Poetry International 2010: Imagining Peace
ALAS! No picture of Waterloo Bridge with which to round off this week. But take it from me: earth has not anything to show more fair, not even Westminster Bridge. I can see the London Eye, distantly and when the trees have no leaves, from my kitchen window - and everyone agrees that that is a valuable perk of my flat.
In the end, my friend and I were whisked up to the green room to mingle with the poets and drink free literary wine, and when the Southbank Centre finally kicked us all out we had barely time to run for the bus.
Wonderful, though. I love listening to people read poetry in languages I don't understand. You almost get to understand a language in a different way that way, through sound and rhythm alone. (And rest assured that translations in english were projected onto a big screen behind the readers!) Arabic, of which we heard a lot tonight, is really, really beautiful. There's a particular elongated dying fall of a vowel that is incredibly musical and expressive. Nouri al-Jarrah - a practitioner of this vowel - began the evening with a poem called Letter From Odysseus (pronouned Odysséus, as if in French), which describes the homecomings the king doesn't have, among suitors, and ends:
I am Odysséus,
Dead in a ship.
Alas: that's all I had time to copy down.
Fady Joudah, a doctor and Palestinian-American winner of the Yale Young Poets series, read in English and was subsequently more anecdotal than the others in his introductions. The Lebanese poet Hyam Yared (her first name is pronounced Heeam) read really beautifully in French, a single long poem situating history in the narrative of male and female bodies. There was no book of her work available: if there had been one in French I'd have bought it and quoted it here. As it was, I was too busy listening to copy lines down...
The Cambridge (& fellow Salt Publishing) poet Richard Berengarten was the sole Jewish voice of the evening, which - without wishing to sound partisan - seems a little bit strange, in a festival called "Imagining Peace." In his poem called Nada: Hope or Nothing, he ends with words for hope in many languages, and inserted the Arabic and Hebrew words for the benefit of tonight's performance. (Berengarten also has a small pamphlet, or chapbook, of short poems all about hands.)
His reading opened with the poem The Blue Butterfly (out of his eponymous book), which is satisfyingly built on a rhetorical trope. I'm going to assume I've got his and Salt's permission to quote it here in full (necessary, because otherwise you don't get to the end of the trope) (and I have the book, so it's an unfair advantage, which I admit):
On my Jew's hand, born out of ghettos and shtetls,
raised from unmarked graves of my obliterated people
in Germany, Latvia, lithuania, Poland, Russia,
on my hand mothered by a refugee's daughter,
first opened in Blitzed London, grown big
through post-war years in suburban England,
on my pink, educated, ironical left hand
of a parvenu not quite British psuedo gentleman
which first learned to scrawl its untutored messages
among Latin-reading rugby-playing militarists
in an élite boarding school on Sussex's green downs
and against the cloister walls of puritan Cambridge,
on my hand weakened by anomie, on my
writing hand, now of a sudden willingly
stretched before me in Serbian spring sunlight,
on my unique living hand, trembling and troubled
by this May visitation, like a virginal
leaf new sprung on the oldest oak in Europe,
on my proud firm hand, miraculously blessed
by the two thousand eight hundred martyred
men, women and children fallen at Kragujevac,
a blue butterfly simply fell out of the sky
and settled on the forefinger
oif my bloody international hand.
Thanks to everyone for reading; and many thanks again to Best American Poetry for asking me to spend a week blogging! I've really enjoyed it. Keep reading, if you like, at Baroque in Hackney.
"This Living Hand": happy John Keats' birthday, while we're at it:
© David Secombe, Esoteric London
Comments