of your life. Here's a blog by novelist and playwright Sue Eckstein, whose recent book, The Cloths of Heaven (Myriad) is a must-read. She's blogging about her current experience of losing part of her leg:

http://sueeckstein.wordpress.com/

A new collection growing

2010-04-12T07:21:00.004Z

A new collection's gathering as I find more time to write - spurred on by blowsy blossom and a trip to Ludlow to see Jane. Ludlow's exceptionally quiet compared to Brighton's constant sirens, car alarms and 4 am drunks and although I was there for less than a week, it's recharged me. I've come back home feeling determined to make more time for writing.

The more time I spend with friends, the more I want to write poems that make sense of our lives, of passing 50, of the changes that happen often outside our control. Just before I left, I was sifting through poems I've written over the last few years and I realised they fell into three groups effortlessly, that maybe I even had a start and a finish.

This collection feels like I've grown it organically. I want to give it three months intensive work this summer and I think it'll be nearly where I want it to be.

An obsession with anthologies

2010-03-16T09:35:00.006Z

Words for Women - new work by Jane Fordham and Jackie Wills

I picked up rumours about a new anthology of British poets a few weeks ago. They felt like code. The anthology was known as IP and poets had started to complain about not being in it.
It reminded me of my early days in Brighton, when I was beginning to write again. I had met some poets here who were friends of a friend and we too became friends. I knew nothing about poetry politics then but in 1993 an anthology, The New Poetry, was brought out by Bloodaxe. At least two friends were outraged because they were not included.
I still remember my sense of bewilderment - how could they feel slighted about something so ephemeral?
I understand arguments about equal representation and am quick to protest if this hasn't been taken into account. It seems IP has more women than men in it, which is a good thing.
But that issue aside, what is behind the obsession with anthologies?
An anthology is a plaything. It's as close an editor can come to writing a manifesto without starting with 'I BELIEVE'. It is quickly dated; soon has only historical or sentimental interest, like a school photo.
So those clamouring to be included are like kids running to a camera for their grins to be magnified around the world, anxious ones waiting in the VIP queue at a nightclub, hoping to god their name's not been left off the guestlist.
Have poets become dandies, so desperate that the anthology is equivalent to the must-have bag? How can poets, whose work is with words, be so taken in by marketing?
The anthology is:
- an exercise in power not taste
- an exercise in pragmatism
- a means of favouring potential enemies
- a display of tribal identity
- the lazy compilation album
- a snapshot of the editor's bookshelf
- a status symbol
- sometimes, rarely, a brave attempt to right wrongs
There are some good ones: my favourites are Faber's book of eastern European poets and Paul Auster's anthology of French poetry, a brilliant anthology of native American poetry I am glad to have on my shelf.
But the kind of anthology that is advertised, reviewed and held up as representative of British poetry is not, has never been, will never be, an indication of quality.

Disappearing languages

2010-02-27T07:48:00.003Z

This is a poem written on rocks on the outskirts of Tunbridge Wells - one of several outcrops around the town that are still odd and out of place in Kent's relatively flat landscape. Writing on stone is always, for me, a reminder of the Rosetta stone and how I wish now I'd paid more attention to my linquistics lectures when I was studying for my degree. It's always the case, isn't it? My lecturer was an oddball eccentric who found it impossible to communicate (ironically) and I remember nothing of his lectures during the three years he must have taught me other than the name of Noam Chomsky. But since discovering the Rosetta Project on the internet I've wanted to learn more about languages and thought. I'm starting with Vanishing Voices, published by OUP. The facts it's throwing out are astonishing: most of Australia's 250 aboriginal languages have gone. At least half the world's languages may die out in the next 100 years. The authors, Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine compare the preservation of languages with the need to protect biodiversity. : "Each language is a living museum, a monument to every culture it has been vehicle to," they begin.

Ty Newydd in February

2010-02-15T12:13:00.007Z

A week at Ty Newydd is always a tonic. I was working with the writer Tom Bullough, whose novel The Claude Glass is a disturbing and brilliantly written story about childhood. We were with a group of young people from all over Wales, sponsored by their local Rotary clubs to stretch their writing and they did just that. There were snowdrops in the woods by the river and each morning the sky was a reminder to look up....

Therapy and A Disaffection

2010-01-21T08:43:00.004Z

David Lodge's novel Therapy is a true book of the 1990s when celebrity was in the wings, feeding on easy cash, TV and an emerging mania for self-promotion. It's about a sitcom writer with an obsession with Kierkegaard. Lodge makes some interesting statements about writing and journals: "The pen is like a tool, a cutting or digging tool, slicing down through the roots, probing the rockbed of memory...." and "A journal....is like talking silently to yourself. It's a mixture of monologue and autobiography."

But as I read it there was another book on my shoulder. Eventually I realised what it was. It reminded me of James Kelman, whose wonderful novel, A Disaffection, I encountered in the late eighties and haven't re-read but will do now. Therapy opened the door to Kelman's character, Patrick, who keeps up a running commentary throughout the book about Holderlin, the German writer who was ignored during his lifetime but subsequently influenced Rilke, Hesse, Celan and Trakl. Holderlin was a poet-thinker as Kelman is a novelist-philosopher. From Holderlin, tumble Heidegger and Derrida.....

Like Therapy, A Disaffection is a book about looking inward and in that sense, the nature of writing, language and thought. But it's a very different book - where Lodge is easy to read and English, Kelman is confrontational and much more experimental. He's been compared to Beckett and is an important writer.

He belonged to a writing group run by Philip Hobsbaum whose other participants included the poets Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead. All have distinctive styles, all challenge our use of language and how we write down the words that come out of our mouths. Kelman is also incredibly outspoken about literary prizes, willing to articulate what many wouldn't dare.

Hags and lads

2010-01-13T09:53:00.005Z

Another whiteout this morning in common with with most of the UK, and I've already eaten my packed lunch. Is it a primitive reflex when temperatures drop? I shouldn't be eating. I'm planning a party. A friend surprised me last night by offering to bring salad. I had anticipated cheesy puffs from Lidl and dips, plus drink and dancing. I guess people might expect pies, bread and cheese. I'm surprised by the enthusiasm for it, but then there were so few parties over Xmas. I invited someone I hardly know by mistake on Facebook and there is a shortage of men. I am not going to any more women-only parties this year.

How does that no single men thing work? Say the 50 something men are with 40 something women. The forty something men are with 30 something women. The 30 something men are with 20 something women. So that leaves two floating groups - 50 something women and 20 something men. Society's hags and lads.

Camouflage and a new year

2010-01-04T08:40:00.004Z

From the entrance to Petworth Park we couldn't see the deer. We walked through the beeches around the car park and up the hill overlooking the lake. Down in the dip we heard a dog and then saw the herd moving. As we focussed we realised there were scores of them, some lying in the winter grass, totally invisible. Even those grazing merged with the background and later, when we walked around the lake, the landscape had claimed them back again.

I was at a friend's 50th birthday yesterday afternoon, the tables groaning under the weight of cake and savouries. The talk was of teenagers and school, of college and choices. A friend who's a great champion of children's rights was talking about how difficult it is for teenagers to challenge the status quo, compared to how it was for us, growing up in the sixties. We want teenagers inconspicuous and tame, quiet and compliant - camouflaged, basically.

Listening to a piece on the radio this morning about the need for greater airport security I heard an interviewee suggest that air travellers should be prepared to be checked up on in the interests of safety. That there should be background checks on passengers from certain countries as a matter of routine and whatever rights might be compromised were sacrificed to greater safety.

Like rights to take photos in the street, to ask questions of institutions, to challenge wrong, to submit those in authority to scrutiny. How many of us want to question a bill, bank, utility company, local authority and are halted by an impossible automated answering system, are fobbed off by a standard reply, by a customer service line that is peopled by untrained junior staff without the knowledge to deal with a question?

Let 2010 be a year of questions, of examining the camoflauge, of being visible and of finding ways to loosen the tightening loop. Let us take photos in public, or as my friend Jane Fordham suggested, draw in places we're not meant to and see what happens. Let us ask awkward questions of insurance companies, banks and telephone companies and let's rediscover the power of boycott.

Then, perhaps, we'll begin to value that fabulous energy teenagers are infused with and see it as something of worth.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty - George Bernard Shaw

2009-12-22T10:54:00.006Z

Morning, Saturday December 19

Here is my letter to Brighton and Hove Council after watching councillor Geoffrey Theobald defend the local authority's neglect of its citizens.

Dear Mr Theobald and members of Brighton and Hove Council,

Mr Theobald's defence on television last night of the local authority's response to the snow in Brighton since last Thursday was astonishing. Yesterday I made a complaint to the council about the state of the pavements and Mr Theobald's comments made me wonder if we live in the same city.

This is my experience of Brighton and Hove Council's response to the conditions we have had to live with.

I live in Hartington Road, a designated emergency route. It is a long hill running from Lewes Road to the top of Elm Grove. Most of the street on the first day of snow impassable. By Friday several side streets became blocked by sideways-on cars or lorries that had tried to move and become stuck.

There was no pre-gritting. Our road was eventually visited by a gritting van at about 5 on Sunday afternoon. I went out shortly afterwards. There was no grit on the road so perhaps it was just going home or putting on a show? That is the only evidence of council activity I have witnessed since the snow began to fall.

I had no need or desire to use my car and was perfectly prepared to walk everywhere, which I did, but with great difficulty. Every pavement in this area, along Lewes Road, across the Level and into the centre of town, or to the station, was like an ice rink. I walked to Brighton station on Friday and it took me an hour because the pavements were so dangerous. It would normally take me 25 minutes max.

On Saturday, I decided to walk to the marina. I went up Elm Grove and over the racecourse, down through Whitehawk. There is a long path into Whitehawk from the racecourse and as I walked down, keeping to the snow and off the path, there was an elderly woman with a shopping trolley desperately trying to get down too. As I and my daughter guided her, we arrived at the bottom of what was more like a toboggan run than a path. It was a sheet of ice and the ice continued until we arrived at the road. How the council could have allowed this path to remain ungritted strikes me as criminally irresponsible.

I wonder if Mr Theobald and officers of the council have attempted to walk anywhere, or perhaps they have restricted themselves to the parts of the city that have been gritted or perhaps they have travelled by car? Last night, (Monday) when the snow started to melt, there was a police officer in my street who tried to walk on the pavements, no doubt attempting to put into practice the official advice not to walk in the roads. Obviously, he had to abandon his attempts and joined the rest of us in the middle of the street.

So four days into this extreme weather, we are still risking injury in order to leave our homes. As for the council supposedly working round the clock to make the streets safe - I wonder what the council defines as safe, as the city and working round the clock?

My questions to each member of Brighton and Hove council are:

1. why were such dangerous conditions not responded to effectively?
2. has the local authority broken the law through its negligence?
3. why were council workers not working to clear the pavements?
4. why weren't members out in their wards with grit and shovels?
5. how exactly do you justify the level of incompetence that residents of the city have experienced?
6. who will pay if there are injury claims against the council - because I am not prepared for those claims to be included in my council tax.
7. when young people are next demonised for anti-social behaviour, can we perhaps remember how many local residents have been put in real danger by the irresponsibility of this local authority. For the last four days, the local authority has shown itself to be incapable of running the city.

Morning Friday December 18

Snow and no to Tesco

2009-12-21T08:42:00.006Z

Yes, snow changes everything. I walked over the racecourse to look for a Christmas tree - Wyevale had nothing below £40, Asda at the Marina had sold out, the Open Market prices started at £35. Price fixing all round.....even the lovely Turkish grocer's at the bottom of my road had upped its prices by around 200% from last year. I found one for £20, much against my better judgement and lugged it home on my head since the car's frozen to the ground.

It was quite literally a slide down to Asda from Wyevale, over the racecourse, down into Whitehawk. Our utterly irresponsible council - Brighton and Hove - barely deserves the title given its complete disregard for anyone's safety. Every pavement is a sheet of ice, and Brighton is a hilly place. But the path down into Whitehawk is like an Olympic toboggan run, smoothed to perfection by the limbs of elderly residents and their shopping trolleys as they slide ever downward.

I cleared the pavement in front of my house but no-one else saw the need. A man was clearing the pavement by the community garden on Lewes Road as the police attended yet another accident in a side street opposite. Virtually every street off mine is blocked by some lunatic who tried to drive. A fire doesn't bear thinking about.

But it's clearly not the council's concern. No grit in sight. Last night I spotted my first gritting van speeding up the road with its lights flashing. When I went outside to walk to a friend's I wondered what it had been spraying. There was no evidence of grit. Perhaps it was trying to persuade the city's population the council was doing something.

However, on to Tesco.

We have a beautiful, now frosty, community garden in Lewes Road that used to be a derelict petrol station. It's right next to a very handy Co-op that's been doing a good job for years, and opposite a Spar. Tesco apparently wants to open up here. We don't want Tesco and its bullying imperialism. Let's remember its attempt to silence criticism in Thailand by taking a local journalist to court. Let's remember its profits this year and question how they were arrived at. Tesco attempting to set up in Lewes Road is a blatant attempt to close both the Co-op and any other local business. It should not be allowed to happen.

Carol Ann Duffy is on form

2009-12-08T10:14:00.002Z

There was never any doubt that Carol Ann Duffy was a brilliant choice as Poet Laureate and her poem for the 12 days of Christmas is total affirmation of her appointment. How else would such politically challenging material make it into the Radio Times?

Duffy is putting poetry at the centre of the arts again. It's fantastic she was chosen to hand over the Turner prize, that she's rising to these commissions with such skill, that she's writing what needs to be repeated.....what better place than a seasonal TV guide which will be in almost every home in the UK.

I hadn't read her poem first thing this morning. There I was driving into Guildford listening to Radio 4 and discussion about bankers' bonuses/executive pay, feeling utterly disenfranchised. There was never a point in my life when I remember agreeing to deepen the divide between rich and poor. I thought when I supported Labour, it was for change, imagining Labour had learned from Ken.

Ken was on this morning. I cheered up when he said 'good riddance' to bankers leaving for more money elsewhere. I've never heard a good argument for bonuses or tips either. They're like pocket money for household chores, aren't they?

Like Ken, Carol Ann Duffy's bringing what's said in the margins into the mainstream again and reminding poets of their responsibilities, too.

Party, coincidence and the police

2009-11-16T10:33:00.003Z

It can take long time for reviews to make their way to you, perhaps not nearly ten years, though, which is the case for the one I stumbled on today. Some writers claim never to read them but the good ones can give you a sense of whether your words work. Charles Bennett reviewed Party for the English Studies journal and I'm cheered by the fact that he appears to appreciate the book.

"Wills explores the seemingly ordinary surface of things, her descriptions acute and poised, and finds – as she follows the dictates of the poem – that the everyday has become unsettling: violent or suddenly beautiful. The poems lead round to the other side of things like a Mobius strip: the reader begins in one place on a seemingly ordinary day and suddenly there we are, on the other side of it all with no memory of how we arrived at this suddenly cold and threatening destination....."

And it's that final idea that rang the coincidence bell when I read it.

Yesterday I was walking a neighbour's dog on the racecourse. It was windy, dramatic and and I was walking fast to try and compensate for the amount of sitting I've been doing. We did the sweep of the racetrack, down into the dip and over towards Wilson Avenue. I was on my way back up the hill feeling fantastic as I always do when I've had nearly an hour of the sea, air and city below me. I heard some motorbikes across the valley. They'd come in from East Brighton park, I guess, and were speeding along the ridge. I was irritated by the noise, but not worried, until I realised they'd raced across to the side I was on and they were fast. The dog was off the lead and I was at the bottom of a slope. Suddenly they were at the top of the slope, riding down, then waiting on a path, revving their engines. They wanted me out of the way. I was trying to get the dog and then they were speeding towards me, one in front, manic, the other holding back more.

The dog wouldn't come, then she did, and one of them was a couple of yards from me, on the slope, laughing like a maniac. I'd called the police - the only time I've ever dialled 999. It took most of the day to feel normal. The bikes had become a weapon and from being safe, ordinary, at the end of my walk, I turned into a wreck as the bikes shot back off to the ridge and away.

The police turned out just under an hour later.

The same force that sent a transit van full of men in flak jackets to break up a bunch of 8 to 13 year olds playing football at the cemetary gates one summer evening, chasing an eight year old boy up the road with the van... that sent 3 cars to intercept a friend who'd been seen 'driving erratically' (not drunk, just careless) and that attempted to ignore a daylight attack on Lewes Road very recently.

Yes, a squad car in a traffic jam on the opposite side of the road to the attack - I was walking at the time with my daughter. A volvo pulled up in front of us, a woman got out and started attacking another woman yards away. I couldn't intervene, but saw this police car and was signalling to it. Eventually the woman driving it looked at me and wound down her window. I pointed to the attack still going on under her nose (she was not alone in the car).....what did she do? She raised her eyes to heaven, looked sour and pulled over reluctantly.

My daughter rang 999 recently when she was with friends. They saw a man covered in blood walking down the road, staggering. They waited for the police who never arrived.

Women and beasts

2009-10-31T09:41:00.003Z

The generous and wonderful Australian poet Les Murray once famously said that he'd written a long poem because he didn't have time for a short one. I find it hard to convince myself sometimes that a day spent on a couple of lines is well spent. On one of the first Arvon courses I went on as a student, when I was starting to write poetry seriously, the tutor told me how delighted he was that he'd found a final line for a poem that he'd been working on for a couple of years. It sounds so ludicrous, doesn't it?

I've since found myself saying that sort of thing - maybe an idea keeps coming back but never quite works, maybe a few lines won't go away and I want to fit them in somewhere. Perhaps it's like moving the furniture around, or refusing to throw out an old pair of shoes, knowing they'll go with something. Jane and I were talking about our books and recycling. The idea's embedded in how we're working, as is throwing an idea, an image, some words back and forth until they settle.

Women and beasts seem to be emerging as themes as our books begin to take shape. There's a way to go yet, though, we're aiming for a lot more than we'd initially planned and the exhibition at Chesworth is unlikely to happen now before Christmas. But we'll be showing some finished books in an open house outside Lewes in December, along with some cards that kicked the process off....

Working with another person helps keep self-doubt in its proper place. We focus only on what we want to do and what works - wonderful, practical, absorbing time, almost sacred in its effects. We can trust the imaginative process, it runs like a river in the background.

Three poets, new work

2009-10-29T15:56:00.005Z

I'm reading tonight with Catherine Smith and Nicki Jackowska at the Red Roaster cafe in Kemp Town. Catherine's a great poet and has published three collections - the New Bride, shortlisted for the Forward, The Butcher's Hands and Lip, also Forward shortlisted. She's a Next Generation poet and I've known her for years - we first met when our children were at Tarnerland nursery. She's a versatile writer, turning her hand to short stories and radio drama, too. Her poetry's terribly unsettling sometimes but it can be very funny, too. She has a pretty unique world view and refreshingly, much of her work is driven by ideas and not sentimental anecdote.

Nicki Jackowska has published 6 collections of poetry and three novels. A seventh collection, Behold, is being launched at the beginning of next month. So she's by far the most prolific of the three of us. She's also written one of those seminal books on writing. She's collected plenty of plaudits in her long career, the most recent from John Berger, who's written on the back of Behold 'its grief has penetrated its syntax'. Her work is concerned with deep, primitive human motivation and the subconscious rivers running through us.

So it'll be a good night, then and I'm looking forward to reading some new work which has hardly seen the light of day yet. I am always anxious about readings. I love them, but always fear there's not enough laughs. But I guess that's what intervals are for.

2009-10-26T16:41:00.002Z

It is no coincidence - about a week after starting my Royal Literary Fund fellowship at Surrey University, I wanted to write poems again. The anxiety about earning enough to live on has been lifted until the end of May.

I am still confused about what poetry's for. It's a noisy world. There's a lot of shouting, generally in the arts. I'm not convinced artists should have to market their own work. I think it's one of the culture industry's biggest mistakes.

Let us celebrate uncelebrity, lack of achievement, austerity, stamina.

Collaboration

2009-10-01T18:42:00.004Z

In the two and fro of collaboration, writing words that will appear between paintings, quite literally in a different kind of book, I am finding myself increasingly obsessed with the one liner. What is its appeal? I've been thinking about how little is worth saying and why the images on my walls are so stark - a chalk path, an oxbow bend in a river, a face asleep, one of Turner's single trees. But then there's Carver's Late Fragment folded over a photo of my kids.

I feel that making anything now, I need to take account of background noise and how poetry might cut through it. That expansiveness isn't necessarily the way. That short lyrics, the simplicity of Basho and of Longley are the great marker stones for this decade - leaving so much out but showing the details we might otherwise overlook. It is the power of metaphor but without the great finger pointing, saying look how clever I am......

Fellowship at Surrey

2009-09-28T10:30:00.003Z

I start my Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Surrey tomorrow. I'll be helping students write essays. It's a brilliant scheme, funded by the RLF to support writers and promote good writing within universities through one to one mentoring.

For the first time in years I'll have an office. I'll be able to work on my own writing, too, because I'm being paid regularly for a full academic year. What with this and the project for Chesworth, the autumn is glowing.

A cataplasm of webs

2009-09-23T07:43:00.008Z

Research and poetry.....I remember the thrill of discovering how a spider creates a web across a stream. Of how she can spin a web across my lawn, from the apple tree to the elder.

Many things are still coming together. Walking on the racecourse with Julie and her dog, picking blackberries and elderberries. Raspberries from the allotment - still ripening, even more jam. Making elderberry cordial with ginger and cloves - it seems elderberries are a super fruit, even more so than blueberries.

Reviving my old obsession with Culpeper in discovering an amazing book at Yale Medical Library with brilliant illustrations. This remedy seems particularly seasonal.

A CATAPLASM OF WEBS
Take Venice Turpentine 2 ounces; Juice of Plantain 1 ounce and half; Figs 3; the yellow pareing of Orange Rind 2 drams; Bole 1 dram and half; Soot half an once; Pigeons Dung 1 ounce and halfl large Spider Webs 6; black Soap 4 ounces; Vinegar enough to beat it up with. To drive an Ague, tie this about the Wrists, so as to make it bear hard upon the Pulses, two hours before the Fit.

Thomas Fuller, Pharmacopoeia Extemporanea, 1710

Recipes and old cures - exhibition Chesworth Arts Farm November and December 09

2009-09-21T18:53:00.005Z

The mistletoe trees in the Vendee are magnificent straggling giants and I've been remembering them as I prepare for an exhibition with Jane Fordham in the winter. We're working on cards and pamphlets loosely based on recipes and old cures - excited by some bizarre discoveries in old manuscripts - and we're bringing an older collaboration closer to reality in the form of a book. Add to all that a seasonal theme, plus cake and tea and it'll make for three great weekends in November and December at a wonderful studio she shares in Horsham, Chesworth Arts Farm.

I'm glad of the project to focus me on writing again. I also start my fellowship at the University of Surrey on Tuesday, thanks to the Royal Literary Fund, so I'll be employed two days a week until next May. Most of September I've been out collecting blackberries or elderberries and making them into jam or chutney. It feels like I've been clearing my mind of whatever silted it up this year but now I need some routine. Paid work's been almost non-existent and at times I've wondered about the increasing divide between my reality and that of people in full-time jobs....

What I've had to cut out is takeaways, impulse shopping, nights out, cafe trips, travel, books and pampering. It's possible to pare spending down to basics and the allotment's helped massively this year - I've only just started to buy lettuce and am still eating veg, although the squash and beans aren't as abundant as I'd hoped. Three massive patches of tomatoes were wrecked by blight, heartbreaking. The raspberries have compensated, though, still producing fruit after weeks of picking, so there are jars of the most delicious jam at the back of the cupboard in the dark which will lighten up February or March.

2009-09-06T17:41:00.002Z

In this cave is a beached submarine with empty portholes looking into the rock, its chamber owned by the tides.

Cloths of Heaven

2009-08-05T13:07:00.005Z

Dramatist and fiction writer, Sue Eckstein has just published her first novel The Cloths of Heaven with Brighton-based Myriad Editions. The title’s from that famous Yeats poem, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.

At the centre of the novel is a fabric warehouse in Bakinabe, west Africa. Among the silks and chiffons works a mysterious and troubled English girl, Rachel. The warehouse is both a meeting place, metaphor for global change and maybe too, a tangible indication of the kinds of choices life offers. Certainly, it is where love, desire, longing and loneliness are played out and the Yeats poem is a link to a life before west Africa, almost before adulthood. So this warehouse is a serious place of dreams, secrets and obsession. But Eckstein gives it a twist of gentle irony, too by making it a place of pilgrimage for Father Seamus and Sister Philomena as they seek out kitsch fabrics printed with repeats of the Virgin Mary and Pope John Paul 2.

Father Seamus and Sister Philomena’s story is one of a number of narratives that make up the novel. They are the gentle, eccentric and humane missionaries who are one facet of ex-pat life in west Africa in the early 1990s. In its own way, each narrative draws attention to the legacy of colonialism, psychologically and literally. Like the classic post-colonial novel by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (a title also borrowed from a Yeats poem, The Second Coming) Eckstein’s story shows the violent and horrific implications of exploitation.

But it also examines the difficulty of aid and the complex, suffocating and at times ludicrous lifestyles of ex-pats forced together only by skin colour or couples who stay together because they are in exile.

I couldn’t put this novel down when I first read it – Eckstein’s no novice, she’s had three plays broadcast on Radio 4 and is a fluid, careful writer. And although she raises important issues in this book about continued European meddling in African society, continuing attempts by the unscrupulous to make a killing by whatever means, it is also a novel about how a single passionate affair reverberates through an individual’s life.

Eckstein’s book will contribute to an important body of fiction written about the continuing relationship between African and European countries. Her background with VSO and now her work in medical ethics ensures that her perspective is informed, intelligent and demanding. This incisive intellect also delivers some fascinating, complex characters who won't necessarily behave the way you expect.

A women-only poetry prize

2009-07-29T07:36:00.006Z

My daughter took this pic.... A poem of Susan Wicks keeps coming back to me. It's a new poem about women in a changing room and it's stunningly simple like the best life drawing. I saw it at a poetry workshop group that meets in London regularly. All the participants are excellent poets, we have a range of different styles, we are all women and I like that.

Wicks has a fabulous eye. Her poems carry no clutter, they are contemporary, her voice is modern, she's in tune in the way that Neruda always is. In fact her work reminds me of Neruda, they're working in the same territory. Both sneak into my thoughts when I'm least expecting them to. (I rarely swim without remembering one of Wicks' very early poems, Singing Underwater).

I have wondered for a long time if it's possible to identify a writer's gender from their work alone. I've never been able to make up my mind, although I suppose subject matter and the first person would probably end up giving enough clues. It would be interesting, though, to read work anonymously for a while to cleanse the mind of preconceptions. The North, a magazine published by Peter Sansom and Janet Fisher, used to ask poets to critique an anonymous poem. I think it's a great idea.

Anyway, this is leading to another kite flying exercise - an alternative, women only, Forward prize 2009 shortlist to blow apart the increasingly restricted group of men who appear to be regarded as Britain's best writers (regardless of who's judging it, it seems). Another excellent poet, Catherine Smith, alerted me to the list. I wouldn't have had a clue since most of my time at the moment is spent on the allotment.

(I came back from Womad to a picking frenzy - armfuls of chard, some French beans, broad beans, bags of peas, beetroot, lettuce, onions, raspberries and blackberries.......)

Anyway, the big cash prize of £10,000 has a shortlist of five men and one woman. One of those men's books isn't even out yet. Glyn Maxwell, Hugo Williams, Christopher Reid, Peter Porter, Don Paterson and Sharon Olds are the people in question.

I have to go back to Neruda to sum it all up. Perhaps shortlists don't matter.

Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or from a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

The poem sends me back to moments during two of the highlights of Womad when that summons was present on stage - the Malian singer Rokia Traore with her funky French band and the Corsican singers who closed the festival, A Filetta, introducing songs with quotes from Rene Char and Fernando Pessoa.

Rokia Traore

Revisiting Tilly Olsen

2009-07-09T07:50:00.006Z

Since 1993, the TS Eliot prize has been won by 12 men and four women.

Since 1992, the Forward prize has been won by 14 men and three women.

Between 1966 and 1987, 17 men won the Alice Hunt Bartlett prize and five women.

Since 1966, 101 men have won Cholmondely Awards and 42 women.

Since 1934, 32 men have been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and seven women.

These are poetry's laurels. They often come with large amounts of cash and significant book sales. The counting idea isn't original but it does a job.

There's a debate going on about women, men and poetry, how women are (or aren't) represented in the Poetry Society's flagship magazine, Poetry Review and how women poets, critics and readers respond to all this.

I think people should respond from many different perspectives and we should have a bigger debate. Some of us have been floating this idea for a while because of the absence of any serious challenge to the male status quo in poetry.

Personally, I'd like to see a discussion extending beyond Poetry Review into prize lists and promotions, publishing and interest groups, academic world and anything else that arises.

Coincidentally I was lent a copy of Tilly Olsen's Silences by Maude Casey recently. How timely. I wonder if it could be a focus for this wider debate since Olsen addresses in the starkest way numerical evidence of exclusion - she calls it counting. She, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin who writes an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, make clear that enforced silence of the kind that happens in discriminatory practice must always be challenged because it is a symptom of systematic discrimination. Fishkin points out that Olsen's idea of counting is still under attack.

We know this, don't we?And many of those allowing discrimination to take place would find it pretty difficult to argue against. So it is our responsibility to remind a wider audience of the consequences of silencing tactics. Maude is a dedicated campaigner, particularly on secret evidence, and I think it's no coincidence that she passed Silences on to me.

The chapter in the book which could be used very effectively is one based on 1971 and 1976 figures. Olsen calls it 'One out of twelve - the figures for writers accorded recognition'. She counts, for example, the number of women included in 20th century literature courses, critical reference works etc. as well as inclusion in anthologies, textbooks, on prize lists etc. etc.

Elaine Showalter was campaiging at the same time as Olsen and hasn't stopped. She responded to the idea of the great American novel as a purely male object in the Guardian in May this year. She provided an alternative list to great effect.

There are still many ideas alive from the 60s and 70s which are relevant and it would do us no harm to draw on those. I love the idea of different lists presented in a batch. Oh, and as an aside - the last time I was an Arvon tutor some of us were chatting about how courses are always packed with women and yet prize lists etc are packed with men. It was unscientific musing, really, but the truth is masterclass courses are always oversubscribed with men. What does that say about our view of ourselves?

We must have the debate, too, about how we support one another. Women have a responsibility to read one another's work properly and well, so we can counter the arguments always put up to defend positions of power - that there just aren't enough good women around. Please, can we stop allowing the men to choose the women they favour as landmarks and can we start making our own minds up? And then there's the old chestnut of age and how it applies differently to men and women.

We can challenge and make changes. The pic's of the beautiful fossil forest, perched on a cliff and within MoD firing ranges near Lulworth Cove in Dorset. It seemed strangely appropriate.

Equality is a long time coming

2009-06-17T14:44:00.003Z

Equality - it's still a long time coming and particularly in the small pond that is English poetry where the shortlists, the prizes and the jobs are rather unevenly doled out to the boys.

So I think we should stop skirting around the edges, of worrying about what voicing an opinion will do to our prospects, or of being seen as embittered hags.

It is, in fact, our responsibility to speak out......

Here is the life-affirming raison d'etre of the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, from its own website:

"The Equality and Human Rights Commission is charged by law with a vital mandate. To protect individuals against discrimination, to enforce the laws on equality and to promote fairness and human rights for everyone."

And there's an interesting theme on the title page: Fairer Britain.

It states: "We focus on the need, for all who live in Britain, to have a deeper sense of commitment and mutual respect based on shared values with fairness at their core. We see our role as helping people who might not otherwise meet to get to know and understand one another better.

"Equality isn’t a minority interest: a fairer society benefits everyone in terms of economic prosperity, quality of life and good relations within and among communities.

"The responsibility for building a successful society rests with all of us."

Dark Night of the Soul

2009-06-06T07:41:00.004Z

Saints are everywhere in France and Spain. They lurk by the roadside, have shrines in the most unlikely places - pre-industrial revolution celebs, I guess, providing the drama, violence and suffering we seem to need as a species. Amado makes links between Catholic saints and a more animistic spirit world. I've always been fascinated by this duality in St John of the Cross and this interest has come back to me again. But why, an unbeliever, can't I ignore him?
The writer of that familiiar phrase 'dark night of the soul' which has endured for centuries, a man who re-wrote psalm 137 By the Waters of Babylon, was born in June 1542 and with St Teresa of Avila, formed the barefoot Carmelites. John was 27 years younger than Teresa but only outlived her by nine years. Despite constant illness, she lived to 67 and died in one of her own convents in 1582. John died in 1591. Both are renowned for their mysticism.
I wonder if I was reminded of him by Kapoor? John of the Cross, in Dark Night of the Soul, suggests the soul must empty itself of self to be filled with God. It is reminiscent of Kapoor's interest in nothingness and maybe my recent immersion has revived the old fascination with this Spanish mystic who so angered the Inquisition.

Oxford Professorship and Moniza Alvi

2009-05-27T07:24:00.003Z

A cub found its way into the window space outside the cellar. I found it when I went to investigate the sounds it was making. It half growled half hissed at me, a tiny, skinny little thing with enormous ears and baby eyes that was probably there half the night and the whole day. I wrapped it in a blanket and carried it to the cemetary. When I laid the blanket down it stayed there for an instant, looking truly comfortable and warm at last. It scampered off and I hope it found its mother.

In between all this natural drama is the Oxford professorship of poetry. Normally I dismiss this as irrelevant but this was to be the year two women defined British poetry and it was long overdue - Carol Ann Duffy as laureate and Ruth Padel as prof. I am irritated Padel blew it, sorry for her too that she felt she had to give it up. I think she should have sat it out.

As for Clive James waiting in the wings, he's another of those old rich men, isn't he, like Felix Dennis, who wants some artistic credibility after a life-time of chatshows. There'll be plenty of bared teeth scavenging.

And Jeanette Winterson putting Alice Oswald up instead......I've always had respect for Winterson, but in this she's wrong. Oswald is a newcomer with upper class credentials but not a patch on many other women writing today, despite her prizes. A Farrow and Ball heritage poet.

Moniza Alvi gets my vote. She writes poetry that's of the moment and relevant. Yes, let's have a woman and let's have one who's writing about modern life in all its confusion, violence, emotional complexity, who celebrates small domestic tasks, who has explored the metaphorical world of being of mixed race with imaginative brilliance.

One in ten children now lives in a mixed race family and the figure is rising to the extent that very soon being mixed race will be the norm. (I hear cheers from Pedro Archanjo here, hero of Tent of Miracles, a story of candomble, spirits and the mixing of races written by that great Brazilian writer Jorge Amado).....

So Alvi is way ahead of her time, inventing the creative landscape to which so many as yet unborn writers will return. In fact, she is probably the only UK poet charting, in poetry, the demographic changes taking place in every UK town and city.

It was Ruth Padel, ironically, who reviewed Alvi's new collection, Europa, for the Guardian and wrote this:

"Her voice is spare, oblique, surreal, compassionate and original. She has unique insight into splits, both emotional and cultural: "The receding east, the receding west", as she laconically puts it. At the end of Split World, a selection from all her books, are the poems with which she became the first, and so far as I know the only, poet to explore sustainedly what 9/11 has meant to Muslims living in Europe.

"Alvi has trained as a counsellor, and her new collection, Europa, explores post-traumatic stress disorder and the meaning of rape while mining the international politics of east and west through the myth of Europa."

So if there's going to be a debate about who's the Oxford professor, let's have a proper one - consign celebrities and strategic networkers to the sidelines and we poets should have our say, not just the media pleasing novelists and rent-a-quotes.

Anish Kapoor The Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc

2009-05-24T08:17:00.008Z

I heard the birds screeching from upstairs in my room. Ten minutes later there's another screech by my bed. The cat's brought one in. It's still alive and I pick it up, stretch the wings gently to see if they go back into place. I'm not sure if it's injured but it lets me carry it outside. The cat's prowling, furious. I shut her in the kitchen and put the bird in the apple tree. It's small with a speckled chest but not speckled enough to be a thrush, I think it's a female blackbird, probably exhausted from feeding chicks. The male's in the sycamore behind, still calling. A wren's joined in. I go back inside to keep the cat away from the catflap and when I go out again, it's managed to fly to a neighbour's pergola, I can see it in the vine. The male's still above me and it, watching, flying from branch to branch, calling. It calls back. I feed the cat, hoping to keep her away long enough for the female to make her escape. The wren moves up into the sycamore too, where one of the parents is keeping guard. When I look again, she seems to have left the vine. But the cat's prowling again. She's moved on from slow-worms, her regular offerings on my bedroom floor and in the hall.

Before Tiger brought the bird in, I was thinking about my trip to C-Curve last night with Maude when the sun had disappeared from the horizon but the sky was still light and there were fireworks on the pier. I spent most of the afternoon there yesterday, attempting to explain why people shouldn't touch it (fingerprints ruin the effect) and wanted to see it at a different time of day. Ewes and lambs were rushing down the hill as Maude and I were walking up. The Chattri's white dome stood out on the hillside. It was perfect. We missed the sunset, although the sky was spectacular in town, but it was quiet and the side facing away from the sea totally surprised me as we walked back to see it as a whole, not close up, as a phenomenon that delivered the light, land and sky we were among back as abstract shapes - blocks of blackness with that indefineable wash that's made when the sun's just gone, the stars emerge and the sky is luminous. It's a camping sky - when people are part of the earth and light is telling us something about travel, history, space, colour and stories. On the side facing the sea - in daytime my favourite side because it's more about panorama and breadth - Brighton seemed smaller, the fireworks little sparks of saltpetre.

What astonishes me is how that concave surface is a funfair hall of mirrors in daytime and hours later becomes a kind of outside Rothko triptich......until the fence goes up and the illusion, as with the theatre curtain, ends.

But the bird reminds me, too, of a story I heard about the Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc and the family of fox cubs living in a den inside the old fruit and veg market. When I was last there, I asked about marks on the mounds where the colour was gone and was told it was probably the cubs, playing at night. While I was there late one afternoon on the last shift, I was sure I could hear them behind the black netting that screens off spaces once occupied by particular wholesalers. Among the regular motor sounds of the pigeons, merging with traffic and once, perfectly, a scooter, there were the playscreams I hear outside at night sometimes when cubs take over our gardens and streets. This is the excitement of sculpture - it's made richer by everything around it. This might be obvious to artists and curators, but it's been a discovery for me.

In the old fruit and veg market, I couldn't get out of my mind a poem by Robert Minhinnick, The Fox in the National Museum of Wales. This is a verse from it:

Through the cubists and the surrealists
this fox shimmies surreptitiously,
past the artist who has sawn himself in half
under the formaldehyde sky
goes this fox shiny as a silver
fax in his fox coat,
for at a fox trot travels this fox
backwards and forwards in the museum.....

The picture from the Dismemberment of Jeanne D'Arc attempts to show how the light in that space works - rather like in a cathedral, I felt. I felt the calm of frankincense and sunlight through stained glass. Filtered light in big empty spaces is in the same league as twilight.

The C Curve and Chattri - Anish Kapoor on the Downs

2009-05-10T20:18:00.004Z

Above the Chattri is the C Curve, part of the trail of Anish Kapoor sculptures that have taken Brighton Festival to an extraordinary level. I was there this afternoon with hundreds of other people, horses, dogs and sheep.

There were conversations about the Downs, engineering, physics, sculpture, and screams of excitement from kids. Kites appeared and disappeared. Figures were stretched and shrunk. The path up from the road was crowded and even later in the afternoon there were still carloads parking in the narrow lane. Some visitors were very familiar with Kapoor's work elsewhere, some had just heard about this mirror on the hill. A very angry man argued that it wasn't sculpture if it couldn't be touched.

It is strange to see so many people making this journey, sitting around a mirror, walking around it and marvelling at how stunning it makes our landscape - reflecting it all back to us on a massive screen - and how bizarre it makes us seem, on the other side, with our heads where our feet should be. And I wonder if Kapoor's 'don't touch' policy, by making us stand back, is gently suggesting that we need to contemplate as much as we need to feel.

It reminds me of a quote I have on my wall, borrowed from a fellow poet who was teaching haiku...it's by Chuang Tzu: "The hearing that is in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. The whole being must listen."

There are some amazing thoughts on Kapoor's work in Brighton here:

http://www.anishkapoorinbrighton.blogspot.com/

Anish Kapoor in Brighton

2009-05-06T07:20:00.003Z

I left the Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc yesterday feeling emptied. So empty, in fact, that I found it hard to put words together. I wanted to lie on the grass somewhere and stare at the sky. In fact, I was doing a workshop with Jane. The installation by Anish Kapoor is in the old fruit and vegetable market off Grand Parade, a cavernous, netted space with speed limits on the walls and nets against the pigeons for a ceiling. Two vast piles of excavated waste sit at one end, two pitted trunks are splayed at the other. At the centre is a vast red hole.

I couldn't wander around it on my first visit because of preparations for a performance, so visiting yesterday was my first proper experience of it.

The space is a gift for an artist but Kapoor's used it well. I was delighted to be disorientated, to feel my mind had been wrung out and a little more space created, maybe, for other things. When I started looking at his work I was resistant, snagged up in the Rushdie words around Blood Relations, perplexed by the title of 1000 names (but that was my own cultural ignorance, I now realise). The Rushdie words are too loaded with everything else that is attached to a successful male novelist.

I was held up, too, by fame.

Working through all these issues was like cutting back the hedge of brambles on my allotment each year. There was a promise of something sustaining.

And yesterday, sitting in Pavilion gardens after the workshop with Jane and her partner David, we talked about the buzz that's come with these pieces placed around Brighton and about the discussion Kapoor's role has generated. This morning, though, I realised that there was something else that had worked on me yesterday and it's indefineable other than through comparing experience. It is starting to feel like my annual week at Doris (sadly not happening this year) when I set aside words and reconnect with movement and contemplation.

That's why the Doris hand is waving.

A riot in Brighton

2009-05-04T18:06:00.008Z

Sirens all afternoon and everywhere...as I was picking spinach on the allotment, returning carpet squares to CarpetRight, baking apple cake and now, they're still going on after supper. The police helicopter emerged from mist as I came down the hill from Tenantry Down and earlier was hovering over Mouslecoomb where the arms manufacturer EDO has a factory. EDO allegedly makes parts for missiles used by the Israeli army.

I hadn't planned to go to the May Day demo against EDO, I wanted to walk up to the Chattri and see an Anish Kapoor sculpture. I stopped off at his Joan of Arc installation in the old fruit and veg market (it is amazing) and when I got to the pier saw Fred Pipes on his bike. Maude had told me she was going and so was my son. So I decided to join it as it moved off towards the town. It was laid back, good natured, a bit noisy but unthreatening.....

So what's so stunning, crazy, call it what you will, is the brute force demonstrated by the police for such a small gathering. (The scale of their preparation is evident from a YouTube video showing a whole street of riot vans parked up near Five Ways.)

Mounted police set off at first, then two meat wagons, then a chevron of demonstrators in black and masked, with the rest of us behind. There was no violence, but every side street off North Street had police in it and as Fred and I skived back into the north Laines later - the demo apparently heading for the factory - we watched the end of it. At the very back, a couple of cyclists and a woman pushing a baby in a buggy. Behind her, four or five transits of police, smirking.

Fred told me a funny story about a Critical Mass demo when so few people turned up that he and the other three or four demonstrators went for a cup of tea on the seafront. They were confronted by vanloads of police who asked what they were doing and they replied they were having their tea. Above them, the predictable helicopter.

Anyway, so I held my breath for the afternoon, wondering what would be going on in Moulsecoomb and hoping my son would stay away from the flashpoints. I recognised the danger signs just before Fred and I ducked out - groups of pissed men joining the crowd, sharp faced troublemakers like ferrets.

Then my daughter rang to tell me she'd gone to a friend's birthday barbeque at Preston Park, arriving shortly after so-called demonstrators had rushed through, scattering the bowls players and terrifying her friend. And then my son rang just now from the seafront to tell me it had turned into a full-blown riot.

Do the police see any small demonstration now as an opportunity for some riot training? Has this become our only visible sign of policing?

Not a copper in sight to get the drug dealer doing four or five drops a day from his car around where we live, or the one at the bottom of the road who's also been sleeping with an underage girl, or the one who's now moved but was known to police and was also a paedophile or the couple who do their deals a few doors up from the nursery in Whippingham Road, blatantly, so confident they won't be stopped by anyone because when do you ever see police around here?

Not a copper, even, half an hour after the rush through Preston Park to stop a mugging. Not a copper, apparently, even on the seafront to do anything about blatant dealing in the crowd.

Policing is easy when it's macho shield battering, riding a line of horses into battle, taunting people who are mostly genuine about wanting to voice their opinions about an arms factory on a housing estate in their home town.

Is this all it boils down to - law and order - a line of police cordoning off the Level, the street alongside Barclays, wasting our cash on a helicopter and alienating our teenagers?

The Brighton festival organisers must have been quaking today as the 'Brighton Riot' moved into the Pavilion gardens where there's 24 hour private security for Kapoor's sky mirror. Read this.......http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/526741

According to the local paper, he was spotted watching the demo in Queen's Road.

Blood and ink

2009-05-01T07:03:00.005Z

It's 8 am and I'm at my window, sun on the elms and hedges of my street. The elm leaves are between bud and full leaf. I was at Fabrica last night for a reading from The Tale of Genji by science fiction writer Gwyneth Jones (who's also Ann Hallam, a writer of novels for teenagers). What knowledge that woman has. It's part of a series - Blood and Ink - put together for the Anish Kapoor show at the gallery. Gwyneth took us through social history, the other writing of the time, her own fascination with the book and the way she's been influenced by it in her own writing.

Gwyneth's website is: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann/

In the afternoon I was planning a workshop with Jane. The treat of doing this is often a glimpse of her studio. I went in yesterday feeling fractious and knackered and was stunned by the luminosity of her new paintings. The walls were full of fruit, flowers, porcelain and fabric and the colours are like perfume, or a blackbird, crickets.......I didn't want to leave. It was like opening a door into an old walled garden with orchard and rampant flowers in the middle of summer.

Jane's work is on sale during May at The Handmade House, Beards Place Farm, 98 Lewes Road, Ditchling: www.handmadehouse.co.uk

There's a sculpture trail, food and jewellery too by the talented Emma Willcocks whose bracelets are never off my wrist. Emma, actually, reintroduced me to the pleasure of allotmenting when she asked me to share hers many years ago up near the racecourse, the one I still have.

And it's a busy time. I've been planting seeds, weeding etc. But for some bizarre reason my neck is rigid and I've been slipping in and out of a seam of anger, like a residue of winter muck. I'm trying to work out where it's coming from. Some is personal, but there's a fair bit stirred up by the world and its inequalities: the usual, men/women, poor/rich, confident/diffident/, powerful/disempowered.

Work no longer guarantees enough money to live on.

Men still have more influence than they deserve.

But maybe the only solution is to net the brassicas, keep slugs off the spinach and chard, scare birds from the redcurrants and leave the snarling, fighting and scrabbling for position, the mutual congratulations and building of towers to those who prefer air conditioning to the chalk slopes of the Downs.

Poem for a path

2009-02-26T22:57:00.003Z

Tiles and picture by Julian Belmonte

This was a poem for a path....sometimes words work better off the page.

Magic realism and the kitchen floor

2009-02-25T16:11:00.004Z

Snowdrops in the Pavilion gardens, but the best I've seen so far were in the garden of a student house this morning doing my daughter's paper round because she's ill. The bin bags set them off perfectly. A couple of yellow crocus in my front, no more yet and I'm feeling about as blank as the garden but excited by a new drive to abandon the first person in my writing, not this writing, obviously, but the poems. I've been attached to it for so long and wonder if I've been misusing the power of it, and certainly leading people to think that everything I write is autobiographical. This may be a mistake. It'll be sods law that when I decide that the first person is out of the window, poetry will find its way back to the kitchen and cleaning the floor will be all the rage again. But maybe if you spend your life cleaning the kitchen floor, it's not such a good idea to write about it, too. I'm drawn back to those magic realists and particularly Angela Carter and Amos Tutuola. They deserve re-reading. So I'm going to fling the pinny out of the back door and put on red riding hood's cloak.

Who's dumbing down?

2009-02-04T08:14:00.003Z

"People tend to talk in terms of art for art's sake on the one hand, or art as a form of social engineering on the other. In fact the debate about the arts should be much more sophisticated than this; it has been going on since Plato's Republic, through Kant, the Enlightenment, Orwell, Leavis, Eliot and Williams." Sir Christopher Frayling has been moaning - "it's all a bit beer and skittles at the moment."

It's all very well to complain as you leave the top job at the Arts Council! I haven't been aware of a sophisticated debate being conducted by that institution. The bulletins I get in the post from the region (south) never cease to be tedious, worthy and predictable. Perhaps if there were some artists (a majority) on arts boards, there'd be a more interesting debate. Perhaps, too, if the arts council hadn't got rid of the specialists with vast experience of an artform, there'd be more challenging discussions, too about art.

You can talk more authoritatively about art if you know your subject through and through. I'm not interested in a debate about art if it has to be conducted within constraints that the arts council has promoted relentlessly, if it has to be conducted through arts council approved organisations, if it refuses to acknowledge the need to support individual artists, if it is squewed by interest groups.

When the arts council got rid of specialists, when it turned its back on individual artists, it hastened that dumbing down that he's so pissed off about. Where is the opportunity for poets, for example, to debate the role of poetry in this society? When did the arts council celebrate one of the most challenging of art forms?

But what does that "beer and skittles" insult mean? I don't think beer and skittles equates to dumbing down. I think it equates to the life most of us experience and where the debate needs to be held. How does poetry relate to our everyday experiences, what can it give us, how can it slot itself into those moments staring out of the kitchen window at the winter jasmine in the snow?

I'd say John O'Donoghue and I had a pretty sophisticated discussion about poetry and writing in the Park Crescent pub the other night. And about funding......John's new book, "Sectioned, a Life Interrupted" is launched on Friday. Buy it.

Can a fine artist save Brighton Festival?

2009-02-01T09:38:00.007Z

'A book is like a garden carried in a pocket.'

Everyone wants to make books. Artists and kids usually make them beautifully, as do dedicated, experienced printers with a love and knowledge of fonts. Limited edition or one off books are mouthwatering. Scrapbooks, photo albums, diaries, baby books, travel journals. When I was working for creative partnerships at Bourne School in Eastbourne for two terms, helping kids in years four and five write poems, I ended my residency with a session on making hand-sewn pamphlets for their work. I'm nowhere near as good as someone who makes artist books, but stitching a little eight page pamphlet is simple and if you use quality paper it feels substantial. The kids loved their books - their first collections of poems, illustrated too - and in their own way were tiptoeing in the footsteps of that master of artist books: William Blake.

Then there are celebrity books. My daughter's heat magazine was the only thing to read on the kitchen table this morning, other than a problem page on infidelity by Virginia Ironside. Four pages on 'the crazy world of Pete Doherty'. And a photo of Pete, dressed in fetching Byronic pastiche, signing copies of his book: The Books of Albion - the Collected Writings of Pete Doherty. I remembered the turning point in literature festivals a few years back. Brighton festival had a wonderful programmer - a guy called Adrian who put on Derek Walcott, Sharon Olds, CK Williams and many more astonishing poets. He packed out 100 seater venues with poetry.

When Adrian left, the literature strand changed. Later it wasn't even called literature, but books and debate. The door to celebrity was flung open - journalists replaced poets, cooks replaced poets, biographers replaced poets and celebrities replaced poets. Instead of working on building up an audience for writing, the festival dumbed down.

Blake's Visions of the Daughter's of Albion was a radical, political tract condemning treatment of women and slavery. And he was an awkward, troubled man. I'd love to think of Blake wandering down the coast from his Felpham retreat, to do a reading at the Brighton festival, looking out at the sea where he imagined visions of his literary heroes. But try as I may, I can't make it work. Wordsworth wrote about Blake: "There was no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in his madness which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott." I wonder if Wordworth was as irritated by the easy targets in Don Juan as I am sometimes, especially that line towards the beginning, "At fifty, love for love is rare, tis true...." His arrogance is utterly contemporary.

Brighton festival launches on February 18. The guest director is Anish Kapoor. In publicity about his appointment there was nothing about literature - the four strands of the festival, it seems, are dance, theatre, music and debate. Can we have faith that a fine artist will dig deeper? Will the chattering classes ever be halted?

Sandstone Dreaming and Fernando Pessoa

2009-01-26T07:54:00.007Z

Sandstone dreaming was a poem written with a group of very young primary school children and transferred, word by word, comma by comma, onto clay. I thought of it this morning flicking through last week's Sunday Times over toast. I saved the news review for the amazing pic of Obama. Yesterday there was no time for a paper, I was scrubbing plaster spots off tiles and bannisters. Maybe I was reminded of the poem because of a feature about parents pushing their kids to succeed and what I love about poetry is its quietness, its integrity, particularly for children. Poetry gives kids an escape, especially in a classroom dominated by results and targets. It's a wormhole that becomes a sanctuary - almost as good as building a camp in the woods. More than anything, poetry is a place you visit alone. Every smell in that place is unique, every sound. And the words you find there can reproduce the excitement of any experience you want.

Funnily enough, escape was at the forefront when I was doing my accounts the other night. Jane Fordham and her partner David helped guide me through the labyrinth of an online tax return and relieved me of so much stress that the next day I felt renewed. But David reminded me about Pessoa, the Portugese writer who adopted at least 14 different identities (I exaggerated, I think, when I tried to tell David not all of them had been discovered) and wrote throughout his life, but when he died in 1935 only one book had been published. He was virtually unknown.

Now, of course, his importance is celebrated, whether or not his views are. A poetry International web feature on Pessoa argues: "It is sometimes said that the greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos."

Alberto Caeiro: "I have no ambitions and no desires./ To be a poet is not my ambition,/ It's my way of being alone."

It's a tortuous route, I guess, from sandstone dreaming and an online tax return to Pessoa. It gets more tortuous. Because what I really wanted to write about, before I was hijacked, was that old Sunday Times news review and three references in it that I found rather shocking, I guess. I have been aware for some time of the widening gap between so-called opinion formers (chattering classes) and the group of people I know. Once I was maybe on the fringes, as a freelance journo. Now I'm decidedly not. The chasm is financial, intellectual and moral.

Featurette 1 by Rachel Johnson refers to a George Monbiot campaign against Agas (could you make this up?). She defends her aga in her Devon home for being "our only means of cooking and heating apart from log fires). Aaahhh.....but the postscript adds: "I also have an Aga in our basement kitchen in London......" When I think of Agas I remember the one Risenga's mother had in her corrugated iron home in a squatter camp on my first visit to South Africa in 1994, the year of the first election. When the whites clear out, they hand stuff over to their servants. Lots of Agas were inherited in this way. After the elections whites felt safer visiting the tin cities their servants lived in. So what did they do? Aware of the rise in the value of agas, they went round collecting them back, offering the smallest amount of cash they can get away with. (Reminiscent of Maupassant's short stories) Anyway, Johnson didn't mention that stuff. But what did she think she'd convince us of?

Featurette 2 was about middle class interns and featured Gemma. We are told that daddy had helped a company director friend into an exclusive golf club so in return she got work experience, which in turn led to a job in PR.

Feature 3 took up a lot of space. It was about women and money. Sooooooo in touch with the times, it quotes a senior editor at Elle magazine on paying the nanny: "I have to say 'How much is it?' or I'll say 'I'll sign the cheque. Can you just fill in the amount?' I feel so much better when I don't have to ink out that large sum." Margarette Driscoll, the writer, comments: "Women are not just reluctant to talk about money, it seems; they don't even want to think about it."

She might want to eavesdrop on almost every conversation I have with my neighbours, friends and even total strangers in a queue at a till.

Hey, Margarette, the problem isn't women talking about money - it's listening to the right women. Women know they're being conned, fleeced and robbed on so many levels but people like you aren't looking outside the Ivy and Groucho.

At least teenagers are thinking........ at least the ones I know, who aren't cocooned by agas and nannies and private education. I know who I'd prefer to have a conversation with over supper.

(The milk tooth is still there. The Maryland bridge was faulty and had to go back. A three week reprieve.)

Pessoa at Poetry International web: http://portugal.poetryinternationalweb.org
Potter Julian Belmonte: www.julianbelmonte.co.uk/

William Maxwell The Chateau

2009-01-22T10:04:00.004Z

The allotment has been on my list of worries - neglected since the autumn when the council began to change the locks and had not got round to sending letters to me instead of the friend I used to work the plot with. But hooray! I now have a working key and on Sunday was there, cutting the raspberry canes and clearing brambles. There's so much to do and this must be the year of raised beds, especially if there's another wet summer and slugs are rampant again.

What has happened to time? In between cooking, shopping, washing clothes, cleaning the house (badly, it has to be said), feeding the cat and attempting to earn a living.....I stop around 8.30 at night, I reckon, when kids and cat are fed, washing up's done and I have a couple of hours to watch a film before bed and an hour or so of reading. Maybe the film should go. That would leave my existence pared back to the absolute basics. Being hard up is time consuming. You have to cook proper meals because they're cheaper. You have to shop carefully. You have to walk places rather than take the car, you repair clothes.

I was glad to see that a novel I found in a charity shop and loved, The Chateau, by William Maxwell, was in the Guardian's top 1000 novels list. But I was sorry that Moniza Alvi didn't win the TS Eliot prize this year. She deserves it - her book, Europa, is brilliant and relevant in a way that very, very few collections of poetry are. Alvi is consistently under-rated and ignored and I don't understand why. I guess this is the fate of writers who are ahead of their time. Writers who maybe make their contemporaries feel uneasy because their work is so original. Europa deals with post-traumatic stress, rape, the anxieties and pressures of modern life...... I guess at least the winner was female.

Anyway, back to Maxwell - an editor for the New Yorker for 40 years and it shows. His prose is so sharp, his eye absolutely clear. Another New Yorker I've been reading is Mark Doty. What a good poet he is....and a nice man. I met him only once at the 1995 TS Eliot award when my first book was shortlisted. He said nice things about my dress - a sleeveless shift of big black sequins. It's folded carefully away for my daughter. But you can't sit down in it because you bend the sequins, so it's a propping up the wall or dancing party dress. Doty's latest book is Theories and Apparitions. I'm reviewing it for Warwick Review, edited by Michael Hulse. Good to have space to do it justice. Good to have time to really think about it. Anyway, the book's incredibly thought provoking and humane. It's big (metaphorically speaking, not literally) and generous, open minded and kind. Some of his Apparitions poems, though, reminded me of the Brighton poet John McCullough's wonderful homage to Frank O'Hara.

Today I lose my last milk tooth. A week off 54 and one of the first teeth I had, the little one at the bottom in the centre of the jaw, is still in my mouth. But by this afternoon it'll be out. For a tooth that's meant to last about five or so years, it hasn't done badly. In fact I'd like my dentist to give me a pat on the back, really. But it's feeling loose. He reckons it might last another year, but I'm nervous biting an apple nowadays and I don't want it coming out the day before I have to go and interview someone for work. So he's going to glue a false one to the teeth either side, somehow. Rather that than a plate soaking in a glass by the bed overnight. I'm not ready for that yet.

London Road Post Office

2008-12-18T10:23:00.003Z

Into the holly hedge this festive season go the post office, ntl, Barclays, all insurance companies and the allotments office at Brighton and Hove Council.

The post office, for obvious reasons, but chiefly for its decision makers' apparent inability to leave their desks. If I knew who to invite, I'd call them down to London Road post office for mince pies and a retro experience because the London Road post office reminds me of Romania when the Wall was still up.

I went on a press trip to Romania in the eighties. We were accompanied by a communist party official at all times. We visited Vlad's castle in Transylvania, some astonishing painted monasteries, saw black robed women in lines in the fields, a beautiful young gypsy woman in a cafe (and heard plenty of stories about Romanian racism) and toured coastal resorts with sixties names like Sputnik. We were taken to a department store where there was nothing on the shelves but crystal bowls.

This is the department store the London Road post office reminds me of. The post office is on the ground floor of an old Co-op, remarkable for its marble staircase, its size (dominating London Road) and always clean, large loos. It used to have a great toy department and handy fabric and haberdashery section. Then it closed but the post office stayed - tucked away in a corner of the vast, empty building with one or two cashiers at the most, not a single chair for the long line of pensioners who queue even out of season for an hour or more to get served.

Retail sourcing

2008-12-05T08:19:00.005Z

A girl in the art shop's asking a boy she works with how to make a skirt. He's doing his best - telling her she needs a paper pattern. I guess he might be a fashion student, probably at Brighton. I'm looking for cheap gold and silver paint. It's that time of year. I'm going to decorate my own wrapping paper. But I'm side-tracked now by a bargain bin of reduced beads by the counter and can't resist butting in.

Do you want a skirt with a waistband? No. Do you have a skirt you want to copy? Yes. So I explain. Sister Short would be proud. I explain how she can lay the skirt out on newspaper and draw a pattern. I explain the need to allow for seams, that it's easier to seat a zip at the back than the side and no, she doesn't need to take the original apart - the secret's in ironing, pinning and tacking.

I guess no-one needs to learn to sew now. Clothes are so cheap. But on the news today there are reports workers in Bangladesh earn about 7 pence an hour for making clothes for supermarkets and the British high street. There was a turning point when I realised it was cheaper to buy clothes ready made than fabric and a paper pattern. It wasn't a life affirming epiphany.

So I cheer when I hear of supermarkets' drop in profits. Two moments from my past: for an 80,000 report in 1999 about retail sourcing and merchandising, I had to research case studies - Kingfisher, one-time owner of Woolworths, was one and I wanted Tesco too. I trekked up to London for a meeting with Kingfisher's then chief executive. I'd been allocated 30 minutes, grudgingly. When I got there it had been cut to 15 minutes. The corporate affairs man knew I was coming from Brighton. Couldn't we have done it on the phone? The chief executive spent those 15 minutes avoiding eye contact, fending off questions with ready-made replies and breaking paper clips into ever smaller pieces.

Tesco's corporate affairs man at the time told me I couldn't use them as a case study because I wasn't important enough.

I still wouldn't want to share a meal with most of the individuals I met or talked to in the course of writing that report. I began to loathe the retail industry. There were some good guys. A chief executive who used to work for Oxfam - he had integrity. A couple of the trade unionists I spoke to. Fair Trade campaigners.

Let the others spend a week working in a battery chicken shed, sewing jeans, putting cheap CD players together, breathing fumes at a plastic mouldings factory. And what would they conclude? That retail now is a worthy human endeavour or a shabby waste of human imagination?

to the heart of November

2008-11-18T15:37:00.005Z

Light 's short but the quality's delicious. I've nearly reached the last of the cooking apples - one or two are rotting now in the bowl, bruised from their fall. The fridge is full of puree and apple cake. I could make scones with the rest.

Behind drawn curtains I listen to wood burn and spit. Night falls in the afternoon. Heavier covers weight the bed.

The wardrobe bulges with jumpers again. Scarves and gloves fill pockets. Wild winds send the kitten scooting around the house.

This month, its hedges, are red with wine and hips. I feel a closing in, a wrapping, a change. I browse recipe books. Walk lit crescents on hillsides. I organise photos. Mend.

I drive through a tunnel of beech trees to the heart of November, pace a vast silver bay to visit its soul.

2008-10-13T07:35:00.003Z

Towards the end of a glorious Sunday I walked with my daughter to the Chattri on the Downs for the opening of the Brighton Sacred Music festival. The event, based on ritual, was conceived by a performing arts duo called Red Earth. All of us who'd made the short trek from a road off the A27, just a mile over the fields, took part in what my daughter called 'a slice of Doris'.

It was so perfectly Brighton, but the best of Brighton - a gentle, quiet, spiritual hour or so with incense, cymbals and temple bells with white flags blowing and shadows stretching. My neighbours, Clare and Pete found it on a walk with their dog, Nyati was there - she'd reminded me about it - Razia was there because she's one of the organisers...

The last time I went to the Chattri was an afternoon scramble with poet Maria Jastrzebska and Atlas literary magazine editor Sudeep Sen, who was in Brighton for a poetry festival. That visit coincided with the opening of the shooting season - guns lined up along the hills in the distance, shots rocked the valley and we watched the beaters' progress nervously. Added to that, the fields were full of jumpy cows with late calves.

The Chattri means umbrella in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu. Built from marble and granite, it's where 53 Hindu and Sikh soldiers were cremated during the first world war. Their ashes were then scattered in the sea.

On the monument, in Hindi and English there's this inscription: 'To the memory of all the Indian soldiers who gave their lives for their King-Emperor in the Great War, this monument, erected on the site of the funeral pyre where the Hindus and Sikhs who died in hospital at Brighton, passed throught the fire, is in grateful admiration and brotherly affection dedicated.'

Around 12,000 Indian soldiers, wounded on the Western Front, were hospitalised around Brighton, some in the Royal Pavilion.

There's a free event each afternoon at 5 pm all week - each one a ritual opening up of north, south, east and west points. Razia will be there on Tuesday to open up the east.

http://www.worldsacredmusic.org
Razia Aziz Between Heaven and Earth: songs of love and devotion from India and Pakistan.
http://www.chattri.com

2008-09-29T07:57:00.005Z

"......categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche." Toni Morrison.

Whenever I go to a poetry festival this is the question I revisit. I'm just back from King's Lynn, where the programme was indeed broad both in terms of the styles of the writers participating, their personal aesthetics and their backgrounds. But I've been troubled for a very long time about the notion of who defines writing quality and how it's assessed - and this is another reason for flagging up Morrison's quote.

British poetry is taking its time to acknowledge society's pluralism, even to acknowledge different points of view. And British poetry is defined, all too often, by a small band of intellectuals who are maybe not that inclined to welcome uninvited newcomers. Sometimes I feel like the received version of British poetry is defined by safety, by invitation, by restraint.

One term of abuse, for example, the easy dismissal, that irritates me is domesticity. It's used by both sides. The traditionalists, defining what is a good subject for poetry, twist and turn between rewriting the classics, working class roots, playing with the ideas of dead philosophers...dealing in traditional form, irony and cleverness. For the avant garde, any hint of the personal and by implication the domestic, suggests the dead hand of the everyday and dullness.

But on this battleground of the kitchen floor, there's a deep hypocrisy. Let's look at the domestic. When men write about food they are applauded. When women do, they are dismissed. When men write about love they are only doing what they have always done. Women are accused of sentimentality. When men write about their children they win prizes. When women do they are mawkish.

Few of these intellectuals defining our poetry and its qualities would dare disagree with Morrison's view. Yet when there's an opportunity to listen to work they are unfamiliar with, that is written outside their narrow boundaries - an opportunity presented to them effortlessly, on a china plate even, with cake and tea, do they take it?

Adel Guemar's State of Emergency, Lorna Thorpe's A Ghost in my House, Paul Stubbs' The Icon Maker and Will Stone's Glaciation were four of those opportunities at Kings Lynn. All of them are poets writing outside the expected. You'd probably rather not listen to Guemar's delicately sinister poems borne of Algerian torture and oppression. They reminded me of the attention to detail in Leon Golub's paintings, the gold watch on the wrist of the executioner.

And you might grimace uncomfortably at Lorna Thorpe's uninhibited poems of the body, charting that unknown place between men and women. Paul Stubbs, taking as his starting point the paintings of Francis Bacon, is signalling his intention to unsettle and as he delivers, the crow on the roof joins in. Then there's Will Stone's melancholy, the quiet exploration of that state of mind that is so taboo to those in bed with irony....

I believe the more people who write, publish and offer up their wares, the better. How can there be too much poetry? Those who fear it are those who fear exposure, who fear their views on what is good and bad will be overturned.

Those who cannot listen to the new are dead. If there is a formula for a healthy mind, I'd say a regular blast of whatever you define as the classics and a brisk daily walk through the margins with whoever invites you.

Personally, I'd rather risk wandering through the graveyard slot and be reminded of what unites us all than sleep through the afternoon.

And as a postscript, I want to read poetry that comes from somewhere deeper than esoteric footnotes, I want poetry to be loving, sexy, angry, jealous and passionate, not preening and self-conscious. Give me Neruda, Lorca, Plath, Edna St Vincent Millay at her best.....those who follow in the tradition of the old ghazals describing midnight and all it contains.

2008-09-15T17:04:00.005Z

I've been writing about a forest the way I normally write about the sea. I thought writing had left me but I'd started a piece before the summer holidays and woke up one morning understanding how I could go back to it. I cannibalised other poems, bits from my notebook and shaped what I'd already written. I felt as if I was hammering metal.

It's a piece based on 20 prints by Jane Fordham, whose work is on the cover of Commandments. Jane showed me the prints, I wrote and showed her some words, changed them and then Jane decided on an order for her images, I wrote again and finally decided I needed an underlying narrative, but not an obvious one, that would bind 20 self-contained three line poems.

A turning point in the process was realising that another poem I wrote while I was working on the prints, a poem I thought was nothing to do with Jane's work, could do some of that binding I needed. Another turning point was showing a rough early draft to some women poets I meet with every month, who liked the very spartan bits and who suggested it could do with a regular form.

It is an amazing challenge working like this. It's an exchange as well as an opening up. It's like someone describing a view and pointing out all the stuff I might have missed. Sharing the excitement of making something new, though, also seems to extend the pleasure. It certainly makes up for the washing machine breaking down on Sunday.

2008-09-04T08:01:00.009Z

There's an intriquing job on offer at the moment: head of culture and lifestyle. It's for Hull City Council and the accompanying pictures in the ad are of an illuminated old building, an ultra modern one, a djembe drummer and blond girl in a swimming pool. I wouldn't expect, of course, a local authority to be at the cutting edge when it comes to visuals. It would test anyone's skills, but the copy below it reveals why our arts are in trouble.

"As a corporate team player, you will bring your experience and ability as a strategic and inspirational leader, a successful track record of delivering change, and an understanding of the impact of culture on our priorities for the city and its people...."

Wouldn't a year 11 kid be ashamed to have written that? Swap 'culture' for 'drugs', 'public transport', 'cycling', green issues', 'energy', 'the health service', 'recycling', 'policing' or any other issue a local authority might be involved in and it makes no difference.

And how can you be head of lifestyle? As if all those different lifestyles were formed below in a pyramid, somehow arranged hierarchically. And cultures....or cultural practices (? unclear, too), dotted between them. I wonder what the bottom line would be and the top two?

The obvious thing, of course, is to look at the website. And that clarifies the bizarre placing of the word Veredus at the bottom of the ad. Veredus, unsurprisingly, is a consultancy the council's using. It means post-horse (pony express, mule train etc. etc.). And it's part of Capita.

So, it's also no surprise the language of this advert, the job description and person specification are interchangeable. That's how to make money - create a format and sell it hundreds of times just changing the date, place and time.

But back to the job. Perhaps the head of culture and lifestyle should be an expert in, um, culture? A poet or sculptor, a film-maker or song writer, a director, conductor, composer - there's plenty of us around who've clocked up a fair bit of experience. Maybe she could have lived several different lives.....a spot of single parenting, a bit of travelling, a couple of years as a carer, a year or so in tipi valley or in the hills around Carcassonne?

Apparently this is not a priority. The first thing listed under knowledge is "Extensive knowledge of the financial, legal and social environment within which Local Authorities operate." The second is: "In depth financial and commercial awareness, with strong analytical skills and an excellent aptitude for developing innovative solutions to highly complex problems."

Ah, so we're looking for an accountant are we? Well, not an artist. Not a teepee dweller. The sixth and final requisite in the knowledge section is this: "A comprehensive understanding of a wide range of Cultural Services."

Hull, hijacked by consultantspeak. They're not alone - there's barely a public organisation in the country with the courage to speak like its workers.

Shame on you Hull, city of plain talking Philip Larkin, who for all his failings summed up the post-war navel gazing of wealthy, industrialised 20th century cultures with a brilliant two lines and well placed expletive.

Shame on you for not even referring to some of Hull's poetic icons Larkin, Marvell and Dunn.

So I'm proposing the city council might be besieged by applications from some of its cultural icons. Some of us remember the days Micky Mouse worked long hours in Fleet Street.

wwwdrivinghullforward.co.uk is the website where you can download the job details.

2008-09-03T10:01:00.004Z

It might be a rather cliched image of summer, but at least it contains some colour. Bright wellies and neon bootlaces were some consolation for wading through Somerset mud at our annual visit to the Blackdown Hills and the wonderful Tribe of Doris.

Doris is a summer camp rather than a festival and works you hard if you let it. I chose beginner's African dance this year and the songs of the Orishas. The dance was a fantastic daily workout to prepare me for winter. The singing reminded me, as it always does, that the soul needs sound too.

I have written virtually nothing this summer other than brief notes in my travel journal. I'm still on the post-Commandments plateau and my confidence in the poetry returning is being tested now that I'm back at home. On the cliff path, in the marquee, around the Doris fires and standing in the back line of the samba reggae dance class, it didn't seem to matter. Now it's a test of faith.

2008-08-11T09:02:00.005Z

The two faces of Cornwall.

There'll be much chattering about English holidays after this summer of tightened purses and rain.

I've just returned from 10 days in a county I have fond childhood memories of, blue with cold from swimming and surfing, still transported by the smell of traditional, thick, vanilla ice-cream and the feel of turf on a cliff.

There weren't many sunny days on this holiday and perhaps too much time to reflect on the nature of English tourism. I was offended by the flags to St George, by the confederate flag, too, flying on our campsite, by the appearance of gollies in the campsite games room grab machine and an aggressive display of them in a Newquay shop window.

How much do you forgive when the coastline gives you so much to dream about?

Walking on the coastal path between Watergate Bay and Mawgan Porth, I chatted with my son about hell and what it might be like. He brought it up and I don't believe in an afterlife, but like him have always been intriqued by the nature of hell. Coincidentally, I'd taken Dante away with me and had just started it (CH Sisson's version). I showed him the diagram of Dante's levels of hell and read bits aloud as the rain pummelled on the tent one evening before he and the other three teens crossed the campsite field to the games room for the night. Yes, Dante was a hit.

But all of us felt uncomfortable with Cornwall's blatant absence of black people, with these gollies - relics of an England I was glad to see the back of when I left Surrey. We felt uncomfortable, too, walking on those tiny roads being buzzed and squeezed into fences and puddles by four wheel drives. I've never seen so many in one place. Everyone wears a wetsuit to go into the water. So much ostentatious wealth.

Last year, in Tintagel, my son saw a golly in a gift shop. He held forth, to an amused audience, about this discovery. The shop assistant didn't understand, or pretended not to, the point he was making.

And then there's the Cornish flag. So reminiscent of the Breton one. It flies among the St George's crosses, too, over the caravan parks and tented villages. Perhaps the golly's face superimposed in one of its corners?

But the kids want to go back next year! They made loads of friends, they hung around and gossiped, they stayed up late and sat at cafe tables, tried surfing and didn't get up till midday. My daughter even said she'd like to live in Cornwall. Its coastline, the deep blue of the sea on a good day, caves, clean sand and stunning coastal path that I wish I'd seen more of, all these elements energise the soul. The sea, of course, can take those gollies and reduce them to rags in no time. And all night, the sea's just fields away, so endlessly inventive.

2008-07-24T10:40:00.004Z

This is Madosini, a traditional Xhosa musician from the Transkei in South Africa, now based in Cape Town. She came to Brighton last night to say hello - the last time we met was years ago when the children were very little so there were the usual oohs and aaahs to celebrate their growth towards adulthood. Madosini's playing at Womad this weekend, which I can't make, but at the kitchen table after supper, she played for six of us, her voice stretching into the back garden and over the walls, seeping into the last of the light and the dark blue sky. She made sense of the word charisma.

Her visit was like a marker, in a way. It's my son's first proper camping trip alone this weekend, at Womad, with friends and after she'd gone to bed and we were sitting chatting, he said it felt like Christmas Eve. I keep returning to the same sense of awe when I think of what it's like to be a teenager, in the summer, with all that scented time ahead, long evenings and beaches. My daughter's only just finished school and she's still in wonder at the thought of weeks without uniform, packed lunches and registration.

But back to Madosini. She's known in South Africa as the queen of Xhosa music. She's the most accomplished player of the mouth harp and jew's harp, which she was taught by her mother. She also plays the instrument so associated with capoeira, the berimbau, but it originated in southern Africa and there is called the uhadi. Her music's part of an important tradition, linked to ceremony and everyday life and she's sought out for performances and collaborations. She's currently working with some classical violinists but at Womad is performing solo.

Her work's available on the net but Madosini's yet to become rich from it. She's been ripped off and exploited shamelessly at times. Now she's supporting her seven grandchildren, alone.

She's a generous woman. As we listened last night, it was like a gift from her village, moments that more than made up for not being able to make the trek along the M4. Madosini's music has a depth and emotional integrity that's truly rare. She's apparently a great story-teller and I could imagine how she'd so easily sweep an audience away. A solo album, Power to the Women, is on Melt 2000 Blue Room. You can find her on YouTube too.

I have been thinking a lot about the power of the everyday. What Madosini does is start there - with tunes to send a child to sleep, rhythms to wind down to at the end of the day, simple refrains that everyone can repeat. She draws power from the everyday, she makes it special and for that reason I think, she is so important. She has the insight and experience of life to know that it is how we live from moment to moment that determines who we are. She also has the confidence to stay with those traditions and not be deflected. Like Neruda in many ways, in his odes for ordinary things, in his repeated celebration of love and his final questions - that pepper everyone's days.

2008-07-16T11:18:00.004Z

I walked to the Jack and Jill windmills on Sunday with my daughter. The views from the Downs path leading from Ditchling Beacon are wide and heartening. We walked through a flock of sheep and herd of cows with their calves. At times the sky was a spectacular deep grey but we weren't rained on. Earlier, I'd dug up potatoes and picked more broad beans, my favourite vegetable. The early raspberries haven't come to much but the later ones are looking promising. There are already ripe blackberries, which surprised me and another odd feature of this summer is how advanced the Bramley apples look.

But I've been infinitely more bothered by reports of the video showing Omar Khadr sobbing under interrogation at Guantanamo Bay. As I listened to the Radio 4 news on the way back from my mum's yesterday, to an interview with one of his lawyers and some of the audio from the interrogation, I thought about my own kids, about all I've read by great writers on incarceration, state violence, political dirty tricks and I wondered how this child could have been locked up so young and abused in this way. The lawyer's descriptions of the pre-interrogation treatment (described so callously as the frequent flyer programme) are unlikely to ever leave my mind.

How can Guantanamo exist anyway? I happily boycotted South African goods during apartheid because of state-perpetrated violence. Are we asleep now?

In Brighton, police are allowed to break up groups of teenagers in a park under a little publicised by-law covering more than two people gathering together. It is not applied to large groups of mothers and toddlers who meet there for picnics. It is not applied to informal football matches. It is not even applied to street drinkers. But it is applied to young people.

We are in danger of demonising teenagers to such an extent that they are dehumanised and we forget they are children, still. Have we lost our imaginations to such a degree that we cannot remember how it was to be 14, 15, 16? At 53, sometimes, I struggle to take myself back there...particularly when my own teenagers are being intransigent or irritating. But I can still remember the extremes of those years - the elation, the almost indescribable sense of being alive, and the self-doubt, the fears.

Children should not be locked up. Full stop. And with equal certainty, Guantanamo prison should not exist. We must challenge lazy politicians, we must make connections, we must be vigilant. It is time to do some homework on our rights. Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak was published by the University of Iowa press last year.

2008-07-08T12:32:00.004Z

The Virgin of Flames is a novel by Chris Abani set in Los Angeles about a mural artist. On the back cover Walter Mosely suggests Abani has rewritten the American story. Its descriptions are original and vivid and as the title suggests, Abani uses the running metaphor of Catholicism and devotion as a backdrop in a number of ways. This novel puts humanity into the city the way Whitman does but there's a nod to the Girl with a Pearl Earring, I reckon, in its concentration on the artist - lots of details on how Black (the hero) makes his colours....

Black engages me, too, because he incorporates lines of poetry in one of his murals. I first encountered Abani when I picked up his collection of poems, Kalakuta Republic a few years ago and was knocked out by it. The collection is based on his experience as a political prisoner in Nigeria between 1985 and 1991 and isn't easy reading, but essential for anyone concerned about freedom of expression and the consequences of forgetting its importance.

What was a coincidence, though, was watching Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law last night and delighting in its leisurely, witty and humane world view, in Tom Waits, of course, and the way Whitman and Frost, those American giants, were knitted into the narrative. It took my teenage kids, used to snappy, action driven narrative and colour, a while to get into it, but they were entranced too.

Abani aside, I've been thinking about African writing again. I was reminded of Amos Tutuola by a friend and how much I love his slant on narrative, but I've lent his books and I don't think I have anything of his left on my shelves. But I read Andre Brink, for the first time thanks to my local library and plan a return to Nawaal el Sadaawi from Egypt, the wonderful poet Jack Mapanje and Ellen Kuzwayo.

It isn't easy being a writer. For most of us it's fitted in between earning a living and for women, looking after children. For writers in so many other parts of the world, add into that mix, censorship, political violence, domestic violence and few opportunities to be published. Many writers serve their apprenticeships over long, long years without recognition or support. I'm indebted to one of the publishers in this country, Saqi, for introducing me to that collection of Chris Abani's. Buy it. And from Algeria, another important voice is that of Soleiman Adel Guemar, whose collection, State of Emergency, is published by Arc. He'll be at the Kings Lynn Festival in September.

2008-06-30T09:17:00.008Z

This is part of a wall painting on show at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum near Goodwood. I was there on Sunday with Fred Pipes and Maude Casey for an event organised by Mark Hewitt - an architectural picnic with music in the museum's unusual Gridshell building. The Gridshell has a roof as rolling as the Downs.

The Sussex Weald is a gentle landscape and just what I needed for a Sunday outing. Just looking over the fields and being outside on a perfect day is a balm but the museum contributed a hamlet of rescued old buildings smelling of woodsmoke, noisy geese and a working mill from Lurgashall producing stoneground flour. We ate Sussex goat's cheese, my home-made apple chutney and tomato mustard I bought on Saturday in Hove from a local producer. The sun shone and sheep slept under the trees. Feverfew, fennel and broad beans filled the cottage gardens.

We remembered paraffin stoves and the three day week when shops opened by candlelight. We talked of how the lifestyles on 'display' at the museum are barely a generation away from our own experience and in many parts of the world, still being followed. What I love about the place is the houses without possessions - as if by being there, you detox yourself for an hour or so of this angrily acquisitive century.

This is the wall of an old market place - saved and rebuilt. It's the size of a large bedroom.

2008-06-22T09:58:00.002Z

Li Mills runs a choir in Brighton, Jam Tarts. I used to belong but I don't like to be flakey and after a run of non-attendance because of different domestic complications, I asked her to fill my place. I miss it and may be able to get myself back in one day, but in the meantime, Li and I are meeting up to write songs. She has a couple of different song writing musician partners and I've been invited into this loose co-operative to help with the words.

Last night I was round at her place with a bottle of 10 year old Great Wall Chinese red wine! The song we were attempting lyrics for was upbeat and bouncy. It was fun to insinuate the odd edgy lyric, to subvert the good humour. I never wrote lyrics when I played at playing bass in a band. Lyrics were written by the guitarist, my then boyfriend, who was obsessed with Tom Waits. I find it hard to listen to Tom Waits without thinking of him, actually, and a long drive in my old Morris traveller through the fens, when we were summoning up the courage to kiss.

Writing these lyrics is a bit like playing a game. What do we want to say here? Where does the stress fall? How much can you stretch a word? Is this a conversation? Who's talking, who is the singer talking to? When I write poetry, the only landscape is my own, that in my head and how familiar it feels sometimes. I feel as if I go back to the same places endlessly, obsessively looking for something else to pull out of them or inspect within them.

Writing with Li, I am questioned, put on the spot and have to see differently, make words fit into the tunes she's sung with blank vowels and consonants over the tracks someone else has composed. And it fits perfectly into my mood, which is to be stretched. The other project, an artist book with Jane, is also progressing. I'm refining, cutting, pruning the lines I've come up with in response to her amazing prints. The big question is narrative. Is there enough of one embedded in the connections I've made between words?

What started me off on this track, though, was an e mail from a friend I haven't heard from for ages. For some reason it began a trail of thought about domesticity and how little it's valued in the arts. As we were listening to our tracks without words, though, Li played me a Kate Bush song, Washing Machine.

I'm going to blast it from the CD player, unapologetically.

2008-06-16T08:10:00.003Z

A sacred cow makes the best burger. I've always remembered that graffiti from a toilet door in Portsmouth when I was a student there more than 30 years ago. For some reason this morning I woke up with an incident in my head from a festival last summer. A festival I'll be off to this year, too. I was standing in a queue for hot chocolate and chips with my daughter. It was late and cold. Something made me turn around and the guy behind me said "salaam aleikum." I replied with "hello". He repeated his greeting increasingly aggressively and I repeated my reply initially confused and then it dawned on me what he was doing. It took four repeats for him to give up. I could smell alcohol on his breath and he had a packet of Golden Virginia in his shirt pocket.

I didn't give the traditional Muslim reply for two reasons. Firstly because his greeting was not given in peace, but mostly because I am not religious. I will use it with families I know, to be polite, but something about this man made me very uncomfortable and my instinct proved right - he was chippy and looking for a fight. (Why does that remind me of George Bush and the way he's always used his religion, I wonder?)

How easily they can happen. A friend of my son was down for the weekend from London. He's a teenager and a target for stressed-out city dwellers whether they're his peers or older. He was amazed at how chilled out this seaside town is! It made me re-evaluate the place and last night I went up to the racecourse with my son. We looked east towards Rottingdean, over Whitehawk, so neatly arranged in the dip. We looked west towards Worthing and I realised how self-contained our home is. We could see the Downs behind the city, empty of buildings and lights. The sea was clear and the sky a band of pink and grey with interruptions of darker grey where it was raining.

Where we stood was once an iron age fort. Its position is perfect. We talked about the weekend and him turning 16. As a teenager I loved to walk with my mum. Talking was so much easier with that rhythm going. I guess it was talking about stress, race and religion that jogged my memory of the festival, plus the fact that some of the friends he's met there were down for his birthday. What amazing young people they are - confident, bright, respectful, articulate and sensitive - and they put many adults to shame.

The poem "Lucretian" by Peter Reading is one of my favourites on religion. I've quoted a verse below. This appears in his Collected Poems published by Bloodaxe in 1996. Buy it.

"Religio-magico-malice -
remember the slaughter at Aulis
when innocent Iphigeneia
was sacrificed by her own father,
deluded devout Agamemnon,
who thought that to summon a breeze
which would speed his fleet to Troy
he must first placate bloodthirsty Artemis
with a welter of gore and guts
and the mumbo-jumbo and cleavers
of a pack of murderous priests...
(Remember, also, Khomeini
and Tomas de Torquemada.)
How much idiot evil
gormless theists engender."