Pascale Petit's Blog

High Wire by Catherine Yass: Poetry from Art at Tate Britain

2012-02-28T09:33:00.000Z

Our second session of my Poetry from Art course was at Tate Britain in the video installation High Wire by Catherine Yass. The video fills a wall but the first thing you notice is the sound of wind buffetting thirty-one-floor-high tower blocks in Glasgow's Red Road. It's such a cold sound that people could feel the blast on their backs as we sat in a circle in the gallery next to the room. The camera views are mainly ones from the camera attached to wire-walker Didier Pasquette's helmet as he inches out onto the cable strung between two of the buildings.

We saw the building opposite veer vertiginously down to the ground, shake then steady itself. And he's off, walking on air, all the time the gusts getting stronger. He walks like a ballet dancer, surely and at a fairly smart pace. A gull flies past him and he stops; his long metal pole dips too low one side. His mouth is moving and later we realise he's shouting that the winds have defeated him and the wire is moving too much. There is nothing he can do but go back and the slower backwards ballet seems impossible but must be done.

A gull flies past him just before he stops

After watching the sequence we talk about the history of wire walking or rope-dancing as it was once called, how some wire walkers perform domestic feats in the air, such as cooking a meal, almost as if they are making a home in the sky. I quote Jean Genet who wrote that the role of the wire walker is to bring his wire to life: 'you will perfect your leaps...not for your own glory, but so that a dead, voiceless steel wire at last may sing'.

Yass' project was set up by Artangel and they have published an excellent book with stills and essays about it where they said: 'We had this clear image of finding these streets in the sky'. Yass has written:

When I was a child I climbed out of my bedroom window, on to the roof and up to the top. It was about six in the morning. I sat astride the rooftop, exhilarated and frightened. Coming down was harder as the tiles kept slipping, making me lose my foothold.

High Wire is a dream of walking in the air, out into nothing. But it has an urban background and the high-rise buildings provide the frame and support. The dream of reaching the sky is also a modernist dream of cities in the air, inspired by a utopian belief in progress.

Every time I see Didier turning back I remember hearing him shout, from where I was standing on another rooftop, 'C'est pas possible!' But something was possible, he returned safely. And something emerged from the actuality of the walk, which was a moment when reality became more of a dream than the dream itself.

We then read Tony Hoagland's poem 'From This Height', and discussed how he opens up time into historical time, telescoping into the past and also outwards, broadening the view, from within the constrained space of the couple on "the eighth story of the world" as they hear the wind which "rubs itself against the walls of the condominium". I wanted the group to feel that they didn't have to restrict themselves to writing literally about the installation, to be inventive and open it up into any direction that served to make the poem matter for them.

Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern: Poetry from Art

2012-02-27T10:29:00.002Z

Last Monday my new Poetry from Art at Tate Modern course started in the Yayoi Kusama exhibition. Twenty six of us sat in her colourful recent paintings room (they're like a cross between outsider and Australian aboriginal art and exquisitively colourful and organic), between two installations: Infinity Mirrored Room: Filled with the Brilliance of Life and I'm Here, but Nothing. We read excerpts from Kusama's autobiography where she recounts her childhood 'hallucinations' and how these have served as obsessions for her art. We wondered if they were really hallucinations, or perhaps a glimpse into dimensions where the ego's boundaries are blurred. She says her ego was obliterated when the room she was sitting in when she was a child was taken over by polka dots and flowers, and in her parents' propagating fields where violets and pumpkins spoke to her. When her dog spoke Japanese and she barked back was she experiencing an extreme degree of negative capability?

The Infinity Room was everyone's favourite. The video doesn't do it justice. It's silent, and the endless mirrored reflections of the viewers are like dark matter between the constellations of her fluorescent dot-worlds. We went in ten at a time, parting the black curtain to step onto a path bordered by mirrored floors which turned out to be water (we could smell the chlorine). The illuminated dots pulse with waves of colour then suddenly go out and you have to stand there not daring to move, trusting they'll come back on.

We started the session by nonstop writing to the paintings which surrounded us, then everyone offered the group a gift phrase from their lines and they could incorporate one of these as well as a phrase from Kusama's poems into their response. The group then had ten minutes to write a short poem about anything in one of these three rooms that resonated for them. I brought in some short poems from Bunny by Selima Hill, as Kusama's work reminds me of the cut-glass-coloured voice of Hill's teenager who is haunted by a lodger.

The homework was to write a 'mirror' or 'specular' poem. This could respond to Kusama's Infinity Room or be about any subject. We read a superb example of the form by Julia Copus: 'The Back Seat of My Mother's Car', where the window at the back of the car works as the mirror hinge of the poem before it reverses back on itself. The second part of a 'mirror' poem is the same as the first half but the lines are in reverse order; only the punctuation can change.

Tonight we will travel to Tate Britain for our second session, to work with a brand new exhibit (in the twentieth century British art rooms) which stunned me when I went there last week for a recce, but I'm not saying what it is. Like the Infinity Room it will be a surprise.

Eyes of Mine Yayoi Kusama 2010, acrylic on canvas

Chinese Water: Yangzhou and the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony

2011-12-14T08:21:00.000Z

Our last weekend in Shanghai we caught a 330 kilometres an hour train to the city of Yangzhou, north west of Shanghai and across the vast Yangtze River. The train station was big as a Heathrow terminal. Yang Lian upgraded our first class tickets to super first with just one word whispered in the conductor's ear, so we settled in the sleek, private, dragon-head of the train and got to work. George Szirtes and I had one hour to write our translations of the Qing Dynasty 'Poem for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony' by Wang Hang – a devil of a quatrain in strict classical form, with a flood of info stuffed into the first two lines and what boiled down to two very short last lines in English. The original has seven characters per line and a strict tonal rhyme scheme. We did not yet have the literal translation, so most of the hurtling of the train ride was taken up with Lian giving us his version of the gist.

We would have one hour for 'polishing' in the hotel before going out to banquet with our hosts, then an early rise to read our efforts at the 9am ceremony. I'm a dedicated free verser, so my failure to meet the challenge wasn't important, as long as I tried to produce something and made the gesture.

Shortly after dawn, we settled into our gaudy gondola and set off across Slender West Lake, the subject of the poem, which is about its naming, and warmed our hands on porcelain mugs of hot green tea with cozy lids, as banks of willow, bamboo and lily grass slid past and a girl played the zither. Rainbow bridges and curly pavilion roofs with tiles like dragon scales came into view; the water was photogenic as it always is even though it's often not itself and famous here for reflecting a fairy moon. We disembarked on a dreamlike lawn where I imagined there might only be a small huddle of poets reciting to each other. People were gathering beyond the bonsai tubs, but surely nothing to do with us.

Our hosts led us towards them and we stood in a line facing the crowd. Beautiful slender girls in purple costumes gave us sprigs of lily grass and scented red silk pouches to hold. Then a round table materialised decked with familiar glasses and I knew that a toast was imminent with the white liquor baijiu, which, thankfully, must be downed in one gulp. Perhaps the baijiu arrived after the readings – it's all a blur now – though I do remember that I had to read my attempt first, relieved that none of our hosts would understand it. Here it is, with some later amendments:

Poem for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony

The willow leaves trail to where lily grass yellows,
the fang of flying geese and arched bridge paint echoes.
Here in this crucible where the sun's molten gold flames
we should call our own haven Slender Western Lake.

And click here for George Szirtes' translation, in his blog. Later, he read his haunting sonnet 'Water', which begins "The hard beautiful rules of water..." and includes the magical line "That it shall arch its back in the sun". I read my poem 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', which was translated into Chinese by both Lian and Kaiyu, so there was a distinct watery theme to our visit. As we only had a few of our poems translated during the fortnight, I heard George's 'Water' many times, that cat-like back-arching echoed by rainbow bridges. From our dragon-boat I spied waterfalls and wished we could stop to see them up close, though I suspected they were man-made.

Last time I was in China, in 2007, I flew from Shanghai to Beijing and from Beijing to Chengdu, and saw just how Shan-Shui China is with the almost continuous vistas of mountains, lakes and rivers that unfolded beneath my window. Yet the two mountains I climbed then – Huangshan (in Anhui Province) and Qingcheng (in Sichuan Province) – were both extremely wild and extremely tamed, with steps carved into every slope and sheer wall. On the summits of Huangshan there were otherworldly cloud- and mist-seas floating between the striated rock cliffs, there were also hordes of people squeezed onto the narrow paths of each jagged peak. Which reminds me of Victor Hugo's opening chapter to Notre Dame of Paris, where crowds surge along the streets, bridges and squares of medieval Paris like floodwater, as if humanity is alien as water and water is human as home.

A lunar arch for viewing the Five Pavilions Bridge

Many pleasure boats ply the Slender Western Lake

Our dragon driven gondola

A boat and a mirror-boat

A crowd gathers behind the bonsai tubs for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony when Wang Hang's poem is recited and we add our translations

Trailing willows like being behind a waterfall

Is this tree painted or real?

Watery zither music on the boat

These beautiful slender musicians were waiting for us in an upper room of one of the many stately homes we visited

Portraits of poets with beautiful musicians, from left to right: George Szirtes; Zi Chuan, editor of Yangzte River Poetry Review and our host; Xiao Kaiyu; Tang Xiaodu eminent critic and poet from Beijing.

Upstairs in the daughter's quarters of a stately home, light on the floor

The daughter's bathtub, for light-bathing.

The Daughter's Bedroom

These rocks are real but glued together. In another part of this garden there was a grotto retreat, complete with rock chaise longue, stone table, bookshelves and toilet!

We cross the road back to our minibus

The evening ends with another banquet followed by calligraphy. Here is Xiao Kaiyu drawing the ceremonial poem on rice paper, watched by George and Clarissa.

Chinese Water: Jinze village near Shanghai, 2011

2011-12-11T06:38:00.001Z

George Szirtes and Clarissa Upchurch on the water stage in 'The Big House', our mystery home for the night

Although I've just spent two weeks based in Shanghai, what I'll blog about first is the watery village of Jinze. Jinze (pronounced Gin Zeu– with long tone descending to rhyme with French 'peu') is about 80 miles from Shanghai but calm, rural and built around meanders of a river or a canal. Where exactly it is is still a mystery, as it was a late night mystery tour arranged by our gentle Chinese poet friend Xiao Kaiyu, to fill in the blank in our very sketchy 'programme'. Even Yang Lian doesn't know where it is, nor google, so it remains a dream of water, rain and rainbow bridges without sides that can be slipped on and over. I spent most of the journey trying to pronounce the name.

We arrived at night, and I slept in a vast room with ensuite jacuzzi and power shower room and an ensuite loo with heated toilet seat that raised its lid on approach. I woke at 5am and worked on my translations at the large trestle table before the windows, while waiting for dawn. When I opened the curtains I found I was next to a wide waterway swirling past my huge, wood-filigreed window. It had rained all night and the water seemed almost under the floor, and I wondered what happened during floods.

But it was a sunny day, so George Szirtes, Clarissa Upchurch and myself walked along the river/canal and over the numerous ancient arched bridges over it. At times the waterways forked. The complex we slept in was itself built between water, with water channels outside each door. We visited a Taoist temple and a Buddhist temple built around a 650 year old gingko tree strung with red lanterns. I think it was the first time I relaxed since I'd arrived in China, away from the cacophony of horns outside our Fudan University hotel.

After clambering over many bridges and ambling along narrow lanes of the village, and Yang Lian had lured George onto a dragon boat, we had lunch and were joined by Kaiyu, who whisked us away to what I thought was going to be a stroll in the vegetable gardens. And this is where the mystery tour became surreal, a Russian doll of surrealism was slowly opened behind the willow and bamboo paths. Hall after hall of exquisitely designed galleries were unlocked for us, their floorboards pastel shades of woods from the factories they had been reconstructed from. They contained antique furniture, craft objects, books, dolls, gourds, sedan chairs, wardrobes, puppets, emperors' beds, seals, and happiest of all – textiles. Heavily embossed silk robes for Buddhas, more 3D than embroidery. Locked in one endless hall were a mother and daughter of the Miao southwest China ethnic group, weaving their sumptuous cloth, silver in their hair. I'd come across them before on Qingcheng Mountain in Sichuan Province. Up more stairs to an attic where designer cloaks were being woven from silk organza and a raffia-like wool. Clarissa tried one on and it suited her perfectly.

We were led out onto terraces with views of the waterways and their bridges. Kaiyu pointed to a room where he comes to write and we were invited to return for a writing retreat, an invitation I almost took up, before I remembered how far it was from home, this land of water like woven silk, of silk like woven water, yellow gingko leaves strewn on the ground like confetti.

So back to the endless fifty-floor towers of Shanghai, via a visit to one of the founders of the Jinze Craft Museum, the quiet ex-artist Mr Hu, his champagne coloured poodles and talk of his friendship with Prince Charles and the royalty who have visited the Mystery for architectural design tips, before a dash for the rush-hour subway where we swayed with our luggage for hours before ascending at the Centre for the Oriental Arts, to another gift from Kaiyu – a concert by the fusion group Amrta, almost all women, and their spellbinding music. In my first row seat I waited and waited to hear the Erhu, a kind of two stringed fiddle, as it features in a poem of Kaiyu's I was translating, a powerful poem about his mother's ghost. I was not disappointed. It sounded hoarse, primeval and sad, and I can still hear it like the sound of water that has dried up.

Entrance to my bedroom was over a little bridge over the water channel

George Szirtes, Clarissa Upchurch and I, outside the breakfast room of 'The Big House'

The slippery sideless bridge!

A shrine to a village elder in the Taoist temple

My favourite dragon

650 year old gingko tree in Buddhist temple courtyard

cloud motif around dragon enclosure, gingko leaves inside

Yang Lian and George in the 'dragon' boat steered by a woman

Clarissa in the bridal sedan chair

Hidden meanings in Chinese children's clothing and accessories etc

3D embossed monster on Buddha cloak in museum

Miao mother and daughter weavers locked in museum hall

The two large wood filigree windows on ground floor were where I slept, the jacuzzi bathroom at the end on the left.

View of waterways from Jinze Craft Museum

Images of Poetry from Art launch at Tate Modern

2011-10-31T08:11:00.000Z

Here are some official photos of the Poetry from Art pamphlet launch on 24th September 2011, taken by the Tate photographer Ana Escobar. I particularly love the ones bathed in Miró cerulean, so apt, as Miró's triptych Blue I, II, III inspired many poems in the anthology. The pamphlet is now for sale in the Tate Modern bookshop for £4.95. (Please do not use any of these images without permission from Tate.) The next Poetry from Art course starts on Monday 20th February. Bookings will open when the course goes up on the Tate website over Christmas.

One of the readers Jac Cattaneo in front of the slide of Joan Miró's Blue II.
Copyright Tate, photographed by Ana Escobar, Poetry from Art book launch 2011.

Audience of 130 in the East Room waiting for the readings to start. Marko Daniel, Convener of Adult Programmes and co-curator of the Miró exhibition (in the black suit standing by far window), opened the event.

I introduced the anthology and the twenty readers who had attended my summer course.
Copyright Tate, photographed by Ana Escobar, Poetry from Art book launch 2011.

View from the East Room over the Thames after nightfall
Copyright Tate, photographed by Ana Escobar, Poetry from Art book launch 2011.

'My Father's City': new poem in Guernica magazine

2011-10-23T17:53:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted that Guernica magazine has published my new poem 'My Father's City' in their October issue guest edited by the wonderful poet Brian Turner. You can read the poem here and there's also an audio clip of me reading it. The poem is from a sequence I'm currently working on, with the city of Paris and my father as its dual theme, twelve years on from the father poems of my second collection The Zoo Father which featured Amazonian imagery.

Here's one of the chimera on the south tower of Notre-Dame, which overlooks the Notre-Dame hotel where he lived for a few years. The hotel is on the corner of the Quai St Michel just under the devil's shoulder.

Rue du Pot de Fer, Paris, September 2011

2011-10-10T08:02:00.000+01:00

This is the street I stayed in for two weeks this summer, researching for my novel and sixth poetry collection. I was on the fifth floor under the roofs, so it was quiet, unless I opened the skylight which faced onto the street. This accordian player played every night, always dressed in that suit and white spats. My flat faced the back, with a view of the Pantheon and rooftops of the Quartier Latin. I had a terrace with a young aspen which seemed to have rooted in thin air and which swished in the breeze, and a panoramic view of the skyscape which made me feel lonely but light-headed, a good mood for writing.

George Orwell lived at 6 Rue du Pot de Fer, just a few doors away, when he wrote Down and Out in Paris and London, but it's more affluent now. This narrow cobbled street is just off the Rue Mouffetard which leads onto Rue Descartes, where Verlaine lived. Opposite the house where he died (now a restaurant) is a pub Le Bateau Ivre. And a few steps further down is a little green patch and a wall with the poem 'Passerby' by Yves Bonnefoy, next to a fresco of the Blue Philosopher's Tree by Pierre Alechinsky.

My father lived just round the corner from here the last few years of his life, in Rue Clovis, in a tiny studio flat in an apartment block right next to the oldest city wall of Paris, built in the reign of King Philip Augustus. Before then, my father lived in various hotels facing Notre-Dame, including Les Argonautes in Rue de la Huchette and the Hôtel Notre-Dame on the Quai St Michel, where he would have been overlooked by the gargoyles. And before that? Marseille, Lyon, the Algerian mountains – a shifting life under an assortment of names appropriate for a vanished person.

The Poetry from Art pamphlet is launched!

2011-09-27T19:04:00.001+01:00

Last Saturday was the launch of the second Poetry from Art at Tate Modern pamphlet anthology. 21 poets who attended my six-week summer course read their poems: one from the anthology and one other written on the course, or on previous courses this year. I was quite nervous – there were beginners as well as advanced writers, and a few had never read before – but I needn't have worried. They all did well and the capacity audience was most appreciative. I reckon there were about 140 in the audience, and a great atmosphere. The last reader, Karen McCarthy Woolf, gave a vote of thanks, then Bea Colley popped out with an enormous bouquet!

Though it's the readers I want to celebrate, and especially the way the less experienced writers among them good-humouredly accepted the email editing process we went through with their poems. They also had feedback from their peers during the course, when we would cluster into small groups to offer constructive criticism. The anthology is now for sale only in the Tate Modern bookshop. The next Poetry from Art course will be 20 Feb – 26 March 2012. It will go up and open for bookings on the Tate website around Christmas.

This first photo of the event was taken by Anne Welsh, who has attended all my Tate courses for six years! The second photo of her reading was taken by Marc Mathison. It was hard to take pictures of the readings because I was projecting a large slideshow of the artworks that inspired each poem to the left of the readers, and we couldn't include those in public photos. The evening was dominated by Joan Miró's fabulous triptych Blue I, II, II so we were bathed in a cerulean glow.

Works by Ana Mendieta (Blood and Feathers #2) and Lamia Joreige (Objects of War) also featured frequently, in contrast to the meditative blues. Our venue was the East Room on Level 7 at Tate Modern, with panoramic views of the Thames and London and the evening was opened with a very warm and welcoming speech by Marko Daniel, Convener of Adult Porgrammes and co-curator of the Miró exhibition.

Karen McCarthy Woolf, the last reader, gives a vote of thanks. Photo credit Anne Welsh.

Anne Welsh reading her two poems. Photo credit Marc Mathison.

The bouquet divided into two jugs.

And here are copies of the pamphlet anthology, a suitably Miró blue (and black).

Preview of a pamphlet anthology: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern 2011

2011-09-18T18:55:00.001+01:00

Next Saturday, 24th September, will be the launch of the pamphlet anthology I have just edited: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern 2011. Here is a preview of two poems from the pamphlet (scroll down).

Participants in Tate Modern's Poetry from Art courses, led by Pascale Petit, present a pamphlet of their work, including poems after Miró and responses to the permanent displays. The readings will be illustrated with a slideshow and opened by Marko Daniel who is Convenor of Adult Programmes and co-curator of the Miró show. The anthology will be for sale that evening then afterwards in the Tate Modern bookshop.

Saturday 24 September 2011 18.45–21.00
Free entry, readings, great views and wine.
Tate Modern Level 7 East Room
Bankside, London SE1 9TG

Free, no booking necessary
Tel: 020 7887 8888 visiting.modern@tate.org.uk
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/coursesworkshops/24136.htm

The contributors are: Karen McCarthy Woolf, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Jac Cattaneo, Wei-Lyn Loh, Margaret Beston, Bea Colley, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Seraphima Kennedy, Marc Mathison, Ali Thurm, Elizabeth Horsley, Mary Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri, Natasha Morgan, Michael Berg, Christine Voge, Ipsita Sinha and Laura-Jane Foley

Elizabeth Horsley's poem is a response to a memorable session we spent in one of the octagonal rooms of the Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape exhibition, immersed in the glow of the meditative Blue I, II, II triptych. Miró's paintings are poems in themselves so it isn't surprising that his paintings generated many poems.

Elizabeth Horsley
The wardrobe is painted blue inside
after Blue I, II, III by Joan Miró

The wardrobe is painted blue inside
and when I open it
the mirrored doors
welcome me in,
channel every side of me through.
I could step inside
let that orange silk dress
swish against me
like a swarm of butterflies;
I could be part of it all –
a glass box full of kingfishers,

but I would rather be outside
dressed in a long shift
of Madonna-blue cotton,
lying in the summer grass
looking at the sky.
I would rather float
in the Hebridean sea
and let the seals watch me
as they watched me once before.
If I could lie in that blue
that would be enough.

In the autumn term, when Ana Mendieta's video Blood and Feathers #2 was on display in the Energy and Process wing, we watched Mendieta perform a ritual on a riverbank, which consisted of her pouring blood over herself then rolling onto white feathers and holding her arms out like wings. This inspired poems about rites of passage and ritual dress and the following is Natasha Morgan's personal response:

Natasha Morgan
On Her Very Last Day
after Blood and Feathers #2 by Ana Mendieta

When my mother lay
in her hospital bed
on her very last afternoon in November
six years ago,

when the sun broke through the plastic strips
that layered the windows
of that suburban room,
promising one last golden moment,

when I slipped outside
into her garden, for roses,
with secateurs in hand, for the pink roses
to take them in their full glory

for the very last time,

when I returned with my
arms full, they fell all around, all around,
because she had not waited for them
or for me.

And so I sat with her,
both of us still, but she more still than me.
And I washed her body and edged her stiffening limbs
into her white cotton nightdress, fresh that day

and spread a white cashmere shawl
to cover her right down to her feet,
and gave her my socks
for the journey.

And when all was done, and well done, and done in good time
I sat with her in the smell of the roses
that rose around us as the sun went down.

Return to the Ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes

2011-09-15T10:47:00.000+01:00

It's fourteen years since I first visited the Ménagerie in the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, when I was writing The Zoo Father. I used to go there every day then, and first went back last year. There are not so many big cats now – no black jaguar, no pumas, no lions. But there is a snow leopard, as there was then, in the Fauverie. No English word quite captures the French word 'Fauverie'; I've seen it translated as 'big cat house', but fauve means wild beast. In a way it's good there aren't so many big cats because the cages are too small as this is the second oldest zoo in the world, an old-fashioned one. There's more conservation work going on now and the zoo was full of young animals born in the spring or earlier this summer. I saw a young yak, and a Przewalski foal, but the mother was still with her doted companion, a nanny goat, which I must confess last year I mistook for her rather shaggy foal until the horns came into view!

As before, I searched for one of my favourites, the Amazonian king vulture. He's the gaudy headed one below. Twelve years ago there was a baby king vulture in the nursery, in a baby's playpen. As I was wandering around, trying to see as much as possible before closing time, I heard a maniacal laugh and made for the source of it: two laughing kookaburras. They set the macaws off who screeched at each other and started to do acrobatics on their bars. The whole zoo at that point seemed to wake up and become vibrantly alert, disregarding the humans. It gave me a headache as I dashed from one cage to another watching them.

I returned to the little farm to feed the goats prickly leaves. They licked my hands and I stroked their bristly heads and horns. No keepers were there and families were feeding them crackers and bread. One of my favourite paths is along the owl cages. I love reading their names in French as much looking at them. The eagle owl is 'grand-duc'. The great grey owl looked like a ghost from a Max Ernst forest and the snow owl was still there, though I suppose he's a new one. I particularly love his name 'harfang des neiges', though still prefer the English 'snow owl', and the word 'owl' to the French words for owl, good as they are: chouette, harfang, hibou, effraie (barn-owl, screech owl, fright).

The king vulture. His mate was eating a carcass on the floor.

The yak mother and son

Can't remember what this creature was but the three of them were very busy eating rats

The przeswalski mare with her lifelong companion, a goat.

Great grey owl

The kookaburras get going

The macaws listen

and join in

Nile croc

Feeding the goats

Le Paresseux – sloth, in his new rainforest enclosure

Photos of the Marché aux Oiseaux in Paris

2011-09-12T19:58:00.000+01:00

One of the things that drew me to write in Paris a second time this summer was the discovery that there is a Marché aux Oiseaux on the Île de la Cité, just behind the esplanade of Notre Dame. It's been there since 1808 and is on Sundays. The rest of the week it's a flower market. Some of the cages have one bird in, others are sadly crammed with budgies, quails, lovebirds and cockatiels.

There were kakarikis – red-crowned parakeets, turtle doves, Japanese sparrows, African greys and many more, even rabbits and three particularly cute black and white rats. They all made quite a noise among the flowers and accessories, the vistas of hanging empty cages for sale. Some birds seemed treated with care, many not. I was there on a research mission but what a feast of colour! I witnessed a few sales. A sudden squawk and a hand was thrust into a cage then out, a tiny flurry of canary feathers dispatched into a paper box and one yellow feather left floating down.

Hand-feeding the Notre Dame sparrows

2011-09-08T10:18:00.002+01:00

Every time I stay in Paris there are new surprises. One of the highlights of last week's visit was hand-feeding the sparrows in front of Notre Dame. The box hedges on the parvis are bustling with them, mostly juveniles – their breasts and wings still downy. Every day I was drawn back. The first day I just watched as two regulars hand-fed them and a few tourists joined in. The second day one of the men gave me a handful of birdseed and I stood up on the low concrete wall around the privet and held out my hand. I waited, and quite soon a young female sparrow hopped onto my fingers. Her claws grasped me and she bent down and picked up a seed with her yellow and fawn beak. It took her quite a while to crack and eat it and I managed to glimpse her peach tongue. She stayed on my hand for half an hour, batting off all intruders by raising her wings and fiercely beating them, cheeping at the same time.

The second day I had up to three sparrows feeding together, some fully grown males as well as females and juveniles. The males have darker colouring around their heads, black and brown markings. By this time I'd been to the Marché aux Oiseaux and bought some small wild-bird grains. On the third day (I would pass there on my evening walk after a day's writing) I had six sparrows feeding together, males and females. At one point pigeons landed and starlings. That day I fed the moineaux for an hour and a half, as I was leaving the next morning, to return to London where sparrows are scarce. These pictures were taken on my iPhone with my free hand, though the last six-sparrow day I didn't take any as I wanted to just concentrate on the experience. It was the same with Notre Dame, every time I looked at the cathedral, especially the facade and towers, I saw more. I looked and looked harder.

The young female who stayed on my hand for half an hour the first day

Here you can see the beginning of the sending-off display, as one bird starts to raise her wings to beat them at the other.

The man with the black hat is one of the two regulars. They come every day, all day. The other one told me he comes because it makes him feel better when things aren't going well.

The Languedoc, August 2011

2011-08-23T16:48:00.001+01:00

I have been visiting the Languedoc Rousillion since I was a child, when my mother bought a steep terraced vineyard near Lodève, with two shepherds' stone huts and a deep banked stream in the sous-bois. We used to camp in the stone huts, after the fire brigade had smoked out the hornets' nests. There are no vines left now but those childhood summers have drawn me back again and again to this wild land with its limestone moors and gorges.

This August, B and I rented a house up the remotest hill of the Orb Valley for one week. The evening we arrived the snowy tree crickets' chirrs filled the house from every window, a sound much like moonlight if it had a voice, more otherworldly than the daytime cicadas, another sound I love. Ours was the last house of the hamlet of Le Lau and the surrounding woods are wild boar hunting grounds. One morning I heard the dogs and hunters capturing a boar; its shrieks gave me a migraine. At night I heard genets, which sound like a cross betweeen a cat and a fox. I saw one darting across the car park when we visited the Gorge de l'Hèric, spotted and with a long bushy tail. On our last night, we heard a boar snuffling and grunting just a few feet away from us as we sat on the unfenced terrace. It was enthralling to be so close but after standing closer to peer at him (he could have charged!) we decided to retreat to safety.

To get to the Gorge du Tarn, Gorge de la Jonte (and its vultures) and the Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux, B had to drive up the Pas de l'Escalette. This is a spectacular pass from the Languedocien plain to the Causses (limestone moors) of the most southerly Massif Central range. The A75 autoroute recently replaced the old A9 road, which we both remember, and that, in its time, replaced an iron ladder for passengers to disembark from their carriages, climb up the cliff, then continue in another carriage. Now, there is a series of tunnels that cuts through then winds round the Steps of the Ladder. It's only this time that I realised just how much this landscape paved the way for my obsession with Venezuela's Lost World, with its cliff-bordered sky-islands. The causses and gorges were the prototype, so that when I journeyed to the Lost World I recognised it as home, though it plainly wasn't, and is actually hostile in its remoteness and grandeur.

View from the lane above Le Lau across the Orb Valley, early morning

View from Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux

Village of Trèves on the road to Gorge du Tarn

Gorge du Tarn

The medieval and higgledy hamlet of Le Lau from the kitchen door

The sudden storm from the living-room window, thunder echoed around the hills and the wind was wild!

The house from the lane to Le Lau

Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux on the Causse Noir

Chaos of Montpellier le Vieux is just like the tops of Venezuela's plateaus, with eroded rock shapes, though these are limestone and those are quartzite sandstone.

A typical panorama

Vineyards in the Orb Valley, on our way to the Forest of War Veteran Writers

Pas de l'Escalette

Pas de l'Escalette tunnels, no photo does this pass justice. It emerges onto the Larzac Causse, which leads to the Millau viaduct which is 750 metres high and leads to the upper gorges of the Tarn and Jonte.

Research trip to Paris then Languedoc

2011-07-24T19:52:00.001+01:00

This Irish pub Finnegans Wake is at 9 rue des Boulangers, about 3 minutes' walk from the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris's Quartier Latin. I have often walked past it down the steep, narrow, cobbled old street, when I used to visit my father and on my way to the Jardin, and chuckled at the pub's name. Later, my father told me that the first place he lived with my mother was in a two-room tiny apartment above it, and that they were happy there. By one of those strange coincidences, I came across a cheap studio room available for holiday rentals directly opposite where they used to live, in 10-12, on the opposite side of the narrow street, also on the first floor. So I've rented it and will stay there one week on 7th August, to research for my novel and sixth collection.

This is only possible because the Society of Authors awarded me an Authors' Foundation grant. During a hectic teaching week since I heard the news, I have been making plans and bookings. After Paris, I will spend a week in a remote house at the top of a tiny hamlet in the Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Languedoc, where I hope to do some more writing as well as exploring.

A Poem for Frida Kahlo's Birthday: Diego on My Mind

2011-07-06T10:56:00.002+01:00

Frida Kahlo was born on 6th July 1907 and died in 1954 at the age of 47. Here is a poem from What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo to celebrate her birthday. She often painted herself with a portrait of Diego on her forehead, as in this painting Diego on My Mind. Here, she is speaking to him and perhaps to herself as she used to feel very alone when he was out with his celebrity mistresses.

Diego on My Mind

Today I chose the ceremonial huipil

with a lace cobweb framing my face.

I have made a fine bed for you

with the white frills of my Tehuana headdress.

And on the counterpane of my brow
           just where the pillows would rest
I have painted your portrait.

All day you keep me company
as I work each gauze bud
into a stiff flower.

You whisper encouragements from the mirror,
nestling deeper into my forehead.

But remember, when you take
          María Félix
                    Paulette Goddard
                              or my sister

to your dirty yellow hotel room,
they lie on my eyes.

My nose smells them.
My mouth stays closed. Every love-cry

is a silk tendril
          quivering in my silent house.

Tomorrow I'm going to Cardiff to the Wales Book of the Year ceremony, particularly thrilled to have What the Water Gave Me shortlisted for this Welsh prize as I grew up there so it feels like my adopted country has adopted me. The UK edition is available from the Welsh publisher Seren and the US edition (just published) from Black Lawrence Press. I'll be giving an illustrated reading from the book at Pallant House gallery in Chichester, 6pm on Thursday 28 July, during their Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera exhibition which opens 9th July. Can't wait to see it!

Touching sculptures at Tate Modern for Poetry from Art

2011-07-05T11:25:00.001+01:00

For our penultimate session of Poetry from Art at Tate Modern the curator of the Tate access project Marcus Dickey Horley gave us a Touch Tour in the States of Flux galleries. Usually, no sighting person is allowed to touch the sculptures, as Marcus provides the tour for blind and visually impaired visitors, but he requested special dispensation for us. Only the sturdiest sculptures can be touched and then it's through lint-free gloves, but imagine if you could feel Rodin's The Kiss. We also felt Umberto Boccioni's futuristic machine-man Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Raymond Duchamp-Villon's animal-machine hybrid Large Horse.

After the Touch Tour and Marcus' fascinating insights into the sculptures, we read the adulterous kissers Francesca and Paolo's tragic story from Dante's Inferno (in Ciaran Carson's translation – half terza rima, half ballad). Their lips never quite meet in the Inferno and they are destined to stay frozen apart but tantalizingly close throughout eternity in the second circle of hell, after Francesca's husband murdered them as they were about to embrace. In the marble they do seem to have just about started, though you have to crane your neck in to see their lips. The sculpture was daringly frank for its day (1904), a curious blend of classicism and eroticism. We also read 'The Race' by Sharon Olds as a study of a poem about speed, for those who wanted to write from Boccioni's striding figure or the leaping war horse.

You can read poems from this session and the rest of the term, in the Miró exhibition, the Rothko room, and Lamia Joreige's Objects of War, in the pamphlet anthology Poetry from Art at Tate Modern 2011, to be launched at 6.45pm on Saturday 24 September, in the East Room at Tate Modern. Entry will be free, and there'll be readings, wine and great views. Please join us if you're in town.

The Kiss Auguste Rodin, 1901-4 Pentelican marble

My trip to New Mexico, 1-7 May 2011

2011-07-03T17:40:00.004+01:00

It was snowing when I arrived in Albuquerque airport on May 1st, and by the time the shuttle arrived to take me to Santa Fe, where I was met by the poets Veronica Golos and Andrea Watson, a blizzard obscured the longed-for views on the winding road to Taos in the mountains. When Veronica took me for a hike in the Rio Grande Gorge, snowdrifts still flanked our path. But within a few days the weather switched to dry desert heat. Here are some pics taken in Taos, at the Taos Pueblo, and in the Rio Grande Gorge. Warm thanks to the fabulous poet Veronica Golos for inviting me into her home, to her and Andrea for their hard work organising a reading and workshop, and to Arthur Sze for a super meal in Santa Fe on my way back to Albuquerque and on to the next leg of my tour, California.

Also at the end you'll see a strange dried creature in a small Taos museum. It's a baby shark used by the Mexican Cora tribe as a charm against evil spirits. It was caught on a moonlit night during the primal equinox at the precise moment that a cloud passed over the moon. The method by which it was dried did not include any metal instruments and is a closely guarded secret.

What the Water Gave Me now published in US by Black Lawrence Press

2011-06-26T17:09:00.001+01:00

For anyone in the US who'd like to buy my collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo, I'm delighted to announce that it's now published by Black Lawrence Press and available to buy from their website for $14.

What the Water Gave Me was first published by Seren in 2010. It was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, Wales Book of the Year and was a Book of the Year in the Observer. There's more information about it and sample poems on my website.

Redwoods and Hummingbirds, Santa Cruz

2011-06-14T11:16:00.000+01:00

The last reading of my US tour was a return visit to Poetry Santa Cruz where I was adopted as an honorary local when I read my poem 'The University among the Redwoods, Santa Cruz' from my fourth collection The Treekeeper's Tale. The morning before I flew home, my hosts Tom and Ellen took me to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. We then had a picnic in a hummingbird arboretum in the grounds of the uni, right in front of the hummers' favourite Grevillea bush, where dozens of Anna's Hummingbirds were doing their dive-bombing displays into the ruby clusters. It was heaven! The birds were too fast to photograph but here are my shots of the coast redwoods earlier that morning. I wrote the poem, which is part of a sequence, when I last read for Dennis Morton at Poetry Santa Cruz in 2005 and you can read it on the Santa Cruz News.

Judyth Piazza chats with Pascale Petit on Cinco de Mayo

2011-05-05T19:05:00.000+01:00

Today is Cinco de Mayo, Frida Day! To celebrate it, Judyth Piazza, host of the American Perspective Radio Program, has interviewed me for the Student Operated Press. You can hear the 15 minute interview here:

Judyth Piazza chats with Pascale Petit, Author of "What the Water Gave Me"

It was snowing when I arrived in New Mexico last Sunday but now the sky is the deepest sapphire and sacred Taos mountain is the only white peak left. I have seen robins building their nests and heard a nightingale-wren in nearby Rio Grande Gorge. The houses here are rich cinnamon shades of adobe earth against the blue, so they seem to melt into the landscape.

I will be reading from What the Water Gave Me at the Metta Theater tonight (1470 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, El Prado, New Mexico 87529) at 7.30pm. If you live nearby please come and say hello and chat about your experience of Frida after the reading when there'll be time for informal audience discussion.

My south west tour continues in LA this Sunday 8th May when I'll read with Mariano Zaro at the Ruskin Art Center at 3pm (800 S. Plymouth) and on Monday 9th May for Moonday Poetry at Village Books at 7.30pm (1049 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades), when I'll be reading with the wonderful Lois P Jones, and with the visual accompaniment of Frida's paintings. My last event is at Bookshop Santa Cruz at 7.30pm on Tuesday 10 May with Rebecca Foust (1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz).

US launch readings from What the Water Gave Me (Black Lawrence Press)

2011-04-10T15:54:00.001+01:00

This April the US edition of What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo is being published by Black Lawrence Press. I'll be flying to New York on Wednesday to do four readings there (see below for details) and one upstate in the Catskill Mountains. The first week I'll be in a friend's place in Tribeca, spend Easter weekend at the Bright Hill Center at Treadwell, then stay near Riverside Drive. I'm really looking forward to returning to NY, but I'll also be taking my notebooks with me to work on my writing in between gigs – heaven!

On 1st May I fly to New Mexico to do a reading and workshop, and after that, LA for two more readings, and I'll end up at Santa Cruz on 10 May to do a return reading for Dennis Morton's Poetry Santa Cruz. I wish the California part wasn't so rushed. New Mexico will be an adventure as I've never been there before. It will be good to see old friends and make new ones, get acquainted with their poems. Please come if you are near any of these places and free, and do say hello. I'm very touched by all the dear friends who have organised these events for me and helped to make this tour happen.

Launch readings from What the Water Gave Me (Black Lawrence Press, April 2011)

Bowery Poetry Club, NYC 6pm Saturday 16 April

Bertha Rogers and Pascale Petit

308 Bowery, NYC

mail@bowerypoetry.com Phone: 212 614 0505 http://www.bowerypoetry.com

Juniper, Brooklyn, 5.30pm Sunday 17 April

Margot Farrington & Pascale Petit

Juniper, 112 Berry Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Bright Hill Center, Catskills, NY, 7pm Thursday 21 April

Djelloul Marbrook & Pascale Petit with illustrated reading

94 Church St, PO Box 193, Treadwell, NY 13846

wordthur@stny.rr.com Phone: +1 607 829 5055

http://www.brighthillpress.org

Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, 7pm Thursday 28 April

Sally Bliumis-Dunn, William Olsen & Pascale Petit

143 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY 11215

events@communitybookstore.net Phone: (718) 783 3075

http://www.communitybookstore.net/events

Cornelia St Café, NYC, 6pm Saturday 30 April

Mark Doty, Melissa Stein & Pascale Petit

29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014

info@corneliastreetcafe.com Phone: (212) 989 9319

http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com

Metta Theatre, Taos, New Mexico, Thursday 5 May

Veronica Golos, Andrea Watson & Pascale Petit reading for Cinco de Mayo

1470 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, El Prado, New Mexico 87529

Ruskin Art Club, Los Angeles 3pm Sunday 8 May

Mariano Zaro & Pascale Petit reading

800 S. Plymouth, Los Angeles, CA, 90005

Email: Ekduende@cox.net Phone: (323) 755-3530

Moonday Poetry at Village Books, LA, 7.30pm Monday 9 May

Lois P. Jones & Pascale Petit (illustrated reading)

1049 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades, California

pero@earthlink.net Phone: (310) 454 4063

http://www.moondaypoetry.com

Poetry Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, 7.30pm Tuesday 10 May

Rebecca Foust and Pascale Petit

Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz

info@poetrysantacruz.org Phone: (831) 464-8983

http://www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern online anthology 2011

2011-04-05T11:24:00.002+01:00

Last night was the final session in our Poetry from Art Shaping Poems spring course at Tate Modern and was a celebration reading. An online anthology of poems from this term is now up on the Tate website. This is a selection of twenty-three poems from many the participants wrote in the galleries during five classes, responding to Gabriel Orozco's Obit Series and Lintels, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds, Do Ho Suh's Staircase III and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass.

Many of the poets read their Sunflower Seeds poems last night, as a mark of solidarity, as we had so enjoyed working with Ai Weiwei's field of sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall and we are very concerned that the Chinese authorities won't disclose his whereabouts since police detained him at Beijing airport on 3 April. Some new poems after Do Ho Suh's ethereal red staircase also emerged, even though we'd only worked with that installation the previous week and this turned out to be another favourite.

Do Ho Suh's Staircase III and Duchamp split page exercise

2011-03-27T13:50:00.000+01:00

Staircase, Do Ho Suh

This is a a fascinating film about the Korean artist Do Ho Suh's Staircase III, just opened at Tate Modern, with Suh explaining how and why he made it. We'll be working underneath it tomorrow, for the fifth week of my Poetry from Art course, and I'm sure it will take me a while to fully absorb the strangeness of this red transparent nylon stairway hovering at ceiling height. It is an exact replica of the staircase in an apartment Suh once lived in, and he says how it took him six years to get to know his landlord well enough to take the precise measurements of the original stairs to recreate this 'memory'.

But first I've asked the group to bring in their poems based on last week's session, when they responded to Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass. I gave them a 'split page' exercise, with excerpts of Octavio Paz's description of the sculpture, which includes the bizarre notes Duchamp made to describe the Bride and her nine Bachelors, on the right hand side of each page. Everyone had to write their own love story or relationship story very fast on the left hand side. We then cut down the centre of the pages and jiggled the personal stories against notes from Duchamp's The Large Glass aka The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and hunted for any resonant lines that materialised from the juxtaposition of the personal and the given phrases. I've already read some of the resulting poems as I'm now rush-editing our online anthology. I'm hoping the online publication will be published on the Tate website by the end of the course next week, if I can edit it by Wednesday and Tate can display it in time. As soon as it's up I'll post a link.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass

2011-03-20T19:01:00.000Z

Tomorrow we'll be working with Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, with the help of Octavio Paz's detailed description of the sculpture in his book Appearance Stripped Bare. Paz drew from Marcel Duchamp's extensive notes in a later work The Green Book. The language is a gift: "The Bride's names are Motor-Desire, Wasp, and Hanged Female, dragonfly and praying mantis..." and "The differences between the Bride's and the Bachelors' respective universes are vast. The Bride has a life-center; the Bachelors have not. They live on coal or some other raw material, drawn not from them but from their not-them..." (see below for a key to the realms of the two sexes).

I have long been drawn to this artwork, and it informed my practice when I was a sculptor. The version now on show at Tate Modern is a reconstruction by Richard Hamilton but I remember seeing it before Tate replaced the cracked bottom pane. So when I made a large glass construction influenced by it I incorporated cracks. Duchamp made this over a period of eight years then announced it definitively unfinished. The combination of his declared subject of the relation between the sexes and his "playful physics" makes its an endlessly fascinating study. Another source book for Duchamp's notes is a long heavy hardback Notes and Projects for The Large Glass by Arturo Schwarz, where Duchamp's original notes (in French) are scrawled like poems on the right and the English translation provided on the left. The notes, sketches and diagrams are an entire looking-glass world I can get lost in for hours.

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds and Yang Lian's porcelain poem

2011-03-15T11:38:00.000Z

For our third session of Poetry from Art at Tate Modern we worked in the Turbine Hall, with Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds installation. These 100 million sunflower seeds have been individually handcrafted over two years by the artisans of the city of Jingdezhen, famed for its production of Imperial porcelain. Ai Weiwei has spoken about how the work is a commentary on the 'Made in China' phenomenon. I brought the poem 'Father's Blue & White Porcelain' by the 'misty' poet Yang Lian as a way in for the group to write about the installation. Yang Lian, who now lives in London in exile from China after the Tiananmen massacre, is as experimental an artist, and like Ai his work engages in a critical dialogue with Chinese tradition and history.

First, we watched the 15 minute film Tate made of how the porcelain sunflower seeds were manufactured, from the men mining and pounding the kaolin to the women expertly painting each seed in three or four strokes, Ai there among them, answering tweets on his mobile phone as he chatted. He is an unpretentious teddybear of a man and his warmth somehow made the installation more accessible and human-scaled. We then returned to the Turbine Hall bridge and I passed around some large striped, black sunflower seeds from Dakota, bought at my local international store, to feel as we discussed Lian's poem:

Father's Blue & White Porcelain

a small jar of night a thousand frontiers carrying him

the sky of old age continues the firing in the kiln

continues arranging this pot plant lamplight

a glazed hand refines a blue cough

in his flesh he embroiders the fragile whiteness of posterity

turns around a thousand times the little

room a snake's stomach swallows the longest diameter of life

his night-long waking like the sleep-talk of the whole world

awake and not looking at humans not even waiting for

a cup of darkness tea four walls softly slide up

a small iron table sinks in to a venom-coated shaft

another red-hot circle sealing

his book its unread wings tightly closed

how many bloomings and fadings of seventieth birthdays have been fondled

startling a container with petals that cannot be rubbed away

lying down revealing again the birthmark of day

Yang Lian translated by Brian Holton

Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008)

A few of us thought there was the ghost of Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' when we looked at the way the father and his room are overlaid on and in the porcelain in a double exposure, the human pageant in the glaze. The images start out ordinary enough, but they soon morph: "a jar" turns unto "a jar of night', "tea" is a "a cup of darkness tea". Someone pointed out that the poem contained a deep well of history in it, both through the tradition of porcelain and in the layering of the past in the complex images: "the sky of old age" and "bloomings and fadings of seventieth birthdays".

I asked the group to sit around the Sunflower Seeds installation and write a poem about it incorporating one phrase from Lian's poem, such as "a glazed hand", "the sleep-talk". As his poem is made in a collage mosaic of images and thoughts, I wanted them to start a collage poem. I then read out quotes by Ai Weiwei when he was interviewed by Juliet Bingham and Marko Daniel (Tate curators), such as:

"In China, when we grew up, we had nothing... But for even the poorest people, the treat or the treasure we'd have would be the sunflower seeds in everybody's pockets."

"For me, the internet is about how to act as an individual and at the same time to reach massive numbers of unknown people.... I think this changes the structure of society all the time – this kind of massiveness made up of individuals."

As well as a phrase from Lian's poem, the group also had to incorporate a phrase from something Ai Weiwei had said in the interview. Homework was to carry on searching for phrases to include in a collage poem. They could find them from failed poems, notebooks, letters, anywhere. Then to print the results large, cut up the lines and rearrange them until they made a new sense. Some of the results will be published next month on the Tate Modern website in an online anthology of poems written this term.

Celebrating Frida Kahlo on International Women's Day at Monmouth

2011-03-09T16:01:00.000Z

Yesterday I gave an illustrated reading from What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo for Monmouth Women's Festival to celebrate International Women's Day. The Monmouth Shire Hall was packed to capacity even though the tickets were £15 (the event included a delicious Mexican buffet lunch. I gave a 45 minute reading and talked about Kahlo's extraordinary life and paintings, showing the paintings each of my poems is based on. There were many Frida fans in the audience and some had travelled quite far to attend, not least my editor from Seren, Amy Wack, who, despite her busy schedule, comes to many of her authors' readings. Amy took this photo of me signing books.

It felt right to celebrate Kahlo on International Women's Day, and include my poems about those radical paintings My Birth and Henry Ford Hospital with their depictions of childbirth and miscarriage which still have the power to shock. So when Mandi, one of the festival organisers, asked me later as she was driving me back to Newport train station, if I thought Kahlo was a feminist, I replied yes. Feminism as such wasn't yet a defined movement when she was painting (she was born in 1907 and died in1954), but what makes her so groundbreaking as an artist is how she bravely painted exactly what she wanted to paint, how she wanted to paint it, regardless of anyone else's approval. Which makes her a great role model.

Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed) Frida Kahlo 1932

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Week 1 Gabriel Orozco

2011-03-01T19:47:00.001Z

Last night my new Poetry from Art course started at Tate Modern. We are spending the first two weeks in the Gabriel Orozco exhibition and what a gift it is for poets. We sat in the hub room, between La DS and the Elevator, all twenty-seven of us. After introductions and a wander around the show we had a close look at Black Kites (see above), a real skull that Orozco painstakingly drew on with graphite while he was convalescing from a collapsed lung. I read out Carol Ann Duffy's poem 'Small Female Skull' and we compared and contrasted it with Orozco's piece. They are both weighted, compact, immaculately made, serious yet playful.

The focus of this term is image-making in poetry, how to shape poems, responding to art to help make poems more sculpted and visceral. Does the poem have one unifying image (such as a skull) or is it made up of a series of images? At the least, to be aware of the potential of imagery in a poem and how it might shape the raw material of the subject, so that the poem becomes more memorable. In Black Kites the black and white man-made checkerboard pattern surrounds and contains a found object which is a real skull; the chessboard-type grid over a mind. The dance between the two images is mind-boggling.

Duffy's 'Small Female Skull' is also mind-boggling in its ambiguity: is the poet holding her own skull or is she holding someone else's? The focus deftly shifts from inside her head to in her hands and we decided that there was no right answer, that the poem was open to individual interpretation. Early on, the skull is compared to an ocarina – the mind as musical instrument. It is delicate, papery in texture. As is Orozco's skull, with its precise loops-and-lozenge pattern over the faint hairline skull-joins.

Black Kites is in the centre of the Obits Series room. Orozco collected these obituaries from The New York Times over years, selecting the ones he found "provocative or intriguing or funny or banal", removing the name and age of the person, and leaving only the heading which sums up their lives, such as "Ascertained Moon's Make-up", "Originated London Fog Coat" and "Researcher of Fireflies' Flash". Twenty-seven are reproduced on each of the large banner-like sheets of Japanese paper in various sized fonts resembling the originals as they appeared in the papers.

I asked everyone to choose one or two of the obituaries and extend them in prose notes, imagining the life suggested by the obit. They could choose one that reminded them of someone they knew, or make up an imaginary life suggested from the phrase. I then asked them to offer the group a gift phrase from their notes and we all wrote these down. The task was then to write a poem of no longer than thirteen lines incorporating one of Orozco's obits and one line from someone else. The results were imaginative, crazy and funny, and the exercise made for a good icebreaker.

One homework was to carry on working on this poem. I also set a new poem to do at home, playing at making a slight intervention in an environment and recording it, as Orozco does. In Elevator he took a lift and sawed through it, reducing it to his height, and removed the lift from its building. He also took photographs of ephemeral arrangements, such as breath on a piano. Some of his interactions are simple, such as placing oranges on every table in a factory. The task was to go on a walk in either a familiar or unfamiliar environment (it could be an office, street, wood, etc), observe it closely, make notes, take photos if possible. Then make a slight intervention Orozco style. Then write a poem about the process and not to get arrested! There was no obligation to actually do it, if they preferred they could just imagine doing it, but I suggested that it would be good if they could do something, however small.

Orozco has said that he likes to work with ordinary things and alter them slightly so as to see them anew. We discussed that and Robert Frost's idea that "Poetry is a fresh look and a fresh listen." I think that's what Orozco does with his pieces. How can we respond to his work in the same spirit in our poems?

Next week we'll have another wander around the other intriguing rooms then concentrate on Lintels. Tate has given us permission to set up our chairs under the delicate grey lint installation so it will be an interesting experience!

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern: poetry from art for kids

2011-02-19T12:46:00.001Z

Last Monday I gave a talk to ninety 11-12 year olds at Lingfield Notre Dame School in Sussex, preparing them for their visit to Tate Modern the next day, when they were to write poems from art. While I was making a slideshow for them and researching for my workshop I fell in love with Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds. I'm not sure what else to call it, but it does mean that I'm working on a poem about them, which is fun to do, even if it's no good.

I spent a day at the Tate, walking around the perimeters of the installation, looking down on them from the bridge, and watching the film of how he got a whole town in China to hand-paint a hundred million of the porcelain seeds in their husks. And wishing I'd seen the installation while you could still walk over or even bury yourself in them. En route to Sussex I hoped to find some sunflowers but it was Valentine's Day so the only flowers at the station were roses. But I did bring in a 800G bag of Dakota striped sunflower seeds, bought at my local Turkish international supermarket. The real seeds are huge, but Ai's are bigger than life and in the Turbine Hall they have an electrifying presence.

I passed the seeds around and told the kids the story of how everyone in the town of Jingdezhen (which once made porcelain for imperial China) made the 100 million seeds over a period of two years. Also, how Ai had said that "In China, when we grew up, we had nothing...But for even the poorest people, the treat or the treasure we'd have would be the sunflower seeds in everyone's pockets." I asked them to keep a few of the seeds in their pockets.

They were a lively, excitable group, and in the space of one and a half hours, they all wrote three poems each, in response to various artworks at Tate. We started by playing the game of Surreal Definitions which creates instant surrealism, and instant metaphors, such as "a mirror is a pool of silver light", "the sun is something delicious in your mouth", some of them believable, some crazy, and some very funny. One boy's ended up as "a boyfriend is where most women keep their money". His neighbour had defined "a purse" then passed his definition on, so that the definition of "where most women keep their money" got joined to the noun "a boyfriend". And so on.

Another big hit was using Moniza Alvi's poem 'I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro' as a template for their poems when I projected Miro paintings for them to pretend to be a shape in. They had very spirited responses to this, and saw all kinds of shapes – boomerangs, arrows, hexagons, and told imaginative stories about their relationship to other shapes in the paintings.

In one week my next Poetry from Art course (for adults) will start at Tate Modern, with two sessions in the wonderful Gabriel Orozco (see a previous post), then one in Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds. Poems from the course will be published on the Tate Modern website in April. The art and English teachers of Lingfield school also hope to eventually publish a book of poems and drawings from the schoolkids' visit to the Tate and I'm looking forward to getting my copy. Meanwhile, here are some images of the sunflower seeds, fake and real, and a sunflower with the seeds packed in golden Fibonacci spirals.

My TS Eliot Prize Reading in the Royal Festival Hall

2011-01-30T18:10:00.001Z

Here is a recording of my entire reading at the 2010 TS Eliot Prize Readings in the Royal Festival Hall on 23rd January. This time last Sunday, I was nervously making my way to the Southbank and what turned out to be a two-thousand plus audience. Ian McMillan of Radio 3's The Verb introduced us all generously and warmly, welcoming us to that scary stage. I loved his joke about each poet speaking for only eight minutes, but not eight 'poetry' minutes.

The poems I read from my shortlisted collection What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo were 'Remembrance of an Open Wound', 'What the Water Gave Me (V)', 'The Little Deer' and 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)'

The Poetry Book Society has recorded all ten of the shortlisted poets' readings and you can listen to them all on one page here. I'm looking forward to hearing them again, including Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the winner of this year's prize, whose poems were read by Daljit Nagra.

There are three more of my poems from What the Water Gave Me, and by each poet from their shortlisted collections, on the Guardian website.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Gabriel Orozco

2011-01-10T20:24:00.002Z

Gabriel Orozco made 'Black Kites' when he was laid up at home with a collapsed lung. He painstakingly drew this black and white graphite grid on a real skull, and has commented on how intense it was for him to live with the skull over a long period. Orozco is a Mexican artist, so I immediately think of the Aztec Tezcatlipoca smoking mirror mosaic skull inlaid with turquoise and jet in the British Museum, and the lifesize rock crystal skull carved from quartz crystal, reputed to be Aztec, though this is disputed.

Elevator

Orozco is a playful, wide-ranging and inventive artist, with photographs, paintings, sculptures, and installations often featuring natural and found objects. A major retrospective of his work will open at Tate Modern next Wednesday, 19 January. I'm looking forward to my next Poetry from Art course which starts on 28 February and hope to spend one or two sessions in this exhibition. The course will culminate in publication of the participants' poems on the Tate Modern website. This course is booked out, but there are still a few places for the summer term, when the Miro exhibition will be on.

Dial Tone

The creatures in our garden in 2010

2010-12-31T17:34:00.000Z

We live in a two-up two-down terraced house in East London and have a very small overgrown garden, but over the past year it has been inhabited by a menagerie of creatures, including in July a swarm of bees which nested temporarily in our jasmine laden buddleia. Foxes shelter in our collapsed shed and toads hide from our four cats under the understorey of campanula and ivy. Photos all taken by Brian. Happy 2011 to you all from us and the beasts who share our lives.

Harpy eagle nest watch

2010-12-26T19:29:00.000Z

My Boxing Day was a harpy eagle research day. I am so fascinated by this creature that I can spend days trawling the web, reading about it. Like the king vulture, which I am also fascinated by, it's one of the gods of Venezuelan Amazonian tribes such as the Pemón, Warao and Yanomami. The Pemón live in the Lost World of the Guiana Highlands, near Roraima and Auyantepui. The Warao, or water people, live in stilt huts on the Orinoco Delta and the Yanomami live in south east Venezuela and north eastern Brazil. I've briefly visited the Warao and the Pemón and studied their lives and mythologies. The Pemón guide eco-tourists to the foot of Angel Falls in Canaima National Park in their curiara – traditional canoes powered by an outboard motor. They know the steep, rapid-strewn rivers of that breathtaking landscape intimately, as I discovered when we dodged rocks and rapids at full speed! They also guide groups up Mount Roraima, the highest of the tepuis or table mountains.

Their mythology includes much about the 'sky-world' – the plateaus of these giant prehistoric mesas. To ascend their spirit worlds in their myths they stick white harpy eagle down feathers in their hair. I don't know if they still do this, though I did climb Mount Roraima in 1995, and was aware that they considered it sacred and that we had to keep our voices quiet so as not to offend their spirits. The Yanomami sometimes raise a harpy eagle chick in a wooden cage for a supply of white down feathers to stick in their hair for ritual dress.

The female eagle is a third larger than the male and can even grab large howler monkeys from trees. I've posted this BBC documentary of a pair of harpies and their chick as I think it's quite extraordinary, especially towards the end, when the chick is almost fully grown (the team spent one year observing the nest), and the fledgling spends a lot of time watching the cameraman with intense curiosity. Since monkeys are pretty clever, he is going to have to learn how to outwit them so as to get enough to eat, and this film reveals the harpy's education as he observes the behaviour of his primate prey.

Review of What the Water Gave Me and an essay

2010-12-16T11:40:00.002Z

This is a quick post as I'm laid up in bed with flu, but very cheered up today by Ros Barber's review of What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo and Val Robert's essay about my work. I find it encouraging to be favourably reviewed by a poet whose work I admire. Ros's latest collection Material, from Anvil in 2008, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. This is her author photo. You can become a fan of her work on Facebook. Here is an excerpt from her review:

"the book is as vibrant, and somehow life-affirming, as the paintings that inspired it. Petit’s Kahlo embraces life with all the joy of one who experienced being laid ‘on a billiard table’ while doctors ‘saw to the wounded, thinking me dead.’ There is an ecstasy in the agony."

There have been a lot of reviews and blogs about What the Water Gave Me since it came out last May, including one by Ruth Padel in The Guardian, one by Zoë Brigley in New Welsh Review and another by David Morley in Magma – three other poets whose work I admire. If you go to the book page on my publisher Seren's website you can click on links to read many of their reviews. WtWGM was also Jackie Kay's Book of the Year in The Observer. The collection was reprinted after only four months and I'm very excited that a US edition will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011.

Val Roberts is a third year creative writing degree student at Liverpool John Moores University. In her post 'The Wonderful World of Pascale Petit' she analyses two of my hummingbird poems, 'The Strait-Jackets' from The Zoo Father and 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (I)' from What the Water Gave Me. I love it when people tell me things about my poems that I didn't quite register myself, but that's what she manages to do, especially in her study of the sonic echoes in both poems, and indeed, in her study of the thematic echoes, which she does very precisely, as shown in this excerpt from her analysis of 'The Strait-Jackets':

"For the first time since she arrived he starts to breathe more easily with that hummingbird metaphor, which is a soul of an injured person. Notice the subtle internal rhymes with the words ‘breathe’ and ‘easily’ and the echo of ‘recycler’ and ‘cannula’ which is attached to his nostrils as it almost slips out. This is an important part of the poem as the cannula almost slips out. This is perhaps where realisation may hit. It makes one wonder what else almost slips out. Perhaps Petit has spoken some truth about her and her father’s relationship. This is the pure brilliance of Pascale’s poetry. She says I don’t know how long we sit there, such a powerful line and in particular with the internal half rhyme and echo of language. One does not know how long she has sat there. One does not know what has gone on."

Here is the poem 'The Strait-Jackets'. I love how she's accurately connected the hummingbird theme in this poem to the Frida Kahlo poem, where I am both writing about Kahlo's efforts to overcome her bus crash but am also coming to terms with my own childhood trauma through Kahlo's painting 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird'.

This is the photo of forty hummingbirds in a suitcase which inspired 'The Strait-Jackets'. The Brazilian ornithologist Augusto Ruschi's stowed his birds in a suitcase to transport them on plane flights, by lowering their temperature and placing them in a torpor (which hummingbirds go into at low temperatures to conserve energy). While they were asleep he wrapped them in pyjamas to protect their wings. Then he used to warm them up before releasing them once he reached his destination.

And here is Frida Kahlo's painting 'Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird'. It's the first painting I wrote into a poem in What the Water Gave Me. The whole book grew from this defiant self-portrait with a dead hummingbird hung from a necklace of thorns made from Christ's crown:

Mir Mahfuz Ali and the Ten anthology

2010-12-07T15:49:00.000Z

Mir Mahfuz Ali is shortlisted for the 2010 Picador Poetry Prize and is included in the groundbreaking anthology Ten from Bloodaxe. Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra, is the culmination of Spread the Word's two year initiative to support talented new black and Asian poets. I had the good fortune to mentor Mahfuz for this project, and what a dream job it was.

Mir Mahfuz Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1958. He grew up during the war of liberation and came to England in 1973, after being shot in the throat by riot police during an uprising. As a performer, he is renowned for his extraordinary voice – a rich, throaty whisper. His poetry has appeared in PN Review, Poetry London, London Magazine and Ambit. He has also been shortlisted for the New Writing Ventures Awards in 2007. His poetry combines a luxurious Bengali linguistic richness with the trauma and first hand testaments of the atrocities of war.

Read his poems in Ten, and all the exciting poets in this anthology, described by Carol Ann Duffy as "ten sparkling new talents who demonstrate the richness, energy and confidence of the poetic voice in our multicultural country". This book is groundbreaking, necessary, but most of all, an enthralling read. Here is one of Mahfuz's poems:

Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971

I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight.
I have caught it all – the screeching tanks
pounding the city under the massy heat,
searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets.
Kalashnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers,
vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements.
I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust
scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye,
at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside,
at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs,
throwing them into the back, hurling
them one upon another until the floor
is loaded to the sky's armpits. The corpses stare
at our star's succulent whiteness
with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation.
Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs.
I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead:
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU
SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Ana Mendieta

2010-11-22T10:26:00.000Z

Tonight at Tate Modern we'll be working in the Ana Mendieta room in the Energy & Process wing on Level 5. As Ana Mendieta is from Cuba, we'll read the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón’s poem ’Ana Mendieta’, which celebrates her spirit and mourns her early death. We’ll watch the artist's video Blood and Feathers #2, where she pours animal blood over herself, rolls onto white chicken feathers, then stands with arms outstretched like wings, on the riverbank.

Mendieta was influenced by indigenous Tainan myths of Cuba and the Caribbean and the writings of Carlos Castaneda, particularly The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. I've always been drawn to rituals about transformation into a bird and have written about Amazonian transformation rites in my first and second collections Heart of a Deer and The Zoo Father. Amazonian peoples stick white harpy eagle down feathers in their hair for journeys to their sky worlds.

Tonight we'll also look at the poem 'Animal Dress' by Sharon Olds (from One Secret Thing) and ' The World's Entire Wasp Population' by Selima Hill (from Violet), as alternative takes on ritual dress, the former celebrating her daughter's coming of age by dressing her in the world's animals, and the latter enacting a ritual of revenge by covering a rival in "this feeling...like jam" then inviting wasps "to enjoy her".

The thirty poets in the group will read the results from tonight's session and their poems from the six week course next Monday, 29 November, at 6.45pm, in the Poetry and Dream gallery at Tate Modern. Everyone is welcome and entrance is free. The other art they responded to are paintings by Gauguin, Joan Jonas' fairytale installation The Juniper Tree and the surreal works in Poetry and Dream. The still below is of another piece by Mendieta Bird Transformation.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: a public reading

2010-11-14T10:17:00.008Z

Monday 29 November 2010, 18.45 – 20.45

A poetry reading by the poets who attended the Poetry from Art autumn course, introduced by Pascale Petit. All welcome.

A group of poets has been working in the magical setting of Tate Modern, when the galleries were quiet and closed to the public. Led by award winning poet Pascale Petit they wrote poems in response to works from the permanent collections – Surrealism, Joan Jonas' The Juniper Tree, Ana Mendieta's Blood and Feathers – and from the current exhibition Gauguin: Maker of Myth.

You are invited to hear their poems in the unique surroundings of Tate Modern's Poetry and Dream gallery on Level 3. This event is open to the public.

Tate Modern Level 3 West, Bankside, London SE1 9TG
or call 020 7887 8888

Admission free, no booking required

A publication by the participants from the previous term is for sale in the Tate Modern bookshop. Look out for it in the Art History section of the main shop.

Poetry from Art autumn 2010: Gauguin & Joan Jonas

2010-11-02T12:22:00.001Z

The theme this term for my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern is myth and fairytale. Paul Gauguin made up his own myths, part derived from Tahitian ones. He created this goddess Oviri as his alter ego. In Tahitian, Oviri means savage – she's stamping on a she-wolf and clasping a stolen wolf cub. Here's the suggestive shape of her back:

We started the course in the Gauguin exhibition and will return there for one more session. It was amazing to work in the galleries when the crowds had left! In the opening class I supplied lines from Polynesian myths, read out the myth of Hina the moon goddess, which forms the basis of his painting Hina and Tefatou (Moon and Earth)

and read out quotes by Gauguin on the genesis of his painting Manao Tupapau: The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch, where he wrote about his use of colour and Tahitian ghost god myths:

This is what he wrote in a letter about how he painted it:
"Here is the genesis: General Harmony. Dark dull violet, dark blue and chrome 1. The draperies are chrome 2, because this colour suggests night, without explaining it, however, and furthermore serves as a happy medium between the yellow orange and the green, completing the harmony. These flowers are also like phosphorescences in the night (in her thoughts). The Kanakas believe that the phosphorous lights seen at night are the souls of the dead. In short, it is a fine bit of painting, although it is not according to nature."

In his journal Noa Noa he added:
"One day I had to go to Papeete. I had promised to come back that same evening. It was one in the morning when I got home. Having at that moment very little oil in the house . . . the lamp had gone out, and the room was in darkness when I went in. I felt afraid and, more still, mistrustful. I struck matches and saw on the bed motionless, naked, lying face down on the bed, her eyes immeasurably larger from fear, Tehura looked at me and seemed not to know me. I too was caught for several moments by a strange feeling of uncertainty. Tehura’s terror was contagious. I had the illusion that a phosphorescent light was streaming from her staring eyes. Never had I seen her so frighteningly beautiful. I was afraid to make any movement which might increase the child’s paroxysm of fright. How could I know what at that moment I might seem to her? Might she not with my frightened face take me for one of the demons and spectres, one of the Tupapaüs, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights? Did I really know who in truth she was herself? The intensity of fright had transformed her into a strange being, entirely different from anything I had known before."

I asked the group of 30 poets to choose one painting, drawing, carving or ceramic and write a poem about it, responding to the colours, and to incorporate one of the lines from Polynesian myths I had compiled. This could be used anywhere in the poem, and could be altered to suit. They were invited to make up their own myths if they wished, but had to make the poem contemporary and were to be ruthless in writing about something that mattered to them, to be free in their interpretation.

If myth was our focus with Gauguin, for our second week we discussed Joan Jonas's magical but grisly The Juniper Tree installation based on a fairytale. It's a darker version of the Snow White story, and involves a boy who is beheaded then cooked by his stepmother. His bones are absorbed by the juniper tree and transformed into a shamanic bird who sings his story and eventually returns to kill his murderer. The installation is dominated by red and white and a haunting soundtrack. Originally The Juniper Tree was a performance (in 1976 in the US then 1979 in the Whitechapel Art Gallery).

I asked everyone to free-write a response to the installation then offer one of those lines to the rest of the group. We discussed the Grimms brothers' 'The Juniper Tree' fairytale and studied Moniza Alvi's poem 'Mermaid' (from her latest collection Europa) which is based on Tabitha Vevers' painting When We Talk about Rape – two responses to a fairytale and equally dark subject matter. We paid particular attention to the form of the poem, with its deep indents, the extra space between the spare lines evoking a feeling of shock. Everyone could select one of the group's gift lines to include in a short poem, with attention paid to the form and how it might hold powerful subject matter.

Next week we will work in the permanent display Poetry & Dream. Then we'll be back in the Gauguin exhibition. Our fifth writing session will be in the Ana Mendieta room, responding to an artist who made performances influenced by Frida Kahlo and rituals of indigenous South Americans. Our last session on November 29th (at 18.45) will be a reading open to the public in Poetry & Dream on Level 3, when the group will read poems written on the course. Entrance is free. Everyone is welcome, so please come to listen and enjoy the stunning surreal paintings which inspired some of their poems.

Preview of two poems from Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

2010-09-21T19:10:00.000+01:00

Here is a preview of two poems in the Poetry from Art pamphlet anthology, launched at Tate Modern this Saturday 25 September. The poems by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Seraphima Kennedy both respond to installations by Francis Alÿs in his recent exhibition A Story of Deception.

The Tornado Chaser
after Tornado by Francis Alÿs

The tornado chaser is superstitious.
He wears a tornado like a cloak of lightning.
His dreams are dark tunnels with stars slipping down them.

He can find a tornado blindfolded.
He smells the fresh-torn redbud tree, the earth’s spores offered up to
      the elements.
He catches the vacuum with his bare hands, wrenches sap from flying
      timber.

The tornado chaser sleeps with sand in his eyelashes.
His foxbrush hair has been drowned in Florida saltwater.
He has been baked in mud in the Mississippi.
He has tripped through scrubclaw in the Texan panhandle and been
      thrown to the sides of the orange-dust caldera.

He has seen a tornado unwrap the night sky like a handkerchief.

He has been in red and turquoise and gold tornadoes.
He has been in tornadoes made of ocean.
He knows tornadoes that spin him in different directions above and
      below his fault lines.
He knows the heart of the sky is the dark back of the mirror, and the
      space between constellations.

He has known tornadoes shimmer like sirens.
He has known tornadoes slice him open like crazed turbines.
He knows one day a tornado will strip the flesh from his bones.
He will feel his skin split open, his eyes spread out wider than his skull.

He has looked up the length of the tornado in fear.
He has looked up the inside of the tornado in longing.

He has seen the dark vaulted cathedral above the tornado and prayed.

Seraphima Kennedy

Three Inches Closer
after When Faith Moves Mountains by Francis Alÿs

All we want to do is go backwards,
like the toy cars the kids make
from old mantequilla de cerdo cans

but I've got my foot down on the pedal
driving into a mirage that disappears
every time we get nearer; it's a river

not a road, wet and shimmering, white
on the horizon, with unknown currents
that curl around our ankles

and what looks like it's on a loop, no what
feels like it's on a loop isn't, each frame
is very slightly different, so we know

it must be real and having another baby
is a mythic type of effort,
like the five hundred men in white shirts

an artist asks to move a sand dune
three inches closer to the sea, across a desert
with plastic buckets and spades.

Karen McCarthy Woolf

Everyone is invited to the launch at 6.45–9pm this Saturday 25 September, in the East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern, Bankside SE1 9TG. Free entry, wine, illustrated readings, great views. The booklet contains poems by 24 poets who attended my Poetry from Art summer course in the galleries and costs £4.95. It will be for sale at this event and only available from the Tate Modern bookshop afterwards.

The contributors are Karen McCarthy Woolf, Naomi Woddis, Malika Booker, Rowyda Amin, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Sarah Salway, Rebecca Farmer, Zillah Bowes, Cath Drake, Rishi Dastidar, Beth Somerford, Roberta James, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Lynn Foote, Seraphima Kennedy, Ali Wood, Julie Steward, Elizabeth Horsley, MJ Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri.

Launch of Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

2010-09-06T18:14:00.000+01:00

Launch of a pamphlet anthology: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern edited by Pascale Petit

18.45 – 21.00 on Saturday 25 September 2010

East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern

Free entry, there will be readings, great views, wine. All welcome, booking not required.
(Tornado by Francis Alÿs)

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/22322.htm

This pamphlet anthology of twenty-four poems was written on my Poetry from Art summer course in the galleries at Tate Modern, the third of three six-week writing courses this year. The pamphlet includes poems after Mona Hatoum, Francis Alÿs, Joseph Beuys and Mike Nelson.

In the Francis Alÿs exhibition A Story of Deception, we sat in the darkened and at times ear-splitting Tornado room, watching the artist running into tornadoes in the Mexican desert over a period of ten years, searching for the calm at their core. There are six responses to this included in the anthology, as well as responses to his other video installations.

Working with Mona Hatoum's Home was an equally intense experience, where a gurney-style kitchen table was laid out with cooking implements, all wired up to a live electric current. This, and two other disturbing pieces which accompanied it, also inspired another set of poems in the booklet, some dark and some humorous.

We spent one session at Tate Britain, in Mike Nelson's labyrinthine The Coral Reef – a network of fifteen interconnected rooms for the dispossessed, and everyone did get lost in it before emerging to write a poem in fifteen minutes, using Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' as a possible approach, focusing on one object in the rooms, as he did in his shed, to tackle such a big theme.

There are also poems in response to Joseph Beuys' The Pack, Sophie Calle's The Hotel series, and more (see below for more images). The publication will be available to buy at the launch then for sale only in the Tate Modern bookshop for £4.50.

For more information about the launch see the Tate Modern website

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Phone 020 7887 8888.

The contributors are:

Karen McCarthy Woolf, Naomi Woddis, Malika Booker, Rowyda Amin, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Sarah Salway, Rebecca Farmer, Zillah Bowes, Cath Drake, Rishi Dastidar, Beth Somerford, Roberta James, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Lynn Foote, Seraphima Kennedy, Ali Wood, Julie Steward, Elizabeth Horsley, MJ Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri.

Francis Alÿs Tornado

Mona Hatoum Home (detail)

Mona Hatoum Home

Mona Hatoum Incommunicado

Sophie Calle The Hotel Room 47

Mike Nelson The Coral Reef (details)

Joseph Beuys The Pack

New video of poem from What the Water Gave Me

2010-07-20T19:27:00.001+01:00

Here is a new video of me reading 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', from my new collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo:

And here is Frida Kahlo's painting my poem is based on, the very surreal What the Water Gave Me or What I Saw in the Water:

The bathwater contains visionary glimpses from her life and art. There are six poems about this painting in my book, some describe it closely, but in this one I wanted to show her dramatic cremation, when the force of the furnace made her sit bolt upright and her hair caught fire in a halo around her head.

A Poem for Frida Kahlo's Birthday

2010-07-06T16:08:00.000+01:00

Here is a poem for Frida Kahlo's birthday, from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo. 'Flower of Life', like all the poems in my book, has the title of one of her paintings. The Mexican mandrake is a cactus flower and through it Kahlo seems to both celebrate the life force and mourn her inability to have children.

Flower of Life

I flip the love plant

upside-down, release a starburst

of stamens and stigma –

insecticide yellow

to ward off scorpions

from our marriage bed.

And around the ruby mandragora

I let the rosette of leaves

bare their petticoats –

the business of what’s inside

and under the fireworks.

Is that an embryo’s fontanelles

in the petalled womb

or Diego’s fountain-flower?

It isn’t roots someone’s pulled

shrieking out of the ground,

but my torn fallopian tubes.

Karen McCarthy's Open Notebooks

2010-06-27T16:13:00.002+01:00

The poet Karen McCarthy will be launching her groundbreaking Open Notebooks project this Wednesday 30 June 6.30 – 8.30pm at The Photographers Gallery 16 – 18 Ramillies St, London W1F7 LW. This fascinating online project was commissioned by the literature development agency Spread the Word and explores how writers use the notebook as part of the creative process. Karen interviewed me while I was writing What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo and has made a video about my drafting process on Open Notebooks:

Pascale Petit on What the Water Gave Me for Open Notebooks from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

Karen is also one of the ten poets selected for The Complete Works, a two-year project to support talented Black and Asian poets, and will be included in the much awaited anthology Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra, to be published by Bloodaxe and launched Friday 17 September, 7pm 8.30pm at The Tabernacle, Powis Square, London, W11 2AY, tickets £7. This much needed anthology reflects the truly multicultural make-up of contemporary Britain and contemporary poets.

Ruth Padel reviews What the Water Gave Me in the Guardian

2010-06-12T11:35:00.000+01:00

Ruth Padel has reviewed What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo in today's Guardian. I didn't know it was to be reviewed so it's a lovely surprise. Here is an extract:

'Petit's collection is not a verse biography, but a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo's life and work. "And this is how I started painting. / Time stretched out its spectrum / and screeched its brakes." WH Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, tells the Irish poet: "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." Petit's collection, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint.'

This is the painting on the cover of my collection. Six title poems 'What the Water Gave Me' are threaded through the book and respond to Kahlo's surreal painting What the Water Gave Me or What I Saw in the Water, where images from her life and paintings float around her in the bath. The floating scenes refer especially to the devastating bus accident she suffered as a teenager and its traumatic aftermath which she countered with art.

I'm busy preparing for the second session of my Tate course Poetry from Art this weekend, when we'll be in Mike Nelson's powerful installation The Coral Reef at Tate Britain, then Seren will launch my book at The Horse Hospital this Thursday.

Five poems recorded by PoetCasting

2010-06-11T11:42:00.000+01:00

Alex Pryce has just published recordings of five of my poems on PoetCasting. Three are from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo: 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', 'The Little Deer' and 'Remembrance of an Open Wound'. I'll be reading these and others from the book at my London launch this Thursday, 17th June, at The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London, together with a slideshow of the paintings. I'll also give an illustrated reading at Lancaster Litfest on 23 June. As well as the three poems from my new collection, Alex recorded two from The Zoo Father: 'The Strait-Jackets' and 'Self-Portrait with Fire Ants'.

PoetCasting is a poetry podcasting project which works with poets throughout the United Kingdom. The project features published, performance, emerging and established poets reading their own work online and out loud.

Poem from What the Water Gave Me in today's Guardian

2010-05-29T11:57:00.000+01:00

'The Bus' from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is the Saturday Poem in today's Guardian. This is the title of Frida Kahlo's painting The Bus, and I wrote this in her voice, about the moments before the accident when a trolley car slid into the wooden bus she was in and she was impaled by a handrail, leaving her disabled for the rest of her life. The poems in my collection are all spoken in her voice and explore how she valiantly countered this trauma through vivacity and art. The book is available to buy from Seren and I will be giving an illustrated reading from it at the Hay Festival 10am this Wednesday 2 June. At 4pm on the same day I'll give another illustrated reading at the Culture Cymru stand.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern - spring course photos

2010-05-27T10:33:00.000+01:00

During my spring Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern, two photographers – Katie Snooks and Masayo Matsuda – took photos of us working in the Arshile Gorky exhibition. The paintings we worked with were 'Waterfall' and 'How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life'. The resulting poems are included in an online publication on the Tate Modern website. I'm now planning for the summer course which starts Monday 7 June in the Mona Hatoum installations in the Poetry & Dream wing: 'Home', 'Divan Bed' and 'Incommunicado'. We'll be in a different exhibition each week.

What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo has arrived!

2010-04-30T18:37:00.001+01:00

It's really strange to hold a collection that's taken 10 years to write, but here it is at last, with Frida Kahlo's surreal painting What the Water Gave Me on the cover, where she's surrounded by scenes from her life and her paintings, floating like islands in the bath. You can order it direct from my publisher Seren, buy it tomorrow if you come to my first reading from the book on Saturday May 1st at Chepstow, when I'll be reading with the great Les Murray for Poetry on the Border, or come to the London launch at 6.30pm on 17 June at The Horse Hospital, Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1HX (Russell Square tube). RSVP victoriahumphreys@seren-books.com or 01656 663018.

There will also be launch readings at the Hay Festival on 2 June, Lancaster Litfest on 23 June, Ledbury Festival on 3 July, Birmingham Book Festival on 7 October, Manchester Literature Festival and Sheffield Off the Shelf Festival (both) on 19 October, and the Durham Book Festival on 23/24 October. Most events will be illustrated.

Notes from the Haut Languedoc

2010-04-25T15:40:00.003+01:00

I'm writing this from Lodeve in Herault, France, a place I've known since I was twelve, when my estranged mother bought a steep terraced vineyard on the road from here to the hamlet of Les Plans (The Maps). We used to camp there in the two mazets (shepherds' huts) in summer holiday, getting to know her. The vineyard was a Christmas present to my brother and myself, just a drawing on a card which had advent type windows with maps she'd drawn of a half-hectare of land with a stream, huts, vines, walnut, olive and cherry trees and an underwood. We used to shower under the cascade at the bottom of the steep terraces, wash our clothes in the stream and go crayfish trapping in the pools.

Twelve years ago my mother died and I came to Lodeve to see the land she left me. It has little monetary value and the vines are long gone but it felt very strange owning it so I've kept it wild. The far mazet had vanished into the sous-bois and brambles but the first was still there, even some of our furniture. Where there was once a vineyard below us there is now a house, but the farm next door is still there and the farmer's wife remembered me, saying that seeing me again was like "a mountain meeting another mountain". I visited the Mayor in Les Plans, the same mayor who three decades ago had delivered milk in a horse-drawn cart.

Seven years ago, two months after I met my second husband, we came here for a holiday, that August when it was so hot people died. We sweltered in this two star hotel then, and explored the surrounding landscape which I had previously ventured onto on my own by bus. We drove over the Grands Causses – great moors on the limestone plateaus, and we fell in love with the solitude and silence of them. So on this visit, almost cancelled because of the Iceland volcanic eruption which disrupted flights, driving our car from London, we have ranged further, a hundred kilometres a day, exploring the Cevennes in the Massif Central, and the gorges I have always wanted to see – the Tarn and Jontes.

Our first excursion was to see the wolves of Gevaudan in the Lozere area. On the way I teased that they were putting on their wolf costumes and practising howling. This area is famous for the Bete du Gevaudan, a wolf which had interbred perhaps with a hyena and eaten many people. There are 100 wolves in a semi-wild state in this park. As soon as we entered and looked into the Siberian wolf reserve, the limping alpha male assumed a howling stance and all the others joined in. The sound was nothing at all like it is in films, it seemed to surround us and each wolf had a different pitch. They looked enthralled with their singing. Then they all arranged their tails according to a strict hierarchical code and the alpha male and female strutted about checking that all was in order, the lowest ranking with tails tucked under cowering hindquarters.

In a corner of the park, past the Mongolian red wolves, the Arctic, Polish and Canadian packs, three males were isolated, with huge open wounds on their lower backs, the result of attempts to challenge the boss.

We also saw two green lizards in the park, one was a male with a sky-blue throat. I hadn't seen one of those since my childhood in the vineyard, when they used to flash across the path between our two mazets.

The next day we drove to the Gorge de la Jonte because B had read that it is famous for its griffon vultures. We recrossed the viaduct of Millau (highest in the world) which connects the Causse du Larzac with the Causse du Mejean, and swung around the hairpin bends of the deep and vast Jonte gorges, and reached the Maison des Vautoures. I inched out onto lookout paths, desperately clinging to the rock face. It was worth the vertigo though, to reach the terrace with telescopes aimed at various nests and perches where we could watch the griffons.

Tomorrow we hope to go to the Tarn. Yesterday we drove up on to 'the balconies of the Midi' as they say here – the Larzac moors which overlook Les Plans and Lodeve, and peered over the vast panorama towards the lower Languedoc while a nightingale and cuckoos sang. On the way up we passed a house called Chantoiseau – Birdsong.

I hope to post photos from the trip when I get back to London from this land of The Maps.

Reading with Les Murray on 1st May in Chepstow, South Wales

2010-04-08T16:22:00.001+01:00

Les Murray will be reading in Chepstow, South Wales, for Poetry on the Border on 1st May and I am thrilled to be reading with him. He's both a great world-class poet and a lovely generous-hearted person whose poetry has magnificent sprawl and a high degree of trance. Among his many honours he has won the TS Eliot Prize and has been awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry on the recommendation of Ted Hughes. He's been very generous to me, encouraging my work since before the publication of my first book Heart of a Deer, and over the years he's published many of my poems in Quadrant, the magazine he edits.

This is Jemimah Kuhfeld's portrait photo of him, as part of her Poets Project. Les will also be giving the Poetry Society's annual lecture on Tuesday 11 May at Senate House, London and I'm really looking forward to that as well. If you live in South Wales and can make it at 7.30pm on Saturday 1st May for our reading, please come along to the Drill Hall, Lower Church St, Chepstow NP16 5HJ.
For more details and to book: http://www.poetryontheborder.org info@poetryontheborder.org

Tel: 01291 625011

Tickets £12.00 (£10 concessions)

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern - online poems

2010-04-04T12:13:00.000+01:00

Our spring term of the Poetry from Art course is finished, but you can read poems by the group on the Tate Modern website. This selection includes responses to Joseph Beuys’ The Pack (above) and Lightning with Stag in its Glare (below), Giuseppe Penone’s Tree of 12 Metres (see previous posts), Robert Therrien’s Red Room and Arshile Gorky’s paintings Waterfall and How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life.

The poets wrote far more poems than this online selection, all started in the 10-15 minutes I gave them to write in the galleries. It's a large group, 27 this term and 29 in the next, so reading back takes a while and we spend time finding ways in. For our first session in the Joseph Beuys room for The Pack, I asked them to imagine what they might need to survive, as the 24 sleds are Beuys' survival kits of fat, felt and a torch. We discussed his myth of how, during WWII, his plane was shot down over the Crimea and he was rescued by nomadic Tartars, who saved him by wrapping him in fat and felt. Then I asked them to write a poem responding to the installation, going through all eight senses in turn (the usual five plus kinesthesia, the organic sense and synesthesia).

Lightning with Stag in its Glare Joseph Beuys

We then looked at the elemental poetry of Tomas Transtromer and storm poems by Eugenio Montale and Theodore Roethke to approach Lightning with Stag in its Glare. I first saw this piece in the 80's when I was still at the Royal College sculpture school, and casting in bronze, so this thin cast of the side of a huge clay mound fascinated me as a technical achievement. I see it as both mountain skin and lightning bolt, retaining the power of the bronze furnace. Hard to think how to write poems from such an abstract piece in ten minutes but do read the results as well as poems about Therrien's glowy Red Room and Penone's carved larch, both of which also generated many poems. The summer term starts on 7 June and I already know where we'll be the first two sessions but I'm not saying yet.

Launch of What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo

2010-03-27T17:45:00.003Z

The London launch of my fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren), will be on Thursday 17 June, 6.30 – 8.30pm, at The Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. If you would like to be added to the guest list please email me at pascalepetit@btinternet.com.

The Horse Hospital is in central London, one minute's walk from and just behind Russell Square Tube. Full address is: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1HX. It's an atmospheric arty venue with a screen so I'll be able to give a short reading with projections of Frida Kahlo's paintings. There will be free wine and refreshments.

Further launches are at the Hay Festival Wednesday 2 June, Lancaster LitFest Wednesday 23 June 7.45pm (at the Storey), Ledbury Festival Saturday 3 July 10.30am–12noon, Birmingham Book Festival Thursday 7 October 7.15 – 8.15pm, Manchester Literature Festival Tuesday 19 October (a lunchtime event at Manchester Art Gallery), and more to be confirmed. Most readings will be with a slideshow of the paintings.

To pre-order the book from Seren and for more details about the collection please click here.

The Female Poem

2010-03-09T17:10:00.001Z

Is there a Female Poem? And if so do women write it? To mark International Women's Day 2010 – Monday 8 March – The Poetry Trust have produced a new podcast. This is an edited version of the discussion chaired by Jo Shapcott during the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2009. Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and myself discussed, amongst other things, the horror of being labelled a 'female poet', whether the male poem is the default position, the importance of 'outsider art', why ‘miserable guys stalk the poetic world' and whether Donne, Keats and Wyatt wrote 'female' poems. The discussion took place at 9am on a Sunday morning, in front of an audience of over 200.

Here is a link to the podcast: http://www.thepoetrytrust.org/poetry-channel/

The event was supported by The Poetry Society, so it was appropriate that Jo should chair it. I've long been an admirer of her poetry, and look forward to reading her forthcoming collection Of Mutability (Faber, July 2010), influenced by the sculptor Helen Chadwick, whose installation Of Mutability I saw in the 80's and also much admired. I'd heard Annie Freud read at the King's Lynn Festival and loved her originality and boldness, and had just met Maureen Duffy for the first time that morning at the breakfast table in our wonderful B&B with its vast panoramas of the sunny Aldeburgh seafront.

The event was so popular that it sold out as soon as tickets went online and had to be moved to a larger venue, the Jubilee Hall. The above photo of Jo was taken by the festival photographer Peter Everard Smith. If you're thinking of going to the 2011 Aldeburgh Festival (5–7 November) I urge you to book as soon as the programme goes online as many events quickly sell out.

Giuseppe Penone tree poetry at Tate Modern

2010-03-01T08:14:00.004Z

Tonight, my Poetry from Art group of 27 poets will be working in the Giuseppe Penone room at Tate Modern. It's our second week of the spring Poetry from Art course. I call it the Penone room because although there are many other intriguing works in that hub room of the 'Energy & Process' display, it's his Tree of 12 Metres (in two parts) that draws me. I first saw it in the 80's and it left a haunting impression. All last week I have been reading Penone's Writings: 1968 – 2008, a thick cream book with tree thorns on its cover, living in his world, a deeply focused place. There are poems, contemplations, texts, translated from Italian; none are meant to be literature, but they have a cumulative power. He is obsessed by trees and forests, and our relationship to them.

The Tree of 12 Metres in the Tate is carved out of a huge block of an American Larch to reveal its younger self. He has sensed around the knots to reveal earlier branches. The first photo shows his process from another installation elsewhere. Here are some other works of his I've discovered around the web:

Skin of Leaves

Tapestry

Here are two extracts from his Writings:

Tree tuning fork; the ear resting on the trunk of a tree

to hear its years of growth, to hear the noise of the wind

that runs in the branches, in the trunk, in the roots down into the earth.

Resting the ear and striking the trunk of a tree.

Each species of tree a sound, each day of the tree a different sound,

a sound of summer, a sound of autumn, every season a sound, every day

a sound depending on the heat, the cold, the dryness, the water in the air.

Propagation of the sound, propagation of the wood,

roundness of the sound, roundness of the tree.

On the fingertips the drawing of the sound.

*

Eye, axil of the leaf.

Tree, eye of the earth, trap of light, glance of leaves.

The sphere of light, the sphere of the eye, the sphere of the tree.

The eye full of light.

The thrust of the tree in the light of summer.

The pressure of light leaves imprints of leaves on the eyes.

Crystal, light of the earth that transports thought.

Marble, bone of the earth.

Calcium, thought of stone.

Brain of crystal.

Flute of vertebrae.

Back of glass.

The tree of vertebrae.

Last week we worked in the Joseph Beuys room in 'Poetry & Dream', sitting between The Pack and Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. Poems from that session are streaming in. I will have more time to study them next week when my schedule isn't so hectic, but I'm very excited about them. Next week we'll look at Robert Therrien's Red Room, the week after, at the new Arshile Gorky exhibition.

Poetry writing course at Chateau Ventenac this May

2010-02-14T18:19:00.001Z

Last April I stayed at Chateau Ventenac in the South of France for a mini-break and loved it. I'll be teaching a poetry course there from May 16 to 22nd, the best time to experience the Languedoc, sunny but not too hot.The chateau sits beside the Canal du Midi and has fabulous views across the vineyards towards the Pyrenees. The surrounding landscape is inspiring – lush vineyards, wild causses, gorges and Cathar strongholds.

Book on http://www.chateauventenac.com/writingcourses/pascalepetit.html

Here is the course description:What do you really want to write about? What can only you write about? And how can you transform this raw material into poems that surprise you and the reader? This course will encourage you to explore what is important to you as a poet and offer inspiration for new directions. There will be plenty of exercises to generate vivid imagery and fresh language, enabling you to produce new poems each day, drawing on a wealth of source material. As well as generating new work we will spend time discussing how to shape drafts into vivid and memorable art. Be prepared to extend your boundaries and create your own fully sensed world. Expect an enjoyable week of hard work and fun in the luxurious surroundings of the chateau and Languedoc landscape.
There will be only between six and ten participants so each poet will get lots of individual guidance.

The mornings will be spent in creative workshops and discussion and the afternoons free for writing and for one-to-one tutorials. Everyone can book at least one hour of individual tuition with me during the week and I will be on hand to chat informally throughout the course. Contemporary poems will be used as models, so bring a few of your favourite poems by published poets, discoveries that have fuelled your writing. There will also be a chance for constructive group feedback on your work and advice on editing and getting published.

The Canal du Midi just below the Chateau steps

'Atlantique' One of the luxury bedrooms

Minerve is a Cathar fortress perched over a gorge.
Lots more info on http://www.chateauventenac.com/writingcourses/pascalepetit.html

Cover of What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo

2010-01-15T15:16:00.003Z

This is the cover of my new book What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, to be published by Seren this May. The book can be pre-ordered from amazon UK.

This collection contains fifty-two poems in the voice of the iconic Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Each poem bears the title of one of her paintings. Some are straightforward translations from painting to poem, others are parallels or version homages. Kahlo had a near-fatal bus accident as a teenager which left her in constant pain for the rest of her life. As well as suffering multiple fractures, a handrail pierced her abdomen and exited her vagina. She then married the muralist Diego Rivera, whom she loved but referred to as her second accident. More than just a verse biography, what I've tried to do is explore how she transformed disability and trauma into extraordinary art.

The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico),
Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl

When you came back to me –

I painted a green day-hand and a brown night-hand
holding up Mexico, her canyons and deserts,
her candelabra cacti.

And we were there, embraced by our land.

You were my naked baby

who is reborn every minute with your third eye open.

Even our dog Señor Xólotl was curled

on the wrist of evening,

ready to bear our souls to the underworld if he had to.

Together, we stared out beyond the picture, saw

in the dark window a small woman in a wheelchair

cast out in a workshop far beyond the moon,

desperately mixing the colours of love
until they vibrated –
watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange.

She hurriedly drew the shattered arms

of the universe –

holding us all up

as if we were a mountain dripping roots and stones.

This is Kahlo's painting The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Diego, Myself and Señor Xólotl. Señor Xólotl was her favourite hairless dog, one of many creatures in her menagerie. He was named after the Aztec god of the underworld.

Sha'ar Poetry Festival Israel

2010-01-06T18:47:00.002Z

Last October I attended the Sha'ar Poetry Festival in Tel Aviv and Jaffa; the theme was Poetry from the Conflict Zone. It was organised by the Helicon Poetry School and directed by the distinguished poet Amir Or. My visit was sponsored by Literature Across Frontiers. Most events were held in the atmospheric Arabic-Hebrew Theatre in Jaffa, and included music, theatre, a panel discussion, dance, video art and an amazing rap band called System Ali. Guest poets came mostly from conflict zones, including Jagbu Dorje Tsering from Tibet (exiled in France), Senadin Musabegovic from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Chung Hee Moon from South Korea and Gearoid MacLochlainn from Northern Ireland. The local poets included some Palestinian poets, among them Samikh al-Qassem born in Galilee. Guests were given tours of Jerusalem, the Dead Sea and Galilee. This was my second visit to Jerusalem and the 'sea of death' in the Judean Desert. The view of the Old City in Jerusalem above is from the Mount of Olives.

These are 2,000 year-old olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

The Via Dolorosa (look for the group carrying the cross above the umbrella!) It's an intense place.

System Ali would go down a storm here. I read 5 poems with the Hebrew translations projected behind. Video by Asher Gal.

From left to right: Cai Tianxin (China), Jangbu Dorje Tsering (Tibet), Chung Hee Moon (South Korea), Amir Or (Israel), Pascale Petit (UK), Senadin Musabegovic (Bosnia-Herzegovina), Nese Yasin (Cyprus), Robert Minhinnick (Wales), Gearoid Mac Lochlainn (Northern Ireland). Photo credit Dafna Kaplan.

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

2009-12-13T10:27:00.007Z

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

2009-12-02T19:14:00.003Z

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

2009-11-11T13:21:00.011Z

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

2009-10-20T08:02:00.018+01:00

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.