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| My cat ripped the curtain by my desk so she could look out at the street |
I have been guiding Maria Jastrzebska, a Brighton based Polish-English poet through a residency at Fabrica gallery, which is showing a film on Etel Adnan by the Ottolith Group during April and May.
I'm in a poetry group with Maria so I'm delighted she's doing this residency, since she shares so many concerns with Adnan, a lesbian Lebanese born poet now living in Paris after a long spell in the US.
The show opened on Friday and there was a talk by the Ottolith group as well as the usual gathering of Brighton people - volunteers and friends - associated with Fabrica. It was such a crush, in fact, that the hum of conversation seeped into the room where the talk was happening, dipping occasionally in response to a handclap or tap on a glass, then rising back to the level it had found, rather like the sea.
Which is the subject of the Ottolith group's commission and of Etel Adnan's most recent collection of short poems, Sea and Fog, that the Ottolith group's based its film on. She is filmed, mostly from the back, reading her work. It's 30 minutes of meditations that take their own courses, liberate your own thoughts and have made me think again about poetry that I've dismissed in the past as too cerebral.
I had to do a lot of research on Adnan to help Maria settle into the residency - which she has now done, brilliantly and is embarking on the challenge of asking the public three very resonant questions: What's the purpose of your visit? Where do you come from? Have you anything to declare? She's asking for answers on her blog: unquiet border.
As for Etel, who wasn't able to be at the opening, I'm going to explore her work - she's been writing for more than 60 years in English and French.
I left the opening with Jane, David and Maude, who had a bottle of Prosecco waiting in her fridge. We bought two more and later they tipped me out of the car, flapping my insect wings.