Poetry

In conversation with Sarah Corbett…

A Perfect Mirror has seen every success since its publication earlier this year. We caught up with Sarah Corbett to discuss art, poetry, and the unconscious life. 

You lecture in creative writing at Lancaster University, do you ever find yourself being inspired by your students and their writing?

Sometimes I find that in working through a problem with a student that I have worked through a problem for myself. Occasionally I see a student do something innovative that I wouldn’t have thought of, but that is rare, and it is actually a moment of feeling that great, they have done that essential thing that all ‘teachers’ hope for – they have outgrown their need for me! Mostly I keep my writing life and my teaching life separate.

You have collaborated with the amazing landscape artist Zoe Benbow for the title poem The Perfect Mirror, are you influenced by art regularly, and how important do you think it is for art and poetry to coincide with one another?

I started, as a very young child, obsessed with drawing (and singing, I have recently found out!), so I think that for me, as for many other writers (and many artists), that word and images, the hand and eye, go together. My Dad was a gifted amateur painter, so I grew up surrounded by art books and art materials, – the smell of oil paint and linseed – and the idea that art is what mattered above all else. I almost pursued the path of a visual artist but realized very quickly during my A levels where my real talents lay. I kept drawing through university – I used to earn money doing street art and painting murals – and my social circle at Leeds University was with the fine artists – finding my best and oldest friend, the filmmaker Gabrielle Russell there. I think that there’s little separation really between visual art and poetry – they just use different mediums – although Zoe would point out the difficulty visual artists have in dealing with time and narrative (something she works with in her painting). What I noticed most about working with Zoe was that what she embodied through her artistic practice and was also very good at verbalizing, was an artistic process that I recognized as my own – something mysterious perhaps, or containing and attempting to preserve mystery – but also deeply rooted in the material worlds of the body and the landscape. Maybe we are just the same kind of artist, and that there are other kinds too. In the past, there wasn’t the sort of polarization between art forms and ‘worlds’ that there is today. Some of this, I think is to do with the excessive commercialization within the art world, and the denigration, in some senses, of poetry within our culture – but I guess they both share the problem of feeling out of reach for the general population. On the whole, I think that poets are nearly always communication with art in some way, and would love to see the two worlds coming together more often, or for there to be a more acknowledgment that what visual artists are doing is the same-but-different to what poets are doing – I think that it would help to raise the profile of poetry in cultural life.

You are clearly very inspired by Sylvia Plath, what is it about her and her life that you find the most intriguing and fascinating?

The most important thing about Sylvia Plath for me as a young writer starting to write, and I continue to write, is that she symbolized the ‘Writer as Artist’, by that I mean that writing and being/becoming a writer was central to her entire existence. I learnt from her focus and dedication and sheer commitment to hard work, her projection of absolute belief even when she was privately full of doubt (that doubt is, though, as essential to any writer’s journey as self-belief). So I learnt about graft and craft – how she taught herself through constant practice of the craft – and I did the same thing – practice, practice, practice, like a pianist learning scales… it’s the only way to internalize those patterns of poetry that can emerge as if instinctually – that’s how she reached those incredible – free – heights of her last poems. The other thing I took from Plath was the permission to write about my own life, my experiences and inner world – my own terrors and madness. There were other poets who were already doing this, and who influenced me too – Vicky Feaver and Sarah Maguire for instance – but I imagine that they had also been given a similar sort of permission by Plath; in many way Plath now stands as the Godmother or Great Matriarch of much contemporary Poetry; she paved the way for so much that we can now say, and how we can say it.

 Your poems particularly ‘The Perfect Mirror’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Dust’ have a very specific and beautiful layout. The words falling down the page like dust in the latter poem is striking. How important is layout to you when writing your poems, do you decide how they will look on the page as you write them or is this a decision you make after?

 It’s not so much as a ‘decision’ as something that emerges organically from the writing of the poem – the needs of the poem itself dictate the form or shape it will take on the page; I also do like the way things look – the picture they make on the page. I am allowing myself to be more playful and free these days though, as I can get stuck in formal patterns. I do, however, love form and pattern, hence the prevalence of sonnets, terza rima, quatrains and the sestina – I love the challenge and the pressure they place on the writing process. Writing a poem though is so much an internal process for me – something like entering a trance state where the ‘rules’ and outcomes are dictated by the process, not by a – separated – conscious mind. Although there are times when I am making later, editorial changes – ‘decisions’ you might then call them – about line endings or stanza breaks, punctuation or word choice – but again, even then I can only do this successfully through contacting the inner workings of the poem – the poems’ essential spirit. None of this though is to suggest that poems arrive like magic – I’ve spent thirty years practicing! So, not magic of the mysterious kind then, but Magic Circle magic, where it appears mysterious, but is really down to well-honed, long practiced and internalized skill.

The collection has very much a haunting and dark feel to it, you have stated you have an interest in psychology, particularly dreaming and the unconscious, do you feel like this is what allows you to write such meaningful and dark poetry? Do you often feel yourself tapping into your unconscious to write these poems?

 Anyone familiar with my poetry will recognize this dark and often unsettling voice. I trust my unconscious life, yes, I respect it; there’s much poetry there: poetry is half in this world, half out of it. I try to be as cheery and positive as possible outwardly, but I’ve battled many very real demons throughout my life. I’m also, I think, very sensitive to the external world which is often a terrifying place, so whereas my poems can seem very personal, very interior, they are actually a symbiosis of a troubled interior world and a frightening external one – I think I’ve come closest in this book so far to getting the balance between the two – the internal world and the external world – or at least showing how it is there and how it operates on the imagination. This is something I think, that I share with Plath, (and is at the root of how she is and has been misunderstood – and how my own work is very often misunderstood), although I don’t claim to share her energy nor her genius!

 

Sarah grew up in North Wales and gained a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from Manchester University in 2013. Her first collection of poetry ‘The Red Wardrobe’ (Seren, 1998) won the Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Best First Collection Prize. She is currently a Lecturer in Creative Writing for Lancaster University.

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Poetry

Blood Child, Myths and Fairytales: In Conversation with Eleanor Rees

Natalie Bolderston caught up with Liverpool-based poet, and author of Blood Child, Eleanor Rees, to chat about poetry as an art-form, fairy tales, and how Liverpool is always present in her writing. 

For many years, you have worked in participatory art as a creative workshop leader. Has this affected your writing in any way?

Yes working in participatory arts has made me very conscious of the connection between poet and their audience. This connection is at the heart of how I understand poetry as an art-form. I have a notion of authorship which decentres the author from the writing process. So, I see all writing as participatory as the poem is produced always in relation to the world, to others, to place, to context. Without these boundaries the new poem wouldn’t emerge. The poem is a transgression of those boundaries. The poet uses their skill with language to create this affect – the poetic. I need forces to work with and through otherwise there is no need to be articulate. I am not speaking to myself.

You have done a lot of collaborative work with singers, visual artists and filmmakers. What connections do you see between poetry and other art forms? How does this manifest in your work?

I think of poetry as a musical form. Sound patterns are crucial to drawing the listener (be that reader as listener or an audience) into the poem. This is something I learnt from welsh poetry, though only in translation, and from poets such as Bunting and Olson. Sound is where poetic meaning lies.

I love to work with other artists in collaboration as the poem emerges from these interactions, from differing artists seeking complex outcomes and from the various histories of the materials with which we are working.

I’m not sure I see connections prior to the act of collaboration. The process involves finding and producing the connections. Commonalities don’t pre-exist but are born of the dynamics of working with others. They have to be continually remade.

Your poem ‘Seal Skin’ is a retelling of the selkie myth. What made you decide to retell this particular story? Do you often find yourself drawn to myths and fairytales?

I don’t set out to write fairytales. I just keep doing it! I am interested in metamorphosis and change as emergent phenomena and find these stories speak of this physical reality in a way many contemporary modes of writing do not. Our culture seems to presume that identity or self or matter are static realities while I see being alive as a continuous movement. Therefore, metaphors and myths which show this flux seem accurate. They have a mood I find compelling; an ontology of flux and alteration I find truthful.

Some of your images feel quite gothic – e.g. ‘Blood drips from the mouth of the house. / Blood floods the dry seas of the moon.’ Would you say that you are inspired by gothic literature?

Actually, no, I don’t see my work as Gothic at all though I can see why readers might do so. I don’t like horror really. The blood in my poems is powerful not uncanny. It stands for life rather than death. I see it as menstrual rather than as life-threatening.

But I also don’t start writing poems thinking about literary inheritance.  I work with places and atmospheres I understand as actually present there, energies that are part of relationships or latent in local histories. Somehow these form into images which then form into words. My job as a poet is to sense and to listen and to write down what I see. All my poems I can trace back to a fleeting apprehension of something in situ, something wanting to communicate. I try to shape that thing into words which carry something of the original sensation. I translate into cultural codes but those codes are just a form to carry the other substances – the feeling, or energetic charge back out into the world.

As a Liverpool-based poet, how have your surroundings informed your writing? 

Liverpool is a participant in my writing. I write about Liverpool because this is where I live and where I was born. If I lived somewhere else I suspect I’d write with that place instead. Our location is part of our selfhood, in all its messy flux and shifting identities. I understand identity as emerging from dynamic interactions, not as a stable formation. For a while I did think if I left Liverpool I’d turn to dust but luckily that sensation has not proved to be the case!

 

About Eleanor Rees

Eleanor Rees is the author of ‘Andraste’s Hair‘ (Salt, 2007), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards, and ‘Eliza and the Bear‘ (Salt, 2009). She often collaborates with other writers, musicians and artists, and works to commission. Eleanor has worked extensively as a local poet in the community. She lives in Liverpool.

For more information on Blood Child and other titles in our Pavilion Poetry series, please visit our website.

 

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Poetry

The Inspiration and Storytelling of And She Was: In Conversation with Sarah Corbett

Natalie Bolderston caught up with Sarah Corbett to discuss the parallels of poetry and cinema and the inspiration and storytelling behind her gripping collection And She Was. 

And She Was is described as a ‘verse novel’, as the poems connect to make one continuous narrative. What made you decide to combine the two forms? Did you face any difficulties?

I’ve always had an interest in narrative and storytelling (I’m currently writing a novel) and narrative verse, and in pushing my practice as a poet …there comes a time when every ambitious poet has to try out the epic! I had the idea for three linked tales or novellas based on a series of recurring dreams some years before starting the book, which was written as part of a PhD in Critical and Creative writing, but attempts to find a narrative prose voice came to nothing. It wasn’t until I read Deryn Rees-Jones’s Quiver that I thought ‘Ah, that’s how I can do it’. As I got deeper into the work (and three books became two) I started to play with aspects of novelistic technique – point of view, voice, tense, time, characterization – alongside aspects of the poem – form, line, image, stanza, page – I was beginning to investigate how far I could push the lyric in the service of narrative and visa versa. The work was written quite quickly in short bursts, then underwent many years of resting, re-writing, development and revision. It took a long time to finish because I wanted to bring the same density to each line, each page and each poem as I would to the briefest lyric poem – and in over seventy pages. In some ways it is one whole poem. In the end I had to trust a great deal to my instincts (for example I reversed the original order of books one and two to create a circular narrative structure), and to the wisdom of the imagination. The opening triptych was written after the main text was finished, and within a couple of days. Deryn asked me if I could write that third book – I couldn’t, it would have taken too long, but the three poems do the double job of summing up the central themes and filling in the ‘gap’ between book 1 (‘The Runner’) and book 2 (‘Pinky’).

Your poems feature many arresting and unexpected images, e.g. ‘They patched up my hymen, / Made a mouse ear / Of my stomach[.]’ How do you maintain the ‘element of surprise’ when writing?

I write very instinctively – and very much from my visual imagination. As a child I drew obsessively, and wrote and illustrated stories and made little books, so the connection between the felt, the visual and language – the hand-eye-mind connection – has always been very strong for me. I both see and feel and hear the images and am often working through the difficulty of language to reach and express the clarity of that image for the reader. I’ve always done that, so I know when to trust it – you get that raising of the hackles when you know it’s ‘right’. This is also about understanding and viewing language as a system of signs – words create images that then create big pools of meaning that are bigger than what is on the surface. I suppose I get this from always having been interested in dreaming, the unconscious, the ideas of Carl Jung, and of reading poets like Sylvia Plath as I was starting to write as a very young poet. That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t also fall into cliché and tired repetitions just like anyone else, and often need other people to point these out for me!

You state that you are influenced by filmmakers such as David Lynch. How do you think cinema relates to poetry?

I think the relationship between poetry and film is closer than between film and the novel, even though it is the novel that is most often adapted for cinema (i.e. more populist viewing). This relationship is a question of form as much as content and is more evident perhaps with Arthouse or Avant Garde cinema. Both good cinema and good poetry are working through the image as the primary means of conveying experience and meaning (we are being shown, not told) and both take risks with and demand much from the reader/viewer. Both require the reader/viewer to be an active participant in bringing the work – poem or film – to life on the page, the screen, and in the imagination. Both should have the power to affect the reader/viewer on a physical and emotional level in the moment of experiencing the film/poem.

I’ve heard that you were partly inspired Deryn Rees Jones’ book length poem Quiver. How did this influence your writing? Which other writers do you turn to for inspiration?

Deryn’s book pointed out the way – how I could stay with the density and beauty of lyric poetry and how I could trust the reader to go on a narrative journey that was not necessarily written in a straight line. Quiver plays with the murder mystery (which I am somewhat obsessed with!) but is also an ‘epic’ poem underpinned with myth, and deals with love and loss – you could describe And She Was in similar ways; I suppose you could say they are ‘sister texts’, even though our styles, voices and approaches are very different. The other poet whose work had a huge influence on me was Anne Carson and her 1996 ‘verse—novel’ The Autobiography of Red. I remember reading this when I was writing my first book, being overawed by its reach, risk and beauty, but thinking ‘one day I want to do something like this’!

My influences are very broad – but broadly speaking within the English lyric tradition. I’ve already mentioned Plath, but I’ve learnt to handle her with care, she can be a very powerful influence! Amongst the first poets I got to know and love really well at school were Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney, and it’s the power and density of their music that has stayed with me and is probably the strongest influence on my ‘style’ of writing – I can usually rely on them if I need a spark to get me working.

Are you working on anything new?

I’m just completing my next collection of poems A Perfect Mirror, which will be published by Pavilion next year. The title is taken from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal (she is referring to the lake on a particularly still and beautiful day). The book has evolved over roughly the same period of time as And She Was (hence having two books out quite close together), although there are new poems getting written all the time – and it is a book that has shed many skins along the way. It is a return to the formal lyric with forays into prose poems and exploded lyrics, and is thematically centred on place – mostly the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire where I have lived since 2002 – and in nature. The collection has a ‘dark heart’, with poems of hauntings both real, poetic and of the unconscious, ‘haunted’ by the presiding spirit of Sylvia Plath, whose burial place I can see from my back bedroom, but also by the instability inherent in the landscape (it is a place of cycles and renewals yes, but also of death and uncertainty, floods and disasters). The title poem is being written as part of a collaboration with the landscape painter Zoe Benbow in partnership with Lancaster University and The Wordsworth Trust, and the image of the mirror might refer the reader to Shakespeare’s idea of art as the mirror of nature, or to the more unsettling notion of nature as a mirror to the self.

 

About Sarah Corbett 

Born in 1970, Sarah grew up in North Wales and gained a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from Manchester University in 2013. Her first collection of poetry ‘The Red Wardrobe‘ (Seren,1998) won the Eric Gregory Award and was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize and the Forward Best First Collection Prize. She followed with ‘The Witch Bag‘ (Seren, 2002) and ‘Other Beasts‘ (Seren, 2008). She currently lives in the Calder Valley and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing for Lancaster University.

 

 From And She Was

Strawberries

Leaving you for an hour is a wound

from shoulder to hip. I stagger

like a soldier from the fray,

like a bull from the axe,

but we have to eat.

 

I buy fruit at the market,

home-grown russets,

pitted cox,

the asked-for berries,

and walking home

take a strawberry

from the punnet.

 

This eating is love’s union,

the twin lost when cells

folded and hardened

to a ridge, the fruit

a globe of flesh

that has left the body,

a painted heart

that yields when bitten.

 

Sarah Corbett

 

For more information on And She Was and other titles in our Pavilion Poetry series, please visit our website.
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Poetry

The Science, Nature and Creativity of Slant Light. In Conversation with Sarah Westcott

We caught up with Sarah Westcott to discuss the interplay between science and creative writing and the various aspects of life and culture that enrich her poetry collection Slant Light.

As someone who has studied both biology and creative writing, do you think that scientific methods (e.g. observation and analysis) bear any similarity to poetic composition?

Yes and no in the sense that both involved sustained and careful observation of both the immediately visible and then the less obvious before any conclusions are drawn or ideas expressed.

But no in the sense that when I am writing early drafts of a poem I am drawing on parts of my mind that do not attempt objectivity. Objectivity is of course fundamental to scientific observation and analysis.

Both disciplines are also infused with the kind of curiosity that is unconscious and in-the-moment and then have parallels in the time afterwards when the mind works over and through what it has been looking at.

There is also a sense for me when editing that I must engage my rational, discerning, critical mind to excise and explain and this is very much a mind I recognise from looking down a microscope or under a stone and examining what is there.

In some of your poems, such as Bats and The Mariposa Trees, nature seems to speak for itself. How did you go about developing a voice and consciousness for different aspects of the natural world?

Thank you – that is something I am still working on. I think for me it is a question of immersing myself in the landscape and also spending time in the garden standing quietly as the bats flicker above me. Those immersive times which are wordless give me a taste of the language that might suit that species. So for the bats I went for a lot of consonantal, clicking sounding words which reflects the staccato nature of their flight and the echolocation they emit (which I can sometimes still hear).

So it’s a question of listening to (and feeling, as a fellow animal) what is already there and then trying to capture something of that essence in our language.

You also work as a journalist. Does this feed into your poetry in any way?

I have been a news reporter for almost twenty years now. In terms of writing, a lot of the news we report is quite complicated and has to be condensed into a few hundred words. So clarity is very important and I think the word-by-word editing skills of weighing up whether a word, phrase or even comma should be there is useful in both areas.

Likewise with rhythm – there is a beat or rhythm in the intros (the first paragraph) of most tabloid news stories  – this may sound fanciful but you do hear it in the sentence as you write it. There is also a degree of word-play.

The other parallel is an awareness of an audience which is strong when I’m writing a news story. We were long ago told to consider: “would this article/angle be of interest to Doris in Doncaster?” And when writing poetry, being able to step back and think “does this actually make sense in its own right” helps my poems hopefully become more understandable.

I have found in my job that you become immersed in all human life as a reporter – not only speaking to people but also sitting through the court cases and inquests, the weddings, the funerals and any occasions when there are crowds of people mourning or celebrating. It’s a kind of privilege to be able to be in those crowds and talk to people and understand why they are there. As a journalist people sometimes tell you quite intimate thoughts as well.  You’re also party to terrible cases of abuse and also the fragility of life. I think that can only help feed my poetry with a respect and even love for us “naked apes”.

You have previously cited Alice Oswald as an influence. What do you value most in her work? Do you have any other literary influences?

I love her use of language to describe the non-human – she manages to make us see creatures, and places almost in a heightened reality without in any way sentimentalising them. For example, writing of a rotted swan as “hurrying away from the plane-crash-mess of her wings” communicates the arched structure of the swan’s frame and also the rigidity and stillness of death and also the way swans ‘run up’ and take off into flight.

My literary influences are everywhere. I am a magpie. I like poems that stretch language to its limits and are not afraid to go beyond.

I really enjoy hybrid work at the moment – recent highlights are Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers and also Solar Bones by Mick McCormack.

I am also fascinated by the sounds, music and meaning in registers of language we have at our disposal – particularly the specialist vocabulary you might find in science. At their best they give you a new way of seeing the world and also sound beautiful when defamiliarised.

Slant Light features several Anglo-Saxon charms and references to folklore. What is your process for transforming raw material such as this into poetry?

A lot of the charms came about when I was writer-in-residence at a nature reserve and I wanted to write about the properties of the plants growing there – many of them common weeds with medicinal properties.

That lead me into researching the charms which are these rich, song-like poems that seem to operate in the area between early Christianity and paganism. I find that hinterland really exciting. I moved between the old texts and my own new interpretations by translating word-by-word using an online dictionary and a bit of poetic license. A lot of the words are open to interpretation and a lot of them are direct translations. What is exciting is the rhythm of speech is already there in the originals which gave me a powerful sense of reaching into something real. They were, I think, performative and meant to be heard. In that sense, the form of the poems, like line breaks and pauses, fell naturally as breath.

 

About Sarah Westcott

Sarah Westcott’s debut pamphlet Inklings was the Poetry Book Society’s Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2013. Her poems have been published in journals including Poetry Review, Magma and Poetry Wales and in anthologies including Best British Poetry 2014 (Salt). Sarah grew up in north Devon, on the edge of Exmoor, and has a keen interest in the natural world. She holds a science degree and an MA in poetry from Royal Holloway, University of London. Sarah lives on the London/Kent borders with her family and, after a spell teaching English abroad, works as a news journalist.

For more information on Slant Light and other titles in our Pavilion Poetry series, please visit our website.

 

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Poetry

‘A Handful of Blue Earth’ Marilyn Hacker on her translation of the poems of Vénus Khoury-Ghata

Marilyn Hacker has translated several of the works of Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Here to celebrate her latest translation A Handful of Blue Earth, Marilyn discusses the translation process and what inspires her about Vénus Khoury-Ghata. Read on for a poem from A Handful of Blue Earth.

A Handful of Blue Earth

A Handful of Blue Earth is your translation of the poems written by Vénus Khoury-Ghata. When did you first read these poems and what initially drew you to them?

This is the sixth book of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s that I have translated since 2000. I had read collections of her poetry in French, and been intrigued by how much implied history there was – history in the macro-historical and in the tale-telling sense –informing them. I was asked, back in 2000,  by an editor to give a reader’s report on an anthology of French and Francophone women’s poetry scheduled for publication. There were a couple of poems of Vénus’ that were so full of howlers of mistranslation – which I signalled to the editor – that I was impelled to re-translate them. Some months later, I met Vénus through a mutual writer friend, and knowing her, knowing the person and the personality behind the work, was another impetus to engage with it.

Throughout the collection, there are a range of poetic forms and styles. Is there any particular form that you would say presents a particular challenge as a translator?

There are no actual metrical /rhymed/stanzaic ” fixed poetic forms”  — either coming from the French (or Arabic) literary canon or invented by the poet – in this book, or in any of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s poetry, though there is a difference between the short-lined verse of the “Lady of Syros” and the more surreal prose-poem-like paragraph-stanzas from the “Book of Petitions” , while the long “Mothers and the Mediterranean” poem partakes of both.   The rhythms and the breath of the short-lined poems are quite different from the marvellously meandering sentences of that border on prose. It’s not hard to keep them apart.

There are not as many formal  – in the sense of metrical/syllabic , etc. forms – virtuosos working currently in French poetry as there are in contemporary poetry in English  — thinking of George Szirtes, Mimi Khalvati, Derek Mahon, Patience Agbabe , for example , though Jacques Roubaud is an exception. I once translated a series of (also surreal ) sequences in decasyllabic dixains  – ten-line stanzas of ten syllables each – by another poet, Marie Etienne, which was surprisingly easy, given how much iambic pentameter I had written myself – and even led me to write something using the same form.

Do you have a particular process when translating poetry? 

No…I often find myself reading a poem in French and “recreating” it in English, and that’s the impulse to translate it. If there’s a book of translations to complete, the process is less meandering than that.

This poetry collection deals with a variety of themes such as exile, warfare and female relationships. Is there any motif in particular that stands out to you as the defining theme of the collection?

Oddly, the only relationship between women I noticed in this collection was that of the daughter who “becomes” the pre-Cycladic statue to her mother. It’s a subject that has been primary in my own work, and an intense ,conflicted mother/ daughter relationship is central to another book of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s that I translated , Nettles, published by Graywolf Press in the U.S. in 2008.  Exile and expatriation, though, are themes that run through all this poet’s work  – quoting from “The Book of Petitions”:

How can you weep in a language no longer your own

what can you call walls not imbued with your sweat

In both the “Lady of Syros” and “The Book of Petitions,” death itself is seen as a kind of exile or expatriation  – which, paradoxically, makes it seem less final and inexorable: exiles sometimes return.  Whereas the state of war evoked in “The Mothers and the Mediterranean” seems almost more permanent than death – and I think it was the persistent murderous state of war now in Syria, in Iraq, that brought the civil war in Lebanon so urgently back to the poet’s imagination…as well as the city of Beirut, where she grew up, very specifically evoked in that sequence.

Would you say that reading and translating Vénus’ poems has influenced your own poetry? 

I’ve translated extensively from the work of about ten French or Francophone poets in the last going-on-twenty years, and there has been, intentionally or inadvertently, dialogue with several of them in my own work.  Here is a glosa, a Spanish form in which the poet takes 4 lines from a poem by another poet, and composes 4 ten line stanzas, each ending with one of those four lines in turn  — this was written elaborating on four lines of the poem by Vénus Khoury-Ghata that is given in its entirety, following.


GLOSE

 The death of a sparrow has blackened the snow

But  nothing consoled her

Who is the night among all nights ? she asked the owl

But the owl doesn’t think, the owl knows

Vénus Khoury-Ghata : “Borderland”

 

Dumb heat, not snow, sheathes Paris in July

and sheathes suburban Washington.

Planes rip through the fabric of a frayed

afternoon torn open

by words no afterwards will clarify.

Knowing what happened, no one will know.

We had a friend ;  she had a young  son.

There was exile, its weight on a day.

There was the heart’s ice, its insistent glow.

The death of a sparrow has blackened the snow.

 

Trope upon silvered trope, of what might a mirror

remind her : copper, black silk , the eloquence

intelligence gives eyes ?  Reflected terror

that conscripted all intelligence.

I am a great way off and cannot come nearer.

I do not know what the night or the mirror told her

or the sense of the words she wrote when nothing made sense,

or if they made a sense that seemed clearer and clearer.

The child raised his arms to be lifted, to be held, to hold her,

but nothing consoled her.

 

Put the morning away in the murk of myth :

not the unthinkable, but Radha’s dance

breaking her bangles, imploring the dark god with

metered and musical lamentations,

repeated measures meant to distance death

suggest a redemptive spiral for the soul

(child, child bleeding to death, no second chance)

in the containment of despair and wrath

within the peopled descent of the ritual.

 

(Who is the night of all nights she asked the owl.)

 

No dark god was there, and no god of light .

There are women and men, cruel or fallible.

No mild friend picked up the telephone at the right

moment ; some Someone was unavailable.

The morning which paled from an uneventful night

would have been ordinary, except that she chose.

Interrogate the hours, invent some oracle

flying overhead , read fate into its flight.

We think the snow was blackened by dead sparrows,

but the owl doesn’t think; the owl knows.

Vénus Khoury-Ghata

 

From “Nettles”

it should have been beautiful and it was merely sad

gardens departed this life more slowly than men

we would eat our sorrow down to the last drop then

belch it in splinters in the face of the cold

the sun’s spirit kept the sun from warming us

a sun that eventually ran dry        from so much concentration

It was elsewhere

it was a very long time ago

tired of calling us the mother left the earth to enter the earth

seen from above she looked like a pebble

seen from below she looked like a flaking pine-cone

sometimes she wept    in sobs that made the foliage tremble

life, we cried out to her, is a straight line of noises

death an empty circle

outside there is winter

the death of a sparrow has blackened the snow

But     nothing consoled her

who is the night among all nights? she asked the owl

but the owl doesn’t think

the owl knows

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

(from Names, W.W. Norton and Co., 2010)

Marilyn Hacker is the author of thirteen books of poems, including A Stranger’s Mirror (Norton, 2015), Names (Norton, 2010), Essays on Departure (Carcanet, 2006), an essay collection, Unauthorized Voices (Michigan, 2010), and fourteen collections of translations of French and Francophone poets including Emmanuel Moses, Marie Etienne, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Habib Tengour and Rachida Madani. DiaspoRenga, a collaborative sequence written with the Palestinian-American poet Deema Shehabi, was published by Holland Park Press in 2014. She lives in Paris.

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