A message to the children : by Miriam Halahmy

Janusz Korczak was born in 1878 in Warsaw into a Jewish family. A doctor and an author he had a great empathy with children and in particular orphans. His philosophy about how to treat children, which included regarding them as individuals and treating them with respect, was way ahead of its time. But Korczak became caught up in the Nazi invasion as Director of the Warsaw Ghetto Orphanage. On August 6^th 1942 Korczak, his staff and 200 children were deported from the ghetto and murdered in Treblinka.

In 2004 I visited the former orphanage of the Warsaw Ghetto ( pictured above) with a group from my synagogue. 

One of our members, Jeffrey Segal, an actor, read to us in the orphanage grounds, from Korczak's final words written in his ghetto diary.  He was driven almost mad by his daily search for food donations for the 200 children in his care. " Aug 2nd 1942. Our Father who art in heaven... This prayer was carved out of hunger and misery. Our daily bread. Bread."

On the bus out of Warsaw up to Treblinka where Korczak and the children were deported and killed on arrival I wrote a poem, A message to the children.

 This year ( 2011) the poem was set to music by Helen Bonney, author and composer and a soundtrack recorded by her son Jack Cooke. The poem has been published in Poetry Salzburg and was set as an essay question for a student on the English degree at Salzburg University. The student called the poem, “an artefact.”

In the poem I tried to imagine what Korzcak might have said to the children the night before they are to be deported. The first two lines come from a speech he made in the 1920s to a group of children leaving the orphanage in happier times. But on that dreadful night in 1942 what could he offer the children, but to take their hand and go on the journey with them?

The next morning, Aug 6th 1942, the children were given a little bag with a piece of bread and a bottle of water. They were dressed in clean clothes and their hair was neatly combed. Then they had to march, four by four, through the streets to the siding where the cattle cars were waiting.

 Armed soldiers lined their route, /even as the pavements weep beneath your feet/

Monument to Korczak and the children in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery

You can listen to the song here and read the text of the poem:

http://www.miriamhalahmy.com/for-janusz-korczak/

You can find out more about Janusz Korczak at this link

http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/korczak.html

Writer's Brain Strain: An Occupational Hazard - Liz Kessler

When I was about eight, I decided I was going to be a poet when I grew up. This decision was justified with some early publishing success. At age nine, my poem, Jinx’s Shop, was printed in the local newspaper. A fact I am still so proud of that I carry the battered paper around with me whenever I do school talks – even if I do have to explain that yes, human beings had already inhabited the planet as long ago as 1976.

My early publishing success, and creative peak for about 25 years

In my teenage years, after I’d got bored of getting caught smoking and skiving lessons, I fell in love with poetry again. I immersed myself in ee cummings, John Clare, Louis Macneice and many, many others, believing the poets were the only ones who really understood the truth, and told it. I still wrote it, too. The tortured, unrequited, angst-filled poetry that only a 17-year-old can write. And then I read something in the newspaper that changed everything.

Apparently, poets were twenty times more likely to go mad than anyone else.

Suddenly, I wasn’t quite so sure of my long-term career plans. I didn’t really like the idea of throwing myself into something that promised me a lifetime of mental instability.

So I became a teacher instead. And then a journalist, and then a combination of the two. The poet quietly sloped away without making a fuss.

But whatever I did, the writer was always there in the background. Finally, about ten years ago, I left everything else behind and put myself on the line. I was a writer, and damn it, I was going to make a living being one.

But that statistic never went away. Even though I wasn’t writing poetry, I was writing – and surely all writing is a form of poetry anyway? Perhaps I wasn’t twenty times more likely to suffer mental illness than everyone else if I was writing full pages at a time rather than rhyming couplets. But I was pretty sure the odds were still fairly strong.

And sure enough, over ten years of writing, my mental health has felt a bit ropey at times. Nothing too awful – although there have been some bad times. But I am definitely prone to high levels of anxiety, insecurity, even panic attacks, and I worry about everything. And I don’t think I’m alone in this.

A writer buddy and I have this joke about our mental state. We call it Writer’s Brain Tumour. OK, so maybe that doesn’t sound such a great joke. But the idea is that whilst ‘normal’ folk will get a little twinge of a headache and pop a couple of paracetamol and get on with their day without thinking about it, we are instantly consumed with thoughts of bleeds inside our brain. A tiny itch to most people means they’ve brushed a nettle. To us, it can only mean the most dramatic of tropical diseases. Even if we’ve never been anywhere tropical. It is impossible for us to have a minor ailment without escalating it in our minds to catastrophic levels.

But it’s not our fault. Making huge leaps of imagination, upping the stakes, thinking of the most unlikely and unusual scenario - this is our day job! This is how our minds need to work in order to do our jobs properly. If we sat down and wrote about a girl who accidentally walked into some nettles and got a rash, no one would be interested. But give her a tropical disease and a mystery person who gave her the disease, and an exciting adventure that she has to go on to find a magical cure, and we are approaching the realm of a plot.

So it stands to reason – if we spend our working hours training our minds to function in this way, there’s bound to be some fallout. Doesn’t make it any easier though, when we’re fretting about the latest lump of fatty gristle on our legs that we ask partners, doctors and anyone who happens to be passing to have a feel of.

So what do we do? Drive everyone mad and hope they’ll stick around? Read lots of self help books? Meditate - or even medicate?

Meditate or Medicate?

And then, just last week, something occurred to me. If we were tennis players, we might get Tennis Elbow. If we were golfers, we may suffer from Golfer’s Knee. That is because those would be the parts of our body most vulnerable to injury in our sport. We wouldn’t be embarrassed to admit it. We’d take extra care to look after our knees and our elbows, and would seek physiotherapy when they suffered. Very straightforward.

And so it is with writers. The muscle that we constantly call upon, work hard every day and exhaust from time to time is our mind. So it’s no wonder if our imaginations can sometimes get a bit overworked and strained. It’s nothing to be ashamed of; it doesn’t make us abnormal. It’s simply a professional hazard – and we need to look after it. And sometimes, as with physical injuries, it can take a few different approaches till we find the one that works for us. It might be yoga, counselling, or exercise; it might even be medication.

The fact is, our mind – our brain, our imagination, whichever sounds right to you – is the number one tool for our jobs. So if we suffer from Writer’s Brain Strain (as I’ve decided to rename it) from time to time, well, let’s not be embarrassed, or try to pretend it’s not happening. It’s part of what makes us the writers we are, and we just need to call upon our own bag of tricks to work out how to give it the care and attention it needs.

On which note, I’m off to walk my dog on a big, white, sandy beach.

Dog + beach + sunrise = the best therapy I've discovered so far

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August and the writer's thoughts turn ....... by Miriam Halahmy

"So where did summer go?" asked a poet friend on Facebook as August kicked in. I was at Lumb Bank, guest author on a writing retreat, and yes - it was raining hard.

Come August in England and dawn has gone dark and chill, leaves are clogging up the gutters and the flowers are fading in the patio pots. That's the thing about summer, by August its truly fading. I even wrote a poem about it one year.

Cheating on me

Here comes August

old prostitute

flowers faded in your red-dye hair.

You strut your green stuff

along days already crisp-edged

nights dark before ten.

All through parched June

classroom stiff with tired bodies

I dream of holidays

cheer myself hoarse at sports day

comfort the losers.

I wave my girl off to camp

and then it’s my turn.

August;

air laced with your carbon cocktail.

As we shave short the lawn

lock-up and head for the hills

the sun angle shifts.

In your see-through vest

you tease us, August;

long-limbed shadow of winter.

© Miriam Halahmy

How many writers feel like pumping out the great novel in August? Its not my best time to write, I have to admit. But if I write nothing then I feel even worse. And I’m not a big fan of the term ‘writer’s block’. It’s not that I always sit down at my desk ready to write and bang out 2000 words a day. It’s simply that I believe it is always possible to do a bit of writing, even if it isn’t the next chunk of the great work you had hoped for.

But with the help of chocolate, all is not lost!

Writing this blog will be my writing for today. Some of the points below I used in a blog for Lorrie Porter's excellent blogsite last year. But somehow in August it all seems very apt to ponder it all again.

So if you are deep in August, fed up the summer is nearly over and don't feel much like writing, here are my Five Favourite Tips for rebooting the writing fervour :-

1. Write a word, write a sentence, write something. Write with thick felt tip – my latest craze is Sharpie pens – deface a large sheet of brown paper. Take a word from your manuscript and brainstorm it all over the page. Writing is the trigger. Not writing makes us feel frozen inside. We are all about words so have fun and just write some.

2. I know, I know...  writing a set of disconnected words won’t get Chapter 14 written and you are feeling anxious and under pressure and can’t I offer something better than Number 1?

Yes I can! Sit down and write for 30 minutes and then get up and walk away. That brief writing time will return your self esteem and unfreeze your writing muscle. Do 30 minutes every day in the leanest, most uninspiring, most shut, closed, tight periods when you feel blocked, and you will breathe new life into your writing. You will stand up and walk away feeling, “I’ve done it, I’ve done my writing for today and now I can load the washing, cook dinner or watch Daytime TV without feeling guilty.”

3. Ask questions. Whenever I am stuck in the middle of a novel and I just can’t seem to write the next 50 words, let alone 5000, I switch to Bold Deep Red and put up any question which comes to mind. I answer each question before I put up the next one. I’m not brainstorming questions for the sake of it. I’m letting questions take over and trigger writing which ultimately will get me unstuck, reveal where I’m headed next and get me back to writing in a linear flow.

Here are a few examples :

a) Why am I sitting here?

b) What has just happened?

c) Who is x or why or z?

d) What do I want to say, write, do here on this page, in this para, in this book?

e) What do I honestly think is going to happen next?

I haven’t found that the question really matters. It’s a device, a trigger to trick me out back into writing. It works, mostly.

4. If it doesn’t work, or sometimes because it just feels better, I go back to pen and paper.  I wrote my first novel, Secret Territory, back in the 1990s

steam- age, by hand on the kitchen table, after the kids had gone to bed.

So when I’m stuck and the writing just isn’t pouring out of me, I go back to the old ways, the contact of pen on paper and I start asking all my questions. Usually I find I’ve covered several sheets in about 10 minutes, I’m ready to fire up the laptop once more and get back on my horse.

5. I know this all sounds a bit smug and as though I can write anytime, anywhere, with just a few nudges to get going again. Well, I can’t.

But like most people who have been doing this for donkey years, I have managed to find tricks and devices which will get me out of the doldrums and off again. 

Sometimes I know you just have to call it a day or even a week. But even in the worst dry patches there’s always something you can do.Write a poem, a shopping list, a note to teacher, a letter to your old aunt ( one of my favourites because we get so few personal letters these days)

We are writers, it's what we do, it doesn't always have to be the next great novel. But it has to involve black words on white background, strung together somehow.

Good luck with your writing and do let us know if you have a great tip for getting unstuck.

The Baghdad Book Collection : Miriam Halahmy

"Where they burn books they will also burn people." Heinrich Heine

In 2003 when the Allies invaded Iraq, Qasim Sabti, an artist and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad, found to his dismay that the University Library had been looted. The library shelves had been ransacked and the books set on fire. "I felt like a fireman desperately in need of finding survivors," writes Sabti. Rummaging through the mess he found some books still intact but one of them collapsed when he picked it up and he was left just holding the cloth cover. Inside the cover were some Arabic verses scribbled in pencil and some notes from the librarian. "I was filled with a new sense of life and hope... Like the fireman realizing that some victims were still breathing, I began to gather together more covers..."

 Sabti took the covers back to his studio and created an amazing series of collages, "bringing back to life books whose texts had been completely destroyed."  Sabti's series of collages, Ashes to Art : The Iraqi Phoenix, can be seen in The Pomegranate Gallery in New York, owned by my brother-in-law, Oded Halahmy. The collages are a testament to the resilience of the Iraqi people and as Sabti writes, "They are also my attempt to gain victory over the destruction surrounding us in Baghdad."

One of the collages hangs on our living room wall in Golders Green, on loan from the gallery, a piece of Old Baghdad where my children's father was born.
As a child growing up in England reading books was the most important thing I did. My weekly visit to the library, through darkened streets, all by myself as a little girl, was almost a holy time. It would have been totally beyond my imagination to think that someone might burn a book.

So I wrote a poem about it.

Untitled, 2008
Qasim Sabti
Mixed Media Collage
8 by 12 inches


Eight years old I walk through softly lit
November streets, our little London suburb,
to the silence of the library and reading,


which came before everything
was the reason to be. Lost all day
with the Little Women, Dickon


at my side in our Secret Garden,
I sailed with Moonfleet to Treasure Island
lost in the fictional dream.


My mother and I sat reading
as coals burned red in the old living room.
Not even the tick of a clock


penetrated our reader silence.
I could not imagine burning,
stealing, destroying - books.

*

Qasim Sabti, artist, in agony as they looted

the Library, Baghdad, 2003.

books violated in the bewilderment of war,

collected broken spines,

shattered bodies, healed and repaired,

a book cover here, a torn page there,

made them into poems on canvas

painted  blue, red, white.

We have one hanging on our wall,

a piece of Old Baghdad in our London home.

It reaches a long blue finger all the way back

to your father's father's house beside the Tigris.

near the Shorja market and the pomegranates,

all the way to the room where you were born;

this broken book, this word, this blue.

www.miriamhalahmy.com

REVIEWS by Adèle Geras

I REMEMBER NOTHING by Nora Ephron. Doubleday hbk. £12.99

This is a bit of a pricey book. It’s also a very lovely object to handle, so anyone who can find it cheaply on Kindle or some such will be saving money but denying themselves the great pleasure of holding something that’s beautiful and satisfying. It’s a small, square-ish volume that fits most neatly into the hand. The typeface is lovely, the paper is thick. What, as a Nora Ephron character might say, is not to like?

Ephron is famous for having written the screenplays for When Harry met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. She also wrote a terrific novel called Heartburn * (better than the movie of the same name) about her divorce and what led to it. This novel has recipes in it and she’s a good cook. Anyone who’s familiar with any of the works I’ve mentioned will know what to expect: sharp, funny, clever and occasionally very moving short essays written by someone who knows how to grab your attention from the very first word. Ephron started her writing life as a journalist and it shows. This is prose with not an ounce of flab on it. Her general theme is ageing and the pleasures and indignities which accompany it. Every piece she writes is perfectly structured and whether it ends in a laugh or a tear or a mixture of both, the reading is nothing but unalloyed fun. She has very good instincts for the most part and you do (or I did!) find yourself shouting: YES! all through the book. But there are certain things she says with which I fervently disagree. For instance: never buy a red coat. I’ve bought lots from time to time since I was 18 and I’ve never regretted a single one of them.

She talks, amongst other things, about how she forgets everything, about the internet, about her family, about New York, about Lillian Hellman, about a meatloaf named for her in a restaurant and about white egg omelettes. She’s got interesting things to say about almost everything. This book would make the perfect present (and here I’m addressing the younger readers of this blog) for any mother who’s over 60. Together with its hilariously-named companion volume, I Feel Bad About My Neck and other thoughts on being a woman, it makes an exhilarating read for anyone who’s left their first youth behind them. Do try these books.

*Nora has three sisters. One of them, Delia Ephron, wrote a good novel about their father called Hanging Up. That, too, is worth reading.



MOON PIE by Simon Mason. David Fickling Books. hbk. £10.99

I read this book in proof and if that’s anything to go by, Simon Mason’s new novel will be much the same size and shape as Ephron’s essays, discussed above. I also think that if Nora E could read Simon M’s book, she’d love it. She may not share my taste in coats but I reckon we might like a lot of the same novels and this one in particular would strike a chord with her because her own mother became an alcoholic. Mason’s book is about the way two young children deal with the problem of a father who’s become alcoholic after the death of his wife.

The cover image, which I’ve only seen on the internet and not in real life, is attractive enough but I’m not sure it gives a very good idea of what sort of book this is. For one thing, Martha, the eleven-year-old heroine, is such an outstandingly-drawn character that you have a strong image of her in your head and an artist’s representation isn’t going to satisfy you. Also, the cartoon-ish style of the artwork somewhat belies the seriousness of the novel. Which is not to say that it’s gloomy or depressing. Trying to work out why a subject which should be so grim to read about is actually uplifting , I came to the conclusion that it succeeds in avoiding misery by emphasising throughout how very devoted the protagonists are to one another. The whole story is about different kinds of love, and that makes everything bearable and better in the end, even if it leads to heartache along the way. The Dad who’s drunk is not a baddie. Sister and brother are very close and brought even closer because of the circumstances in which they find themselves. Even a pair of grandparents who could be seen as less than lovely are doing their best and love the children, albeit in ways that Martha and her little brother Tug don’t quite know how to deal with.

The characters make this book live. They positively spring off the page. Tug is one of the most loveable and believable five year olds I’ve encountered in a book. Martha’s friend Marcus is wonderful, both as a character and as a support to Martha. It’s through him that her theatrical ambitions develop and the ending...well, I shan’t say a word about that. Critics will use the word ‘heartwarming’ about this book and they’ll be right. I’ve seen one review which suggested that the way Martha behaves and thinks is too mature for her years but I don’t agree. The whole narrative rings true and the reason that it does is due in part to the story being beautifully told in the third person and the past tense (somewhat of a relief to me, I have to confess!) Because it is, the writer isn’t limited to a young girl’s language. In any case, there are eleven-year-olds and eleven-year-olds. Martha is one of the mature ones, taking her place most appropriately alongside Anne of Green Gables, another famous redhead, who’s important in this book as well. The blurb on my proof says: “ A funny tender novel about families, dreams, being yourself …and pies.” All of that is true and I’d only add: it’s heartwarming as well.

FAMILY VALUES by Wendy Cope. Faber hbk £12.99

I’m adding an extra book this time round. Wendy Cope and I were exact contemporaries at university and also at the same college, and I’ve been a fan of her work since the (in restrospect) revolutionary Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis. I say, ‘revolutionary’ because Cope is a believer in rhyme and scansion and words making sense: quite unfashionable in some circles when she first came on the scene and still today not every critic’s cup of tea. Because she often writes humorously, there are those who classify her work as Light Verse, but it’s much more than that and in this volume in particular, many of the poems strike a more serious note, though never a solemn or pompous one. You’ll want to come back to your favourites again and again. Mine (and it was hard to choose) was a poem about the reading of the Shipping Forecast at the BBC but there are gems throughout the book and many wise reflections on life and love and literature. Great stuff.

Dirt Music and Solitude - Dianne Hofmeyr

Here at the sea I’m searching for a new story that I can’t quite yet grasp, with Tim Winton’s Dirt Music ringing in my head.

In the epigraph to his book he quotes Emily Dickinson’s lines…There is solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that
profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself –
Finite infinity.
In Dirt Music, across mind-numbing landscapes, Winton manages to capture the essence of solitude. Stark, terse dialogue lopes into wide vistas of creeping anxiety… where ‘the only trees are rare huddles of coastal morts whose bark hangs like torn bandages.’ This man can write… his words are music that picks up, falls, weaves, lurks, strides, crescendos. It’s a ‘Heart of Darkness’ story like so many of his others - In the Winter Dark. Breath. Cloudstreet. (I’m such a numbskull I didn’t realize when I sat mesmerized by the production of Cloudstreet in the Riverside Studios in London a few years ago, that he was the author.)

I’m searching for the nuances of my own story. I know the title. The characters speak and gesture as I pace along the beach trying to capture the story’s essence. But it’s all drowned out by space and the incessant ebb and flow of the tides and the hulk of the wild peninsula with its tangle of virgin trees and deep caves.

If I stare long enough, the beach produces its own events. A group of surfers in dark wetsuits out on their boards like a clutch of floating kelp... or circling sharks? A jellyfish of astounding beauty. And two weeks ago on a day of heavy mist, a small plane that went down into the sea with nine people on board just a mile off the peninsula.

My story is set in the 16th century on this same beach but will I ever turn the space and solitude into words that will begin to capture such inchoate thoughts? Soon I need to put pen to paper… finger to keyboard… don’t writers have to write?

I need words that rise, fall, weave, stride, crescendo but most of all I need a plot!

ALMOST AT SEA: Penny Dolan

My local writer’s group holds a recitation evening at this time of year, when people seem drawn to old stories and songs and poems. The poem below, although not traditionally wintry, is my own favourite for this season. 

Almost a short story, the poem was written by Robert Louis Stevenson, who was the son of a lighthouse engineer, and appeared in 1888 after the publication of his Treasure Island.  Although the poem seems to be about danger at sea, the emotional conflict and longing seem to me a deeper part of the celebration itself, whether on land or sea. Please, if you have a moment, do read through to the end.

 Christmas at Sea

The sheets were frozen hard, and they cut the naked hand;
The decks were like a slide, where a seaman scarce could stand;
The wind was a nor'wester, blowing squally off the sea;
And cliffs and spouting breakers were the only things a-lee.

They heard the surf a-roaring before the break of day;
But 'twas only with the peep of light we saw how ill we lay.
We tumbled every hand on deck instanter, with a shout,
And we gave her the maintops'l, and stood by to go about.

All day we tacked and tacked between the South Head and the North;
All day we hauled the frozen sheets, and got no further forth;
All day as cold as charity, in bitter pain and dread,
For very life and nature we tacked from head to head.

We gave the South a wider berth, for there the tide race roared;
But every tack we made we brought the North Head close aboard:
So's we saw the cliffs and houses, and the breakers running high,
And the coastguard in his garden, with his glass against his eye.

The frost was on the village roofs as white as ocean foam;
The good red fires were burning bright in every 'long-shore home;
The windows sparkled clear, and the chimneys volleyed out;
And I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.

The bells upon the church were rung with a mighty jovial cheer;
For it's just that I should tell you how (of all days in the year)
This day of our adversity was blessèd Christmas morn,
And the house above the coastguard's was the house where I was born.

O well I saw the pleasant room, the pleasant faces there,
My mother's silver spectacles, my father's silver hair;
And well I saw the firelight, like a flight of homely elves,
Go dancing round the china plates that stand upon the shelves.

And well I knew the talk they had, the talk that was of me,
Of the shadow on the household and the son that went to sea;
And O the wicked fool I seemed, in every kind of way,
To be here and hauling frozen ropes on blessèd Christmas Day.

They lit the high sea-light, and the dark began to fall.
'All hands to loose top gallant sails,' I heard the captain call.
'By the Lord, she'll never stand it,' our first mate, Jackson, cried.
… 'It's the one way or the other, Mr. Jackson,' he replied.

She staggered to her bearings, but the sails were new and good,
And the ship smelt up to windward just as though she understood.
As the winter's day was ending, in the entry of the night,
We cleared the weary headland, and passed below the light.

And they heaved a mighty breath, every soul on board but me,
As they saw her nose again pointing handsome out to sea;
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

 * * * * *

The Awfully Big Blog posts are mostly about fiction, but there are poetry readers and writers too. 

What’s the title - and author - of your favourite poem at this time of year?

Penny Dolan

(The painting is by Aivasovsky Ivan Constantinovitch. 1899.)

No Frigate like a Book - Joan Lennon

October 8, 1940, after an air raid on London 

(AP photo)

There is no Frigate like a Book

BY EMILY DICKINSON

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

(This version of the poem is found on the Poetry Foundation website.)

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Poetry Interludes: Clearing the Mind Between Books - Lucy Coats

I'm in the space between novels at the moment - in the eye of the creative storm, so to speak. It's a necessary space for me, a place where I give myself the time to do ordinary things, let my mind wander - and feed my creativity by doing something completely different in the writing line. Sometimes I'll work on a picture book, but I'm more likely to write poetry - most of which goes into the big box marked 'never show this to anyone'. Usually I challenge myself to master a new form of verse - I attempted triolets last time - but quite often I'll go back to an old friend. I love the discipline of iambic pentameter, or I might dip into a sonnet, a ballad, or even a limerick.

One of my favourite forms of poetry to write is haiku. To condense so much feeling and atmosphere into so few words is an art--and a difficult one. I have never managed to write one to my own complete satisfaction (and certainly not one I'd be happy to show in public), but I'll always keep trying. It is an art worth working at.

As a student I remember marvelling over Ezra Pound's In a Station of the Metro from "Contemporania," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 2.1 (April 1913), which I make no apology for repeating here in case there are those who do not know it:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

With a boyfriend in Paris at that time, I spent a lot of hours riding the Metro and mouthing the station names of Denfert-Rochereau, Chatelet-Les Halles, Pyramides, Arts et Metiers, Sevres-Babylone (a poem in themselves, and so much more romantic than Marylebone, Ealing, Euston or Lewisham). I understood Pound's words exactly from my own experience, and even now they conjure up the frantic, crowded platform jostling, the harsh braying note of the closing doors and the slightly sweet smell of sewers and smoke from a million damp Gauloise cigarette butts which would say 'Paris' to my senses even if I were blindfolded.

Years after Paris, I made a trip to Japan, the true home of haiku. Riding the Tokyo Metro was a different experience entirely, and yet just as evocative in its way. Coming in from Narita airport I remember eating sea-fresh sushi from my first bento box and marvelling at brown-grey jagged hills covered in pine trees and moss, exactly like a Hokusai print--and that was before I'd even seen Mount Fuji.

In Japan I felt tall for the first time--but also alien, standing out like a sore thumb above the massed commuters on the platform, trying to read signs in a language I had no hope of understanding. Somehow, though, I trusted myself to one of the seemingly familiar coloured lines on the map and arrived where I was meant to be--a place where a friend had told me I would find a taste of the 'real' Tokyo, far from the blazing multi-coloured neon signs of Shibuya and the clicking cameras whirring outside the Imperial Palace. In Shinjuku I got lost deliberately--the best way to discover unexpected wonders. 

There was the tiny shop with a window full of wooden shoes, which I entered down three rickety steps to find a tiny grey-haired woman bowing to me. I bowed back politely, and suddenly the lack of language was no longer a barrier. With mime and hand gesture and more bowing, we communicated perfectly, and I left with three exquisite pairs of shoes, destined for the (then) small feet of Lovely Daughter, her brother and my god-daughter, all wrapped in patterned paper with a little string to carry them by. I wandered deserted shrines with small offerings of food and flowers before them, and then found myself in a busy market where I was, once again, alien--the alien window shopper amongst a sea of hurrying, haggling housewives buying live chickens, leafy vegetable, roots large and small and rice from great hoppers as tall as the eaves.

There were many more metro trips along the coloured lines of Chiyoda, Marounouchi, Yurakucho, Asakusa and Oedo, but the final one took me to the peaceful woods of the Emperor Meiji's garden--tribute to his beloved Empress wife. Here's what I wrote about it. Not a haiku, but I like to think it has some of the idiophones which characterise other Japanese poetry. 

In Emperor Meiji's garden
black bright carp
dance
their slow drumbeat
on waterlily ripples.
The Empress Shoken sleeps
and nesting crows
sound
requiems of flight
above the weeping trees.

copyright © Lucy Coats 1998

For me, it's a word picture which conjures up how I felt in that particular time and place, better than any photograph could. That's why I'll keep on writing poetry in the in-between times - whether I show it to anyone or not. 

Lucy's new picture book, Captain Beastlie's Pirate Party is now out from Nosy Crow!

"A rollicking story and a quite gloriously disgusting book that children (especially boys) will adore!" Parents In Touch magazine

"A splendidly riotous romp…Miss the Captain’s party at your peril." Jill Bennett

"An early candidate for piratey book of the year!" ReadItDaddy blog

"A star of a book." Child-Led Chaos blog

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Lucy is represented by Sophie Hicks at Ed Victor Ltd

I’m not a poet, and I already know it - Lari Don

This month, I’ve taken part in NaPoWriMo14: National Poetry Writing Month 2014. I’ve faithfully written a piece of poetry every day, though I haven’t actually gone public with any of it. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to inflict any on you here either.)

Why did I want to do NaPoWriMo? I’m a far-too-busy prose writer, with deadlines to meet and children to look after (when I remember), so why take on another creative responsibility?

Because I thought challenging myself to try something new as a writer would be interesting, and possibly even useful.

I already knew I wasn’t a poet. I was put off poetry at school (yes, just like everyone else) so I don’t read poetry very often, and I never attempt to write it. I do write riddles, because my Fabled Beasts adventure series contains lots of magical creatures and characters who use riddles as clues, tools or weapons, but I think of riddles as verbal puzzles than poetry.

And NaPoWriMo14 has certainly confirmed that I’m not a poet.

I did enjoy writing the poems, I did manage at least one a day, and it was fascinating discovering that the subjects I wanted to consider in poetic form were very different from the subjects I’m drawn to examine in fiction. (Observation rather than question, emotion rather than thought, location rather than journey.)

However, the most important thing I discovered is that I don’t like rhyming.

I can find rhymes easily enough, but I don’t like them. I don’t feel fulfilled or satisfied by writing one line which rhymes with another line.

But I tried very hard to rhyme a few of my poems this month, and while doing that I discovered why I don’t like rhyming. I want to pick the absolutely right word for the job, the word which most precisely and vividly tells the story. I don’t want to pick a word just because it ends with useful letters and sounds.

I don’t feel like I’m telling the truth when I rhyme.

None of this means I can’t admire and enjoy rhyming verse written by someone as skilled as Alan Ahlberg or Julia Donaldson. But when I try to rhyme myself, it comes out as either forced or flippant.

So this month of poetry has taught me more about what kind of writer I am. I am a writer who cares about the meaning of the words much more than the sound, and as I already knew I was a writer who cares more about plot and ‘what happens next’ than any other aspect of a novel, that makes sense. Perhaps that explicit realisation will allow me to be more analytical about my editing decisions in the future.

This sudden discovery (well, month-long discovery) about my relationship with words reminds me of the night I discovered that I’m not a stand-up comedian. I already knew that too, but I was invited to take part in a project linking storytellers and stand-ups, and I do love a challenge. So when I was telling a story in a comedy club, with lights in my eyes, unable to see the audience, only able to hear them when they laughed (which they did, occasionally!) I realised that I’m not primarily interested in the moments of humour in a story. I’m not interested in the laughs. I’m interested in the moments which make an audience or reader gasp or sit forward or hold their breath. I’m interested in the moments of drama.

So I had to stand up in a comedy club to realise what is important to me in a story.

And I had to spend a month writing poetry to realise what is important to me in a word.

Perhaps that’s the main value of trying out new ways of writing or performing: it allows you to discover more about the core of what you do best.

Did anyone else try NaPoWriMo14? And if so, what did you discover?

Lari Don is the award-winning author of 21 books for all ages, including a teen thriller, fantasy novels for 8 – 12s, picture books, retellings of traditional tales and novellas for reluctant readers. 

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