TiaTalk











{Mon 30 August 2021}   Take me under your wing

Take me under your wing

Images that make us feel

The viral image of 640 Afghan refugees packed into a cavernous US military plane has stuck with me these last two weeks. I could not find out how to get permission to use it here, but it was so widely shared that you’ve probably seen it already.

This picture called to mind strongly the biblical metaphors of God as a mother bird who protects her young with her wings and body.

This does not mean either that I equate the USA with God, or that I believe in their (or your) versions of g/God. It only means that I have been aware of the image and the metaphors and the powerful feelings they stir.

Together, they also reminded me of Bialik’s beautiful poem, Take me under your wing, which for me speaks directly to the fear and hope I see in the picture; see it below with a translation by my husband (mostly) and me (tweaking).

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{Tue 17 August 2021}   Freed Spirit: a tiny big story

Freed Spirit: a tiny big story

Photo of a tall tree stump against a background of green plants. The stump bears carvings of large flowers and the face of an impish sprite looking outwards and upwards from the bole. Below the face are carved the words, "Make a wish". This is one of the stopping points for clues on the Malahide Gardens Fairy Trail.

An abandoned paragraph

Looking for stories, I came across a tiny standalone paragraph in my unpublished drafts. I remember that I wrote this in response to a “fictional stimulus” exercise during my MA, so it wasn’t the result of a visitation by any Muse, just a reply to a prompt (probably an image).

Yet, today, it feels fresh and full of inspiration. It speaks to my longing to escape the intense confinement of Covid restrictions (which have been especially strict in Ireland), and to find the freedom to move and regenerate. Here is my original text:

The garden breathes; absorbs me. The smallness of walls evaporates as I run free and fly upwards through the tree. I clamber, but fly, with each seeking-for-handhold sure and sprung, full of the energy of homecoming. I am a sprite, like Ariel released to his natural element, with no service required for the next few green hours.

Tia Azulay, 2009
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Il n’y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent pas

View of the Pyrenees silhouetted against a streaky muted orange skye, looking over early morning mist amid dark lines of trees and the lights of a distant town in the Adour Valley
View over the Adour Valley to the Pyrenees

“Il n’y a que les montagnes qui ne se rencontrent pas”

… or so they say
Of the Pyrenees and other ranges
That stretch to heaven and stroll from sea to sea.

But in this small world
That encircles us and bears our circling,
Our molehills meet as mountains between you and me.



Thomas Carew had it right: Lukewarm is icky!

On Tuesday night (6th December) I enjoyed Poet in the City’s monthly drop-in at Waterstone’s Piccadilly. The theme was “Fire and Ice“, based on the famous poem by Robert Frost.

Thomas Carew

Jamie Field, a new blogger for Poet in the City, has posted a short review of the event with a list of the poets and poems read, which is a feast in itself, but I thought I’d post here the full text of the poem by Thomas Carew that I read, because I love it! My friend and fellow Poet in the City volunteer, Alice, suggested I read it and I’m so glad she did, because it reflects how I feel about everything from bathwater to coffee to love!

Mediocritie in love rejected

Give me more love, or more disdaine;
The Torrid or the frozen Zone
Bring equall ease unto my paine;
The temperate affords me none;
Either extreame, of love or hate,
Is sweeter than a calm estate.

Give me a storme; if it be love,
Like Danae in that golden showre,
I swimme in pleasure; if it prove
Disdaine, that torrent will devoure
My Vulture-hopes; and he’s possesst
Of Heaven, that’s from Hell releast:
Then crowne my joyes, or cure my paine;
Give me more love, or more disdaine.

Thomas Carew (1595? – 1645?)

It seems the poem was originally a sonnet, because all the versions that I’ve found have fourteen lines, except for the one I actually read, which adds the final couplet to the end of the first stanza as well. Presumably, this is because it was slightly modified by Little Machine to enable their musical rendering of it, which is worth a listen!



{Wed 5 October 2011}   About Art Accelerating Art

Art Accelerating Art

Is this the shape of things to come?

We had the first rehearsal yesterday for this performance to be held at the Saatchi Gallery 13-16 October.

The idea is to investigate how audience appreciation of The Shape of Things to Come exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery is affected when music and poetry are performed in response to sculpture.

Elinros Henriksdottir asked me to select and perform some poetry in response to certain works and invited A Band of Buriers to do the same in music.

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{Mon 3 October 2011}   Accelerating Art and Life

Accelerating Art and Life

Hello, hello, my long-languishing blog (and my very occasional readers)! I love you, I really do, and think of you constantly…. well, a bit inconstantly, it’s true, but I do hold you in my heart. It’s just been an incredibly busy year, with three main themes occupying my energies:

  1. Writing content and building an exciting commercial website for RealCorp Luxembourg; as well as ongoing training, consultancy, blogging and other writing for them and for other clients.
  2. Volunteering for Poet in the City as Social Media Manager: creating a WordPress blog and an internal Social Media Wiki on PBWorks, teaching social media workshops, encouraging a mixed bag of users to contribute on the blog, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, assisting with a bid for Nesta’s Digital R&D Fund, and writing a spec to revamp the main Poet in the City website (project on hold for now). I also managed the Poetry and the State event at Amnesty International and assisted with several other events.
  3. Buying a house in France…. more on that later, when I can get my head around the fact that it’s actually happening!

All this has meant that I haven’t had much time for personal creative projects, so I was surprised and thrilled to be approached by the sylph-like Elinros Henriksdotter, after my reading of Shakespeare at the Poet in the City “Dog Days” Drop-In, to participate in a wonderful four-day initiative (13-16 Oct) to use poetry and music to enhance the experience of sculpture: “Art Accelerating Art”.

(Update 05/10/11: I’ve moved the chunk on Art Accelerating Art to a separate post).



{Mon 29 August 2011}   I, ferocious woman

I, ferocious woman

I, ferocious woman,
bellow
at the morning;
You, angel,
heal
yesterday, softly.



Looking beyond libraries for learning

Reading facilitates self-knowledge and life

In a recent Poet in the City post, Lockie McKinnon muses on the assumption by some people (led in this instance by economist Dambisa Moyo) that society can get along fine without the arts as long as we focus on science.  Lockie argues passionately that, despite the current regime of cuts, we must retain art as an equal partner with science.

Although science may offer us water and food, our motivation for life itself and our understanding of ourselves, comes from the arts (not his words, but I understand this from Lockie’s example of Alberto Manguel’s Colombian villagers in The Library at Night choosing the Iliad as the one book that they refused to return to the travelling library). He finishes with an appeal to join a local library to oppose cuts.

I’ve been thinking about this post and wondering why, when I wholeheartedly agree that we cannot contemplate life or society without art, I felt hesitant about committing to the libraries campaign.

When did you last visit a library?

Today in The Independent, Mary Dejevksy asserts that “our view of libraries is sepia-tinted” and I knew, considering my own behaviour, that this is true.

Despite being a keen reader, and definitely old enough to know how important libraries have been in encouraging reading, I never use them. The last time I went into my local library to find a book (which they didn’t have, but did order for me), was 2001, I think. 

How we find what to read today

Since then, I’ve never encountered a “finding” challenge that I couldn’t solve using the Internet. The process is much quicker and entirely under my control. I can read reviews to help me determine whether search any further; I can find summaries, excerpts or entire texts that sometimes supply all I need, depending on the reason for my search.

Many great books are free, for example, via Project Gutenberg, and if I decide to buy a book, I can usually find it at a reasonable price. Definitions, interpretations, background and context are literally at my fingertips via links or online search, while I read, wherever I’m reading.

Travel-wise, the convenience of instant download and reading books on my Kindle or iPhone is unparalleled. The books cost less than they do in hard copy, I don’t have to carry the extra kilos, and I don’t have to return them to anyone.

Of course, I’m aware of the digital divide and I know that, right now, reading devices are still relatively expensive, but digital reading will inevitably become ubiquitous as prices go down and it fits better into our busy lives.

Beyond online books to digital literature

Digital reading also opens wonderful new possibilities for narrative, as witness these collections from the Electronic Literature Organisation: Volume 1 and the recently published Volume 2.

One of my favourite digital poets is Peter Howard, whose e-poems use digital facilities in a non-trivial way to support and/or convey the poems’ intent, and manage to be aesthetic at the same time (surprise, complexity, intelligibility and beauty are a rare combination in the still-nascent world of e-poetry). See, for example, A Poppy. He is also a master of pace and comic timing, which many digital poets are not (yet). See Xylo and Portrait of the Artist.

We still need literature curators and guides

As we navigate the explosion of data on the web, I believe that there will always be a role for reading guides or facilitators, people who inspire and encourage us to read, experts who not only curate directories of literature and suggest what to read, but also teach us how to engage with what we read, and to read critically, so that we grow through these encounters, but I doubt whether libraries as we currently know them are optimally suited to this task.

For anyone interested in pursuing this topic, The Institute for the Future of the Book is a great resource and their blog if:book addresses developments in reading. You can also find new thoughts on the evolution of the creation and consumption of communications across all media on Transliteracy.com.

Copyright



Do different love-types spawn different poetry?

Thoughts on Valentine’s Day

Thinking about Valentine’s Day, and the Love Poetry event at King’s Place tonight, to which I am looking forward immensely, I suddenly wondered which of my own poems had been inspired by love, in the sense of romantic love.

I am a very occasional poet, but, as for most people, those occasions are often linked to love or the loss of it.

Of course, I’m interested in the nature of love in its broadest sense, an interest developed through my years in the Christian church.

Four types of love as per Christian theology

We were taught to categorise love into agápē (God’s love — sacrificial love, the highest kind, a matter of choice), philia (brotherly love or friendship – the next best, perhaps imperfect, but also a matter of virtuous choice), storge (familial affection — a love to be expected, as good and natural) and eros (romantic love — also a natural love, but a dangerous and unreliable one, to be outwitted, outwaited, carefully managed, or repressed … and never trusted).

Nowadays, although I still find these concepts useful, I don’t see any of them as exclusive to particular types of relationships, which, I guess, reflects my more mature view of humans as psycho-sexual-spiritual beings who are inevitably always all of these things in all relationships. As the Wikipedia entries point out, the ancient Greek terms encompassed a wide range of concepts and affections.

But the goal of Christian teaching is usually to simplify life, rather than to revel in its complexity, so the above simple English translations and the relative values assigned to them by my teachers were what stuck for a very long time.

Finding these love-types in my poems

And yet, despite this drilling in the compartmentalisation of love, when I looked through the paltry collection of my own poems, I was startled to realise that I had never read or examined the love poems as a group. Each was born in its own time, and each out of a different relationship or phase in my life, and although I have worked on each of them for years, I have never related them to each other.

In retrospect, this seems strange, so today I looked at my poems to see a.) which I could call love poems and b.) whether I could sort them into the ancient Greek groups.

While in this “grouping” mode, I’ve enjoyed reviewing the more agápē-oriented poems arising from my spiritual quest, but that’s a post for another day.

Valentine’s Day is the day for contemplating romantic love (and friendship, I think, because there is often so much overlap). With these poems, I was surprised to see, firstly, how they reveal precisely that tendency toward synthesis of which I’m now conscious, and secondly, how different they are from each other.

At least, to me, they seem different from each other. I wonder if another reader would be struck by similarities or differences?

Poems on romantic love and on friendship

Eros

Philia

Copyright



{Sun 18 April 2010}   Spring Poetry
Spring Poetry

“Spring Transformations” was the original theme for Saturday’s reading. I was a little worried that we might end up with a round of sickly sweet “positive” poems, but as it turned out, none of us brought poems specifically to do with change and renewal. These ideas are always associated with spring, along with youth, innocence, idealism and hope, but most of us found poems with “a shadow over them” as the poets looked back with a mixture of pleasure and regret on past springs. Perhaps, as none of us are exactly “spring things” ourselves, we are attracted to poems that have a more complex view of this season.

My favourite amongst those shared was the gorgeous Nocturne of Remembered Spring by Conrad Aiken. This is a bittersweet poem, capturing all of the above themes, but from the perspective of one looking back on the promise and potential of a path not taken.

Other poems shared included:

  • Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98, From you have I been absent in the spring, a poem of longing where the lover declares that despite the spring all about, winter remains for him while he is separated from his lover.
  • Men ask the way to Cold Mountain (scroll down to read stanzas 6-8) by Han Shan. This does not seem to be a spring poem, but perhaps a reluctant spring is implicit – the reader spoke of a resonance with the feeling of deep-seated cold when the summer is not able to break the ice of winter.
  • Spring (8 Haiku) by Ben Gieske, a whimsical, funny and tender poem that is also of remembrance, of one or several springs.
  • A series of Spring Haiku by different poets, accompanied by photographs, curated by Ray Rasmussen. The Haiku poems sparked quite a discussion about Haiku and even inspired some sharing of poems written by the various participants.

We rounded off the evening by watching Michael Radford’s Il Postino, a funny and touching delight that was good to revisit as I’d last seen it many years ago. I was quite surprised to discover that in fact this story about Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s friendship with, and inspiration of, a humble postman on a remote Italian island is fictional… I suppose I believe so much in the power of poetry that it seemed to me perfectly plausible.

(Update 19/04/10: ) The Haiku shared included this one that I loved and which I can share now with the permission of the poet:

Drowning the day’s sorrow
Back and forth
The swimming pool

© Nitzan Marinov, Spring 2007



et cetera