Lavinia Greenlaw : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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from Self-misunderstood
by Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaariye’
I can’t understand you, curious self,
nor grasp how you’re both life and death, 
grabbed land and peaceful settlement, 
grudging milker that makes me full, 
sun set at evening whilst casting 
noon’s shortest shadow: how can you be 
two who can’t marry 
yet share the same house?  
How can I set this riddle and 
give away its answer if 
I fail to understand your secret 
or even what you mean by it?  
Are you something separate, 
a stand-alone that leans 
upon no man’s shoulder, 
or such a part of the people
 that you can’t be parted from them?  
And are you that which is Gaarriye
 or two opposing halves 
he cannot fit together? 
I call you, crooked creation: 
bear witness to your character. 
Gaariye’s poetry was translated by W.N. Herbert in collaboration with Martin Orwin, as part of the Poetry Translation Centre’s second World Poets Tour, which recently brought to the UK leading writers from Kurdistan, Cape Verde, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Somaliland and Sudan. Almost a year earlier, each was matched with a translator and a British poet, who worked together on producing English versions of their work.
W.N. Herbert had this to say about it all on the tour blog:

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10.28.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Lavinia Greenlaw

Emily Dickinson explodes

So did she or didn’t she and do we care? Travis Nichols is right to question the misguided investment made in how a poet goes about things and what they were wearing at the time, although there is sometimes something to be gained from putting the books down and going there.
I lived in Amherst for five months and failed (quite unconsciously) to visit the Dickinson home. I sat in an apartment belonging to the college founded by her grandfather, and read her poems and letters instead. It helped to be there under her sky (what could be seen of it through all those trees) and to get a sense of life in the kind of place you felt yourself entering or leaving, but I had no curiosity about her chairs and tables, let alone what action might have been seen by her sofa.
Some years later, I went back to make a radio programme about her and so had to get over myself and go inside.

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10.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Lavinia Greenlaw

Silent disco

Have we entered a version of silent disco in which the primary experience of the poem is as received signals rather than noise?
For a poem to operate as a poem must it now be concentrated on the idea of itself, must it appear to be either the square root of poem or hardly a poem at all?
What’s a disco? asked my American penpal in 1974. She also sought clarification on ‘jumble sale’ and ‘youth club’.
Silent disco: I thought it was the most miserable thing I’d ever heard of (a room full of people with headphones on, dancing alone and in silence) until one night a year ago in Nova Scotia when there was well and truly nothing else to do. Someone described me as looking joyful. It’s not often I get called that.

10.13.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Lavinia Greenlaw

How to write a bad poem

new%20year%20moon%20%20jan%202007%202.jpg
1. COSMIC BLOOM
Someone told me recently that I was ‘one big metaphor’. They had a point.
One of my brothers has a PhD in astrophysics. I once asked him how his research was going and he replied, ‘It’s been a good month. I got a result.’ What was it? ‘Twenty-five million light years plus or minus twenty-five million light years.’ Fifteen years later, I am still thinking about what that might mean.
He was sent out to an observatory in the Australian desert to observe his particular corner of the cosmos. It rained for the first time in a hundred years and the skies were so cloudy that he could not see his stars. Meanwhile, flowers that hadn’t been seen for a century were emerging outside the observatory door. The desert was in bloom.
How was I going to resist this? Even though IT DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING. And how could I properly understand what he was doing when I did not have the required maths?
Writing poems is as much about learning what is not enough, what is not the poem, as it is about retaining susceptibility (and you do need the courage of imagination to let yourself dis-integrate so that, like Frost, you arrive in the world of the poem as if you had ‘materialised from cloud or risen out of the ground’).
The more something speaks to you of poetry, the more you must search for, and find, whatever it is about the desert/cosmos/bloom fandango that speaks of you.

10.05.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Lavinia Greenlaw

Read the foreign and the dead

jewish%20cemetery%20near%20lubin%20june%2006%202.jpg
I grew up in a house full of books and made my way through the shelves.
There wasn’t much else to do.
I didn’t have a clue who anyone was, so I read poems not poets.
Those who formed me were from mythical places: Eastern Europe (lurking behind the Iron Curtain) and America (lurking behind the album cover and cinema screen).
They took me outside and so I got to see in.

09.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Lavinia Greenlaw

Lo Fi

bishop%20house%20light%20fitting%202.jpg
Al night by the rosë, rosë,
Al night bi the rose I lay,
Dorst Ich nought the rosë stele,
And yet I bar the flour away.
Anon (14th century)

09.23.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Lavinia Greenlaw

I am so bored with words

higgs%20boson.jpg
Those who understand what went on inside a tunnel in Switzerland last Wednesday have been struggling to explain it to the rest of us. The picture above is of what physicists believe the thing they are searching for might behave like if it does in fact exist.
While the world might think it doesn’t need poetry, it sure needs metaphor. The trouble is words get tiring and boring.

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09.14.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Lavinia Greenlaw

Easy listening

aldeburgh%2006.jpg
I like what Clive James has to say about Plath’s suave swing and what it is that activates a poem, or sustains one. On two recent occasions I have sat listening to people – first scientists, then academics – talk about the “poetic” when what they meant, in terms of content as well as style, was a kind of background music or easy listening. The scientists wanted something fuzzy from the word, the academics something sweet.
The second of these occasions was a conference on the great German melancholic W.G. Sebald, whose prose work Rings of Saturn is a metaphysical wander along the coast of East Anglia.

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09.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Author Archive

Lavinia Greenlaw

Yet share the same house

Lavinia Greenlaw

Emily Dickinson explodes

Lavinia Greenlaw

Silent disco

Lavinia Greenlaw

How to write a bad poem

Lavinia Greenlaw

Read the foreign and the dead

Lavinia Greenlaw

Lo Fi

Lavinia Greenlaw

I am so bored with words

Lavinia Greenlaw

Easy listening

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