A seasonal poem 'Hieroglyph Moth' from The Treekeeper's Tale

For years I'd kept a postcard of a tropical hieroglyph moth bought at the Natural History Museum in London. It gave me a particular feeling, those hieroglyph colours on its white furry wings:

As I was writing my last collection The Treekeeper's Tale and had already written two "moth" poems, 'Atlas Moth' and 'Moon Moths (in the Day Room)', I thought surely it's time for me to write that hieroglyph moth, so I did. The poem for me has some of the feeling I associate with the visual image, the colour language on those snow-wings, and the meaning is meant to be quite open-ended, though it makes me think of how I learnt English when I was seven, the newness of the language and the country (mid-Wales) I was having to adapt to from Paris. How hard I found it until someone gave me a picture dictionary. There were the English words below the pictures and after that it all came clear. The three moth poems are in The Treekeeper's Tale, along with other ice and snow poems 'Siberian Ice Maiden', 'Frozen Horses' and much else.

Hieroglyph Moth

When the white ermine wings

opened at night

like a book of frost

smoking in the dark,

I understood the colours of vowels

painted on moth fur –

the black, red, saffron signs

of a new language.

Antennae grew from my forehead,

my tongue was restless in its chrysalis.

I felt lift-off

as if my bones had melted.

I stepped out into the snow –

not even an exoskeleton to protect me

in this strange country.

Video of my poem What the Water Gave Me

Here's a video of me reading 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)' from my next collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, to be published by Seren in May 2010. This was filmed at the Sha'ar International Poetry Festival in Israel by Asher Gal last October at the Hebrew and Arabic Theatre in Jaffa. There are six poems in the collection based on Kahlo's painting of that name, interwoven throughout the book. I'll post photos from the festival and of Israel soon.

In Kahlo's painting she is lying in her bath surrounded by scenes from her life and paintings. This sixth of my WtWGM poems is more a version than a literal interpretation.

Poetry from Art reading at Tate Modern

Poetry from Art: a public reading by poets on the Tate Modern course. 

Monday 23rd November, 6.45 – 8.45

This is my fourth year of tutoring poetry writing courses at Tate Modern and this year the course has expanded to three terms. This autumn term will culminate in a reading open to the public. 25 poets have been working in the magical setting of Tate Modern, when the galleries were quiet and closed to the public. They wrote poems in response to works from the permanent collections (including Anselm Kiefer's Palm Sunday), from current exhibitions (John Baldessari: Pure Beauty and Pop Life: Art in a Material World) and past exhibitions. You are invited to hear their poems in the unique surroundings of Tate Modern’s autumn exhibition John Baldessari: Pure Beauty.

Level 4, Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Admission free, booking essential as seating is limited 

For tickets call 020 7887 8888 or book online http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/20562.htm

                                Palm Sunday by Anselm Kiefer (Energy & Process)

                         Hotel International by Tracey Emin

                 Brain Cloud by John Baldessari

                  Untitled by Maurizio Cattelan (Pop Life)

Interview in Horizon Review & Poetry at Tate Modern

Issue 3 of Horizon Review has just gone online and includes Michelle McGrane's interview with me, Dreams, Spirits and Visions. Michelle also has two fine poems featured from her forthcoming collection The Suitable Girl which I highly recommend.

Last night was the first session of my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern. Twenty-seven of us sat in Anselm Kiefer's installation 'Palm Sunday' in the Energy & Process collection and soaked up the uprooted palm tree and its thirty-nine vitrines. I can gaze and gaze into these and always see new things among the ghostly plants and pods bursting from cracked clay, smoke, earth, ash, ladders, flying clothes and scratched words. I handed out a hat containing lines from Paul Celan's poems (huge influence on Kiefer), carefully selected but picked at random to incorporate in a 5 minute quatrain, then asked everyone to introduce themselves by offering the group a gift line from their resulting quatrains. These were poems in themselves. After discussion of Celan's techniques (twisting language to say the unsayable, in his case the aftermath of the holocaust), everyone had ten minutes in which to respond to the installation in a poem, aided by selections from the list of gift lines.

The results were impressive and rather moving, as one by one, each participant stood in front of 'Palm Sunday' and read out their first drafts. The course is launched! I've been planning it for months and thrilled with the results so far, but it never fails to amaze me how people can write to order in such a short time. Perhaps pressure is the key. Next week we are in the John Baldessari: Pure Beauty exhibition and I'm plotting writing games for his extraordinary new ocean installation 'Brain/Cloud', if Tate confirm we can keep the AV on that evening. This is also where we will hold the public reading at the end of the course on November 23rd. Book early if you'd like to come and hear the poems written on the course, entry is free but seating limited.

I've encouraged the poets to email me their works in progress but guess I'll have to respond on the hoof as next Tuesday I'm off to Tel Aviv to take part in the ninth Sha'ar International Poetry Festival, and I get back on Sunday night, just before Week 3 in the Pop Life exhibition, and after that I'm off to do lots of things in the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, so an exciting time ahead.

Tezcatlipoca & Guest blog for Bernardine Evaristo

This week I'm delighted to be a guest on Bernardine Evaristo's blog. Bernardine's latest novel Blonde Roots made the Orange Prize Longlist, then was shortlisted for the Orange Youth Panel Award, which it won. My guest blog is titled A Suitcase-full of Hummingbirds and explores the relationship between images and my poems and how I draw on my training as an artist in my poetry. This image from my guest post of a suitcase-full of hummingbirds in pyjamas prompted me to write my poem 'The Strait-Jackets' in The Zoo Father.




One source of imagery for me has been Mexico, both Frida Kahlo and Aztec mythology. I love this animation of Tezcatlipoca the Aztec night jaguar/ trickster god, twin to the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. I used Aztec mythology in my third collection The Huntress, all about my mother who suffered from severe mental illness and seemed to me as a child and teenager to be a powerful trickster, always changing faces, some quite terrifying. However, the fire/ice jaguar in this animation is a beautiful creature, and I hold on to the idea that there was some beauty within her under the terror.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Anselm Kiefer

I'm researching for my Poetry from Art course which starts at Tate Modern on 19th October, enthralled as always by some of the art, and hoping we can start in the Palm Sunday room by the German artist Anselm Kiefer which is in the permanent display Energy & Process on Level 5. There's not that much space in the Kiefer room and the group's large – 26 poets plus one Tate staff and myself. If they let us work in there I guess we'll set the chairs in two rows against the back wall, facing the installation. If we're not allowed then we could work in the room next door and walk in to write.

Anselm Kiefer is a deep-thinking, spiritual artist, and will be a stark contrast to the Pop Life: Art in a Material World exhibition where we'll be working in later weeks, and to the ironic cool of John Baldessari. But in each show there are pieces I am getting very excited about working with. For now, I'll leave these images to speak for themselves, but am collecting words towards writing about them, and more importantly, towards fun ways for the class to write about them. But whenever I peer into those vitrines behind the powerful palm presence, I see new misty shapes emerge.

For our last session, on Monday 23rd November, we'll be giving a public reading of poems written during this and previous courses, in the Pure Beauty: John Baldessari show on level 4, 6.45 to 8.45pm. Details will soon be up on the Tate Modern website, (click on Talks & Discussions and Courses & Workshops). If you'd like to come, early booking is essential as space is limited . Entry is free.

King's Lynn Poetry Festival

I arrived lunchtime at King's Lynn rail station after a lightning journey catching up with Moniza Alvi and Susan Wicks, to the traditional champagne reception on the platform. After I made a dash to the station loo (no working loos on the train) we refreshed ourselves courtesy of the always-welcoming-and-smiling festival director Tony Ellis. This was my second time at King's Lynn. Last time, I have a faint recollection there was also a bagpipe player. In the photo, from left to right: Richard McKane, Susan Wicks, John Hartley Williams, Annie Freud, Kit Wright, Moniza Alvi, PP, and Larissa Miller from Moscow. Also on the platform to meet us were our assorted hosts who would offer up their houses for lodging and ferry us about, and a group of volunteers who help Tony run the festival. I met my hosts, Maryanna and Roger, and later their dog Samba (a cross between a border collie and black Alsation) and their two hens Lupin and Clover. They warned me as I'd answered positive to "dog tolerant" that I'd drawn the short straw, but the moment I entered their home I felt thoroughly at ease and long-strawed. Roger would later show me his unique cabinet of antique bird eggs. But first, lunch at the director's house.

More champagne, which I declined, as my school visit loomed. Rob Elwes, who I'd already met on Twitter, attempted to whisk me away as I fumbled for the note where important info was jotted, such as name of school and teacher contact. By now Tony's house was heaving so we battled through the kitchen and made our escape, since my school was a fair distance, the exact whereabouts neither of us were entirely sure of, nor the age group, which turned out to be 13-year-olds. Quick flick through books for okay-poems-for-any-age en route. But I was prepared for all eventualities and had xeroxed pics to circulate with poems. The class's burning question was "Miss, are you famous?" And their answer to my question: "How many modern poets have you heard of?" was "Only you miss" – a sobering thought. One boy though has ambitions to become a poet and most had written some poems in class.

I kicked off with 'The Strait-Jackets', showed them the photo that sparked it (40 hummingbirds in a suitcase) and we discussed how I made the poem, what a metaphor was (silence), simile (they knew), and so on. Where were my rhymes, they wondered. The story of Ruschi transporting the birds by suitcase for air travel had them hooked. Further chat about travels, China, the Great Wall (ooh!), and did they know what "primeval" meant? "Of course! We've seen it on telly!" One mile high waterfalls, 2,000 feet high trees (how high is that Miss? Umm...) and out came my pics of atlas moths, in real-time eye-popping size so we knew what we were talking. Magical silence.


I settled into my lodgings, and dashed to the evening reading – Susan Wicks, who was here as stunningly original French poet Valérie Rouzeau's translator (but Valerie had gastric flu so didn't make it) read her translations and her own exquisite poems, Moniza (still recovering from gastric flu but luminous – 'Mermaid', 'Europa' and 'How the World Split in Two' never fail to thrill anew), and Michael Hulse who read the best poem about the grinding and creation of pigments I've ever heard.

It's one of those festivals where all the poets attend all each others' readings, so I had the pleasure of a first acquaintance with a number of new-to-me voices – Annie Freud (wow), Basque poet Eli Tolaretxipi, and one of my co-readers on Saturday afternoon, Lachlan Mackinnon. Must get that poem by Kit Wright about Roy Orbinson's 'Only the Lonely', just thinking of it has me giggling "not only the lonely, Roy, but simply the pimply, nearly the bleary and lastly the ghastly." I've also come away with an image which won't dislodge of a polar bear in John Hartley Williams' living-room during his Dove Cottage residency, and a very absurd dialogue with said bear a là Ionesco theatre. Two morning panel discussions (one of which was hijacked for a celebration as this is the 25th year of this splendid festival and Michael Hulse had secretly published an anthology for Tony with contributions from us all), and after-reading parties, have mingled in the imagination. I do remember a serious discussion with Michael about God, atheism and aliens in the early hours of Saturday morning and vivid recollections of his nine-week-old daughter Agnes.

My next festival is Warwick Words, where I'll be reading in the Kozi Bar at 11am on Sunday 4 October. After that I go to Israel's Sha'ar International Poetry Festival, and then Aldeburgh, and in between there's classes in Tate Modern with 26 writers, bang in the middle of the Pop Life and John Baldessari new shows.