Litfest

Originally uploaded by beanphoto

Ta Dah!

The next Flax anthology is shaping up very nicely – so much so that with the stunning cover image (thanks once again to Jonathan Bean) we’ve nailed that elusive title. Always one of the trickest elements of the production process once we have the writers and work in place. And invariably we go through some really bad ones – the penultimate suggestion for this anthology could have been a Bond film title I was told … not entirely the tone we were looking for.

And so chocka with some familair names and less so – all providing strong and expansive work – we’re delighted to be working with Rebecca Irvine Bilkau, David Tait, Michael Crowley, Ron Scowcroft and Jim Turner.

They’ll be be launching the anthology, ahem – I mean, An Elastic Sky, Flax022 on Saturday 16th October, 5pm in the Storey Auditorium, complete with some films inspired by some of the poems.

It’s going to be a goodie

I’m living the high life. As if working for Litfest wasn’t idyllic enough I went on a lovely holiday recently. And what does a bod from Litfest do on his holiday? Why, he reads books.

1.The White Hands and other Weird Tales – Mark Samuels.

The weird tale was pioneered by HP Lovecraft – think of it as an Edgar Alan Poe horror story but with tentacles instead of skulls – its a form which includes authors like Arthur Machem, Algernon Blackwood, Clive Barker and China Mieville. Mark Samuels writes very pure, very old-skool weird tales, very close to Lovecraft but without the bileous racism that characterises the father of the genre. He’s not up there with the modern donjon of the gloominati Thomas Ligotti, but this collection is well worth a read if you’re a weird fanatic.

2. The Devil You Know – Mike Carey.

Because you’ve got to have some trash on a holiday. In this case a crime procedural in which the detective is an exorcist and the silent witness is floating around the halls of a London museum. Mike Carey is better known for his work on the long-running comic Hellblazer. This doesn’t have the panache of his comics work; the Cambridge graduate exorcist Felix Castor in Devil You Know is no match for the spiky, egotistical depressive John Constantine. Still, good light reading with a reasonably well realised world full of ghosts.

3. The Ant King and other Stories – Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum is an odd one, with short stories published in the superfit literary journal McSweeneys, the oddball obscuritanist scifi anthology like All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and even the academic journal Nature. This collection of short stories is all killer. The stories bounce backwards and forwards between surrealism, fantasy, sci-fi, metafiction and fairytale, stirred together with a healthy spoonful of trans/post-humanism and Jewish religious mysticism. Go out and buy.

4. The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born – Ayi Kwei Armah

A paean to depression and despair. The nameless hero of this masterwork of Ghanaian literature is faced with a simple choice; abandon his principles and join in with the “national game”, that of petty and perpetual corruption, becoming a small-time crook who perpetuates the squalor and poverty of his homeland; or continue to fail to support his family and endure their hunger, thwarted hopes and contempt. This is a hopeless novel. Nothing happens to save the main character, except that he is proved morally right – it’s obvious that this is not going to materially save him. Read when you’re feeling robust and want a deeply layered, very richly written treatise on despair and corruption.

5. The Forever War – Joe Halderman

I’m torn with this one. Halderman’s account of the alienation between soldier and society during wartime is one of the best pieces of military (and also anti-military) sci-fi I’ve read, but it’s deeply homophobic. Homophobia of the fearing rather than the angry kind, but nevertheless a real moral problem for anyone who enjoys the book. Read it for its place in the science fiction canon and its superb take on the Vietnam war, expect to be saddened by its smallmindedness.

6. Oblivion – David Foster Wallace

Foster Wallace is well beyond me, in a way that keeps taunting me to read more. The first two stories in this collection swept me off my feet. Mentally I felt like a fish on dry land – desparate for something I had taken so much for granted for so long that I hadn’t perceived it as existing. Some of the later stories settle down and become less aggressively avant garde. But for the most part Wallace plays continually with the notion of the narrator, the author, the idea of a story, the form of textual intercourse, and as many other variables as you could ever hope to pull out of written English. On top of that he manages some pretty good comedy and some staggering beautiful moments of emotional clarity. Brace yourself well before reading, prepare to be disatisfied and also to question what kind of satisfaction you ever thought you could achieve from a story.

With the Forward Prize shortlists announced a couple of weeks ago, we’re working our way through the First Collection category, and particularly enjoying Helen Oswald’s Learning Gravity for its concentrated quietness, Sam Willets’ New Light for the Old Dark for the strange glow of love that comes out of the darker corners of experience, and Steve Spence’s A Curious Shipwreck for its fantastical exhuberance. And there’s still the other three to chomp our way through: Hilary Menos, Abegail Morley and Christian Campbell.

While in the Best Collection Category we already know how much we loved Robin Robertson’s Wrecking Light (nightmarishly intense interactions with nature) and Sinead Morrissey’s Through the Square Window (sustained delight on things we loved in our childhood). Both of whom happen to be reading at Grasmere on Tuesday 31st August for the Wordsworth Trust. And are looking forward especially to getting our mitts on Jo Shapcott’s Of Mutability and Lachlan Mackinnon’s Small Hours. There is also the unavoidable slight dip in the excitement at this category being full of F&F, Picador and Carcanet, compared to the First Collection’s range smaller presses. It seems so predictable.

So we’re gearing up for the next Flax launch – tomorrow evening at The Storey Auditorium. And while I know it’s going to be a great night of new voices reading new writing, I’m not entirely sure what to expect. Except, I’m pretty sure Chris Witter, Annie Clarkson, Amy Prodromou, Naomi Kruger and Emma Bragg will all prove to be as honest readers of their work as they are writers.

It’s been a stranger than usual journey on this one. Not just in producing an actual themed anthology, which we’ve never done before (which wasn’t intentional until we had made the final short list) but in putting it together; we had a new designer and a new ITer. It’s been a whole new learning curve of different ways of doing things and learnings, but I think it’s worth it. It’s a great looking, fascinating read, detailing the undulating road we travel in dealing with other people, in loving them, in feeling disappointed by them, and in just not getting them at all.

Beep beep!

I come from Constable country, down South (and a bit East) and my experience of the Lakes and Dales was until last year limited to childhood holidays in towns with names like “Dalesgate” and “Little Wigget”. Invariably the heavens would open on the first day of the holiday and proceed to drown the family  while we steadfastly trudged up mountains and down vales. Alledgedly there were great views to be seen, but as the rain, fog and mist never cleared until we were on the motorway home I couldn’t confirm or deny that for you.

Until last year! When I moved oop north, packing the tin hat and shovel I assumed were necessary attire to navigate the blasted mills and coal pits. Naturally I discovered a beautiful countryside of unexpected hills , sharp rocks and surprising beauty. Wordsworth country was now my country.

As a Southern softie it’s hard for me to think of Wordsworth as a local poet. He’s so much a part of the national consciousness (not to mention the stuff of schoolboy nightmares) that the idea of him writing from a place, about a place, a place he lived and grew up in is pretty alien to me.

The Wordsworth poems that Andrew Forster of the Wordsworth Trust chose for his contribution to the Lunchtime Classics series were all poems of place, many of them about places which are only and hour up the road. It added a context to Wordsworth’s writing that startled me. I still have some strong opinions from my childhood misadventures with Wordy (nothing so ironic as reading Wordsworth’s awful “Expostulation and reply” while stuck inside a class-room on a sunny day). But having his nature poetry located in a landscape that is real, that you can go and visit to this day, went some distance to rehabilitating the lakes poet in my imagination.

I couldn’t pick between Constable country and Wordsworth country. However, you could find a worse guide to the Lakes than the collected Wordsworth, whereas carrying around a roll of Constable prints is liable to end badly. Sometimes it’s hard to beat a native guide.

Next Lunchtime Classic is Keats, which should be a lot of fun.

Another conversation. This time with the fascinating poet, Pascale Petit, who has spent the best part of the last ten years researching the life and paintings of Frida Kahlo.

Her collection, What The Water Gave Me, (Seren) is the result. And she’s coming to Lancaster on Wednesday 23rd June read from it accompanied by slides of Kahlo’s paintings.

In anticipation of her visit, I talked to her about the book and the process of writing it.

SH The poems of What The Water Gave Me are absorbing in their physicality, wrought and muscular in imagery and narrative, which suits the subject of Frida Kahlo and her paintings perfectly. I know you trained as a visual artist, so am interested to hear more of your thinking about the relatonship between visual art and poetry.

PP When I gave up making sculptures and installations to concentrate on poetry, I needed to bring the physicality of 3D work to a poem. I was used to creating my own world in the studio, working inside an installation to shape it. I did a lot of grinding with the grinderette, sanding and manipulating materials until they began to suspend disbelief, for me and hopefully for others. As an artist my concerns were often with the female figure and experience, and this has continued into my poetry. I was interested in the body and in pain as a subject for sculptures, and this is one of the main themes of this book. Writing poems about Frida Kahlo’s paintings allowed me to inhabit her world as an artist, to try to recreate the paintings about pain with words, as well as capture her vitality. I’d always used bright colours in my sculptures so enjoyed playing with her vibrant palette.

Her range is narrow, and I enjoyed that depth rather than breadth of subject matter. I like to explore one subject or set of images, to go deeper into them each time. It was a challenge to search for different words or permutations of words for her recurring images, especially the self-portraits and menagerie. I wonder if visual artists worry less about repeating subjects than poets? Take Bill Viola for example, there’s always water or fire in each video installation – he mines his obsessions and I relish that persistence.

SH And also how you balance between the physical and metaphysical strands that interweave the poems?

PP I’m glad you find metaphysical strands, because that ultimately is what I’m interested in, though expressed through the senses. Frida Kahlo was very well read and had beliefs about the interconnectedness of all living things, which I share. I wouldn’t be interested in a purely physical or empirical world, there has to be a spiritual dimension to it for me. But I didn’t set out to say anything in particular, just to imbue the poems with the ideas about the natural world that informed her paintings, to be true to her, and to convey her life force. My aim is to make my poems as alive as I can and she seemed to be a good subject to help me do that. I’ll never forget when I saw Self-Portrait with Monkey in the flesh (the dark green one Madonna owns), her eyes looked right into me as if she was still alive.

SH Frida Kahlo and her work have occupied a prominant position in the mythologising of artist and creation for many decades, how did you approach writing about such an iconic painter and her paintings?

PP The first poem I wrote, ten years ago, was ‘Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (I)’, and the same day I also wrote ‘Remembrance of an Open Wound’. I thought that writing about the paintings of these titles might be a way for me to write about trauma and sex. I had just finished writing The Zoo Father, my second collection, which is about the legacy of child abuse. Kahlo suffered a near-fatal street accident when she was a teenager, when a bus handrail pierced her abdomen and exited her vagina. This accident, which was a kind of rape, left her disabled and unable to have children. I identified with this but thought I could explore the subject through the imagery of the accident, without having to be confessional.

SH At what stage did you realise the poems would make up an entire collection?

PP I’d written fourteen and published them in a pamphlet The Wounded Deer in 2005, and thought that was it. Then in 2006 I started looking at her paintings again. I’d been to Mexico a few times and seen Without Hope in the Dolores Olmedo Museum in Mexico City. I wrote a poem in response to that and then wrote my first ‘What the Water Gave Me’ poem – a little one about her daughter being the bathwater. There are six about the title painting now, but that little poem seemed to open things up again, make them fluid. I wanted to write more about the bathwater – it’s a strange painting which I can look at for hours, its subject seems to be the imagination, with all those scenes from her life and paintings floating around her legs like daydreams. She used to leave dinner parties to lie in her bath to soothe her back, so I also think of it as a painting about trauma and healing. It’s also very interesting because it’s a self-portrait without her face, we only see her legs and feet, but sense the head where we are, where the viewer is, looking down on them. Her body is fragmented and in a way her ego is out of the frame, which is a kind of release. I wrote about that release (brought about by paint) in my fifth ‘What the Water Gave Me (V)’ poem.

SH You say these do not intend to be a verse biography, although the poems sparkle with the inclusion of many details of her life. How much did the biographical details help or hinder the writing of the poems?

PP In my author’s note I say that it’s not a comprehensive verse biography, but it is biographical through the paintings. I used the frame of her life as the structure of the book, from pre-birth to death, and the poems are roughly chronological in order. They chart her polio as a child, the street accident, her marriage to Diego Rivera, her miscarriages, his infidelities, her self-portraits, portraits of animals and other people, her still lives, her divorce and remarriage to Diego, the increasing pain she suffered from her injuries, her many surgeries and treatments, then her death.

My main focus was the accident and its aftermath and how she used art to withstand and transform pain as she underwent surgeries and treatments for her chronic conditions. This is what engrossed me. Lots of details of her life are missing in my collection as there was no point in my dutifully including everything; that wasn’t what I was after. So I was never hindered by those. The biography was a structure to give the book a story and a plot. I loved reading all the books that have been written about her.

SH Within the theme of the book, and the close refernce to the paintins, the poems are hugely varied in style and tone. What poetry did you read when you were writing these poems?

PP Over the ten years I read very widely. I travelled a lot, including to Mexico, Nepal, Kazakhstan, China and Israel. I read a lot of work in translation, particularly by Alfonsina Storni, Amir Or, Zhai Yongming, Yang Lian, Ferenc Juhász, Paul Celan. I think the styles and tones must be varied because of the long time it took to write the book, but also because I brought different moods to it. I wanted to portray her despair and her electric joie-de-vivre. I also read a great deal of natural history and nonfiction books. The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon by César Calvo is a key book, with fascinating notions about the original fertile power of language. I like his idea about a word being a well which contains oceans, about words being chants or spells.

SH As a reader, reading the collection is a rich jungle-like experience, with a humidity of unfamiliar plants and creatures soaking my consciousness, at times this was almost suffocating, at others expansive and liberating. How did you experience it as the writer?

PP It was liberating. I love jungles, luxuriance, finding the names of new plants and fruits. I did have to research Mexican food and fruit, and how to pronounce them! Last week I saw some pitahayas in my local international supermarket, they called them dragon fruit – their Chinese name, I was pleased to see that they do look like leafy wombs as I described them in a poem.

SH Thank you, Pascale, for the expansive insight into the book, and for the huge reading list I now have!

If you can’t make her Lancaster reading, there will be others at 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.