sculpture by Dorothy Love at www.dorothylove.co.uk
In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk
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The ground underfoot has a thin crust these days but we’re still talking
On Saturday May 7th, I spoke at a conference at Warwick University. It was called “2nd International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine”.
I gave a short power-point presentation and read a paper.
Here is the power-point and here is the paper. This version of the latter is slightly longer than the one I actually read.
I mentioned the fact that the “Poems for…” project I run is out of funds and has been for several months. One or two helpful suggestions were made.
The funding issue is, incidently, one reason why this blog has gone quiet recently. Another reason is that there is serious illness in my family. I have to give time and self to those things.
The conference opportunity was exciting. So are other developments just emerging. I am a bit tight lipped just now, and concentrating fiercely, but am still talking and will talk more here soon.
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The Travails of Gordon Brown
Here is a poem about the last Emperor of Byzantium. I sent it recently to a married couple I know, who both liked it. She said it’s about me. He said it’s about Gordon Brown.
The idea behind the poem is that we are all now inheritors of fallen cities, walls of security which have been broken. The fugitive fox has much to teach us.
We are also perhaps no less apt than ever our ancestors were to go after those who stand or speak out, people we can blame for our woes, confusions and pain. So we are fox-hunters as well, baying with the hounds.
The Travails of the Last Emperor
by Rogan Wolf
2010
dedicated here to the Right Honourable Gordon Brown, MP, with thanks.
For centuries, Constantinople, capital of Byzantium, was the greatest city in the world. Historians maintain that when it fell in the fifteenth century, its last Emperor died on the walls. But his body was never found and we are free to consider another possibility : that he simply wandered away – on the one side to Thrace, or on the other, Anatolia …
Part 1
The Emperor at Kerbside
i
Highness,I saw you tonight,
creeping like a sickly fox
across our street.
The camera’s bound
to have caught you
in that glare
of white light
at the corner –
would it miss ?
I didn’t know
you were still going,
Highness,
with your City
a charnel yard
of stone
and bone
and shard
of fine crockery.
There you presided.
Can death
be worse than this ?
ii
Between our blurred and broken lines
the fox is worth picking out.
He guards the word on the tip of all tongues
the telling we are frantic to avoid.
He slips between the cars at kerbside
his home his own slinking
his homelessness our street.
iii
He has moved in !
I heard him last night
scuffling by the open window
emasculating my arrangements there.
This morning
as I put the garden
back together again,
I knew he was watching me
from my window !
iv
All my life since setting out
I have carried fragments and relics
mementoes of a time intact.
The city is fallen,
undone and irretrievable.
Bowed archaeologists scraping about
shall not ease my desolation.
The City is fallen.
I am the ruins.
v
He makes grin
his mask
and he spins in the air
his stink
and lightly
sleeps
and lightly
he shits.
He has no shame
in his matter.
His game
is defiance of death.
vi
There are real advantages
to being nowhere nowhen
no profile
on the radar screen.
I am the broken emperor
so when I materialise
surface breaks
queues scatter
and mouths gape in wild surmise.
vii
Fox feathery and starved tonight
emerges from a bank of ivy.
His back arches, he walks on tip-toe
and his tail is like the skeleton of a wing.
The cats take no notice of him.
They know that they’ll be alive tomorrow.
viii
The stillness of the Voice on Sinai
foxed Moses. He’d made that arduous ascent
in full expectation of Grandeur and Majesty.
Still, small and crucified day upon day
(until at last
one day of sorrow
He’ll simply give up the ghost),
this was not the God he thought had promised
to show his people the Way.
ix
Cities in the desert
picked over by camera and crow –
history grows dim
the present points to sorrow.
June 2007
Part 2
The Emperor Unclothed
i
Who was that boy
who said the emperor
was merely naked ?
The boy died of course
almost at once
his flesh in gobbets
scattered across the hills.
Perhaps he was blind.
For the emperor wore that day
the sheen of his apartness
and a shadow so long
it girded the earth.
ii
Have at you, Highness –
clear of the multitudes
free of the robes.
You’re just quarry now
shoulders bare and shining ahead –
fair game.
We’ll paddle in you,
your excellency,
you’ll do us good.
iii
A young fox
most of his fur missing
pads the ridge of the garden wall.
He knows he doesn’t belong here
and to survive the night
he must glide to perfection
between each holding
he must slide with precision
around each lit space.
iv
That wide-eyed small boy
who proclaimed the obvious to his neighbours
didn’t live long enough to see the truth –
that truth is unendurable
but learning you’ve bowed for years to a lie
can drive you to murder.
v
And the fox said to the boy emperor
“follow me.
Let me guide you
through my web of shadow
to where the truth lies hidden
precarious as an embryo.
Let us sidle
together.”
August 2007
Part 3
The Last Emperor in Chaotic Times
i
The last emperor stirs.
Chaos inspires him.
It brings back memories
of earlier convulsions
when he was the apex
uppermost in disaster.
Now citadels collapse again
and strange new progeny stagger
sleek and bewildered
across our blasted fields.
The last emperor hunches
into a ball, wheezy and crackling
and hurries to join them.
He is sure this time
he will be our chosen one.
But what is there left to say ?
It has all been used up.
All the great redemptive words
fizzed and burned out
almost the instant they entered time
and for millennia
they’ve hung in countless rooms
like lumps of raw clay
twisted and re-modelled
to ennoble and justify
the frets and furies that have always been.
But the last emperor
has no need of hope.
He lost it ages back
amongst the paraphernalia
of cities and face
and full diaries.
This is child’s play.
Yes indeed, oh yes indeed
there’s nothing left to say.
He sings to himself happily.
Against the odds another chance.
Against all the odds another chance.
Let’s try.
ii
The last emperor confided
resting his feet, reaching for the water jug –
“I had a cheering thought today.
I realised the past is just
another set of possibilities
as rich in guidance and new ideas
as anything present or still to come.
The dead may still belong in the dance.”
The last emperor was almost weeping now.
“And straightaway, the walls of my City
renewed themselves in my mind
and the dead rose from their mass graves
took back their faces, their noble eyes,
and became again my counsellors,
comforting me with their wit and high learning.”
iii
When the great City fell all those years ago
the emperor had to give up communicating
with crowds. Now he secretes words in code
under stones and between buses, whisperings
deep in caves by the shore, scribblings
borne in small balloons loosed to ride hurricanes.
It’s more intimate that way, he says,
more telling
more effective in getting his message across.
iv
He tends to avoid caves for his resting.
They are too obvious and accessible.
He goes for between-space
and between-time
on the edges of snug living.
Fly-tips do well, for instance,
or gaps between fences
in the more established parts of suburbia
where arguments over boundaries
can open things up a bit.
Allotment huts have proved satisfactory
shared with the odd fox or down-and-out,
or patches of spare paving beneath bridges
beyond where the cyclists pass.
And like the kestrel and the red kite
he is drawn to the motorway
and will often bed down within feet
of the juggernauts
blasting through
their sharp beams searching infinity
all night.
v
Since the last emperor lost his name
he’s been invisible.
He asks himself,
does it matter
where I place myself
if no one can find me there ?
He wanders from city to quiet fastness
and there’s no difference
except in the impact on him.
No one knows he has gone
and no one takes note of his arrival.
Yet on the mountain trail
he adds a small stone
to each cairn he passes.
There is no name on it
and no one will know
he placed it there.
But the stones will continue
to serve and guide
once the emperor is dead.
I’ve learned to be
an invisible servant
says the last emperor
to himself.
October 2008
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“No language is chauvinistic of itself; it is our misuse of language that makes it so.”
Now that the new “One World…” poem-poster collection is up at last and as I begin to collect myself again and think about how to make sure that people know it is there, I want to record a good email conversation I had recently with Lakshmi Holmström, translator of the two Tamil poems selected for the new collection. The conversation is reproduced here with Lakshmi’s permission.
_______________________________________________________________________Sent: 31 March 2010 11:17
From: Lakshmi HolmströmDear Rogan Wolf,
I am glad the new collection is nearly ready for uploading……I too, of course … would want to support and encourage any initiative which would make Tamil more visible, and the best of Tamil writing more accessible to people who are unaware of this rich literature. But the thrill is in seeing Tamil as part of a spectrum of languages, each making its own wonderful contribution.
_______________________________________________________________________Sent : 31 March 2010 11:50
From : Rogan Wolf…I also think – that there is something almost political about this project, in a healing sense, in that it affirms people in their self-belief and cultural identities, as part of the wider community.
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Sent: 31 March 2010 14:46
From: Lakshmi HolmströmYes … I do agree that there’s a political aspect to your project, which I find truly admirable in that it encourages and celebrates different identities equally, within a world citizenship.
But I’m also aware that language chauvinism leads to the most bitter nationalism and violence.
There seems to be a fine line here (between a pride which shares a universality and a pride that turns into narrow chauvinism) which I think one ought to be vigilant about.
But I do wish you the best…
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Sent: 16 April 2010 10:06
From: Rogan WolfI’ve been meaning to reply for a while. I want to thank you for…what you wrote to me in your message of March 31st and yes I know it’s a fine line, but it’s also a vital and precious one, to be worked at and worked on.
I actually “run” a small charity called “Hyphen-21.” The title is based on the image of human connection itself as a fine line, in fact a hyphen. The source of the image is a book by Martin Buber called I and Thou. The more successfully we nurture the skills of connection between I and Thou, along this fragile line between I and Other, the more chance our communities and our world have of surviving.
There is a beautful Arabic poem I chose for the first “One World” collection (see “Prison”) The poet Mourid Barghouti wanted to be identified as a Palestinian. I showed it to a friend of mine who is himself a Palestinian. He came to UK as an asylum seeker and now works for the NHS at quite a senior level. My friend read the poem and said it made him come out in goose-pimples – because it spoke to him and for him so vividly as a Palestinian – that he felt he had just discovered the power of speech. There are things at present the Palestinians cannot say, my friend said ; the experience of being Palestinian is not being given real credence or validation at this time, by the outside world. But the poem says it, and far from being prison offered him release. He said that, if he were an NHS patient and saw that poem on a waiting room wall, he would feel respected and recognised by this hosting country, even though it might treat him clumsily and suspiciously in other respects. He was even prepared to suggest that his health might benefit from this poem.
I lap up that sort of thing, of course. For similar reasons, though to a lesser extent, I do warm a bit to enthusiasm that verges on the nationalistic, which may come from someone whose culture is being reduced and weakened by another in some way, and the psychological and identity issues there must be among a people in that position. In doing that I am not warming to chauvinism, as such, I don’t think, but I might be a bit of a sucker for people who identify themselves as underdogs, and turn to chauvinism as a substitute for true identity. And that’s a real danger.
The translator of the Barghouti poem mentioned above has something to offer to this discussion. Her name is Radwa Ashour and she is actually the poet’s wife, and an Egyptian academic (they live in Cairo). It was she who suggested the Arabic text should be on the right of the poster. Her suggestion was less because the eyes of the Arabic reader travel right to left, than because, this way, the texts are open and broken to one another, whereas the other way they stand stiff back to stiff back.
That first bilingual collection of 45 poems is already on the site and can be downloaded. It contains several Arabic poems but no Hebrew. Quite deliberately seeking to balance that, this present new collection will be carrying two Hebrew poems. But which poets to choose ? Rahel Bluwstein is seen as virtually the national poet for all Israelis ; Amichai was a soldier in his time but was to the left in politics and would not be seen as a Israeli “chauvinist”.
Similarly, for the new collection I’ve tried hard to identify and select poems in African languages. Should Afrikaans be included ? Yes, so long as it is one of a large enough group of poems by black Africans. Written by someone identified with an earlier oppressive regime ? No. The poet is Ingrid Jonker who was at odds with the Apartheid regime and committted suicide by drowning.
And again, I have been given permission to adopt and publish Michael Rosen’s commissioned poem celebrating the 60th birthday of the NHS last year. He was asked to write it during the time he was Children’s Poet Laureate. The poem will be in our new collection, alongside translations of it into Punjabi, Turkish, Greek, Somali and – soon afterwards – Arabic and Hebrew. And maybe Tamil and Sinhala ? The idea is obvious – the NHS waiting room is common ground ; people sit there from many cultures and nations, several of them warring or otherwise in conflict ‘back home.’ So let’s choose, for this poem of the waiting room, where people sit together to see the doctor, languages of peoples who elsewhere might be seeking to harm each other’s health.
Obviously there is a danger of getting a bit omnipotent in all this, delusions of influence, etc. Finally, though, I might record the following slightly paradoxical thought : if it were possible to avoid the charge of seeming to sympathise with oppressive behaviour, by singling out the poetry of nations or regimes guilty of aggressive actions against others, I think it is at least arguable that we should do precisely that – to show them and their neighbours the other side of themselves in their lives, to validate their higher nature and more human identity. It can’t really work in reality, but seems to follow a bit as a line of thought…
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Sent: 01 June 2010 16:12
From: Lakshmi HolmströmDear Rogan
I wanted to answer your previous email, ‘Thoughts on Chauvinism’, but have been very busy with deadlines, besides being away for a part of April/May.
Of course I agree: languages, literatures and above all poetry are among the most powerful ways in which we identify ourselves. Poetry can express for us – as nothing else – the particularities of a landscape, specifics of memories, sensations to do with a particular way of being.
But poetry also seems to tap into what is universally felt too. When I do ‘readings’ of my translations of novels [in my language] , there is a lot of ethnographic and cultural detail which I need to gloss for ‘western’ audiences. This isn’t needed at all, in the case of poetry. The particular seems to get subsumed in the universal.
That first aspect of poetry, I think, is one reason why a Palestinian or a Tamil (when in exile) reacts so intensely when she/he sees a poem in her/his language, on the wall of a hospital waiting room in England, or the London Underground….
But most of us who are transnationals, or who are part of a diaspora, carry multi-identities, too. And poetry, signalling to the universal, the humane, should help us all to heal, to reconcile and build bridges within ourselves and between ourselves.
You are absolutely right in seeking out poems in Hebrew or Sinhala which do just that. No language is chauvinistic of itself; it is our misuse of language that makes it so.
Best wishes
Lakshmi
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The “Poems for…” project – a new collection has been uploaded , crossing new frontiers
A new collection of mainly bilingual poems has been uploaded on the Poems for… website. It consists of sixty poems, most of them bilingual.
Eventually this sixty will join and become one with the collection of forty five poems launched a few years ago, called “Poems for… One World.”
The new collection has taken three years. Thank you, Stephen Watts, yet again, for guidance, counsel and support.
Thirty different languages are represented. They include six poems written in African languages spoken south of the Sahara – Ewe, Igbo, Somali, Tigrinya, Afrikaans, /Xam (though /Xam is no longer in live currency). Six is not enough and we’ll come again at this one.
But this time there is also some variation on the collection’s main theme – the simple exchange on a single page between two languages – between “foreign” and “incomprehensible”, and familar and clear. The crossing over from one to the other.
For instance, the new collection includes a poem called “These are the Hands” by Michael Rosen, until recently the UK Children’s Poet Laureate. People at the UK National Health Service commissioned him to write it in celebration of the 60th birthday of the NHS a couple of years ago.
I asked whether we could add the poem to our collection and send it round our mailing list. Of course we could, he said.
Then I asked, would he agree to me getting it translated into various languages as well, particularly languages of people often in conflict or in question ? Of course he would.
So in the new collection there are four versions of the poem, besides his own – in Punjabi, in Turkish, in Greek, in Somali. And soon I hope to add other languages too – such as Arabic and Hebrew.
The point is obvious. People sit quietly together in NHS waiting rooms, sharing their common human precariousness and mortality, who back in their own places of origin might be seeking each other’s lives.
A few days ago, I showed the different versions of his poem to Michael, who was excited. I told him I have to fund-raise now, to keep the project going and he asked if I would like a quote from him, in support. Of course I would, I said.
He sent it over minutes later and here it is : “I think that this is a stimulating, exciting and important project. We all need to be able to talk to each other and we need to be able to talk to each other about things that matter. I wrote the NHS poem firstly because I was asked to but more importantly because I care deeply about the NHS. My parents fought for it, it brought my children into the world, it saw my mother and father out of it with care and dignity – and much more besides. The people who work for the NHS come from all over the world and the NHS cares for people whose origins are all over the world. It is a truly international, inter-communal, inter-cultural institution. How right then that what we say within the NHS can, when appropriate, talk multi-lingually. I am excited and delighted that my poem might appear in several languages. It shows that we can talk to each other just as we try to care for each other. I think the project needs all the help it can find.”
But there are other variations, hinging on the meaning of the word “frontier.” Frontiers are not just geographical, nor lingual, nor cultural.
There is a frontier in me between life and death. I am afraid to cross that frontier.
There is a frontier in all of us – I suggest – between mental well-being and mental ill-being. We are almost as afraid to cross that frontier as the one that divides life and death, and our fear affects our behaviour the closer to the frontier we find ourselves.
So in this new collection there are pairs of poems in English which seek to speak clearly across this other kind of frontier, in the cause of better connection. A pair of poems by someone who this year died of an aggressive terminal cancer, and kept recording it all in verse, almost to the last minute, and humorous to the last. A pair of poems by someone also recently dead, who was seriously physically disabled himself and was campaigning to the last and with high effectiveness for disability rights. A pair of poems about someone with Downs Syndrome. A pair of poems by children. A pair of poems by people familiar with the inside of psychiatric units…
Each one of these pairs could become a whole collection in its own right, if we can get the funding…
Fund-raising needs alone require me to seek publicity for these 60 poems. But I think they simply deserve to be known and read, deserve on their merits maximum possible exposure. And even without publicity, I know that they will be downloaded in large numbers, in the UK and all over the world. They will go mostly to schools, but also to public libraries, healthcare waiting rooms, embassies, prisons – and not just in the UK.
I know this, because we can keep track of the downloads from the site. And we have the e-mail addresses of everyone who registers there. There are well over 1,000 names on our mailing list. At the very least we shall be telling everyone on that list that the new poems are available.
I think this project is powerful and it is necessary. For poetry can speak to people beneath the skin, it can penetrate armour, it can speak straight to you where your average advertising copy merely works on or round you, diminishing you. I wasn’t 100% impressed by the recent advertising campaign in the UK, seeking to liberalise social attitudes to mental ill-health, for instance. Huge sums of money were made available for it. What a wonderful opportunity. But the main result seems to have been just more advertising copy, often simplistic and even misleading, to join the daily cacophony of advert-speak. I’m not convinced it does that much.
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Talking of Art – why write poetry ?
Someone asked me recently for my thoughts on why I still seem to write poetry, despite everything. This was my reply :
…I think a lot of your day can flood out your sense of self. Writing a poem is a way of restoring your own distinctness and boundaries. The world can silence you. The poem, written on a blank page where there is no competition and no noise, restores your voice, is an answer back.
We all need a voice, and coupled to that, a way of making sense of what’s going on. Like you, I think even if no one hears your voice, the writing process is restorative, and one can always mutter one’s own words to oneself when the going gets rough.
I had a moving conversation once with someone suffering extreme but chronic back pain. It destroyed her capacity to work and was often so bad she would vomit. She felt the pain was changing who she was and in a sense replacing her with itself. She decided to make a sculpture of her pain. It made her feel better. Instead of her pain shaping her, she had now shaped her pain. She had restored herself to a proper balance. It’s a good image for any artist, I’d have thought.
But having ways of getting your voice heard makes things even better. All the poems I write are meant for the air, for declamation, me reciting to an audience, rather than for the page, where it’s just the words singing (or rumbling or muttering or whatever) inside a stranger’s head.
That declamatory element can be a weakness and I know there’s quite a lot of me that wants my poems to save the world, just as I myself want to save it. Oh come on, I say, from my poetry pulpit. Listen to this. It will do you good. It will make you be good. So the poem becomes preachy and uncentred. And yet…
There’s the “Poet as Shaman” school which regards the poet as a kind of seer for the community at large. I’m highly suspicious of that approach, yet the fact remains that it grabs me quite a lot. Certainly there is more to the business than just self and restoring one’s own boundaries and systems. One’s day is spent vulnerable and at the mercy of other systems and currents besides one’s own, and I think we are all particularly vulnerable and drawn to that which is unsaid, unrecognised, unspeakable. The more frightened we are of it, the shadowy demon in the cave, the more healing it would be to bring it into the light, and I think there’s an instinct to wrestle with the unspoken, to make sense of it, to chip out the words for it.
Maybe the real poet’s need to articulate and make sense of things, to restore self, can also involve being the community’s lightening conductor, truth teller, dragon-slayer. Or victim. “Thank you for saying the words I could not say myself but needed to hear and thereby share in” Or “How dare you say what we don’t want to hear, or want our cowering population to hear. To silence you, we’ll rip you to bits. To silence you we’ll put you in prison. To silence you we’ll simply pretend you did not speak.”
I like your community idea as well. Community implies connection between people, and poetry is about making connection particularly vivid and electric. Therefore community lives wherever a poem hits the mark.
I was once asked to write a poem about a tree-planting. The local member of parliament trundled along to put down a few spadefuls of soil in the park, around this little tree, and I read my poem to the assembled company.
Two park gardeners were waiting to settle the tree in properly once the ceremonials were over and we’d all gone away.
At the end of my poem one of the gardeners asked me for a copy of it. That was a good moment. The poem had ceased to be “art” restricted to arts pages and the like-minded, and became instead community, reaching out in any direction and finding a home where it may…
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