Big Writing for a Small World

On Thursday March 24th we launched the fifth anthology of poetry by participants in writing workshops funded and run by English PEN. It was an electrifying evening of work by participants from all over the world.

In my group we had people from the Ukraine, Gambia, DRC, Cameroon, Pakistan, Uganda, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Jamaica and the Phillipines. Few of them had written poetry before and many were struggling with English as a second language. All of our participants were migrants, refugees, asylum seekers or undocumented, trying to establish a foothold in London and make a new life for themselves. Many people came with very difficult stories of why they had left their homes, families, children, farms and businesses behind. Some people have been here for many years with still no hope of being granted the right to stay. But everyone said that they had come to the workshop to write down their stories, to improve their English and to meet other people.

Today is a glorious day
today is me on the rota
today is a lovely breakfast 
today is Crust Day.
by Maggie

When I sit in my garden
and see the flower
beautiful to see
they take my worries away.
by Nanette

Our students bravely stood up and read their poetry out at the launch, telling us how they had never ever dreamed that one day they would see their writing published and have a chance to read it to an audience. The atmosphere in the room veered from laughter to tears as the writers read us their amazing work.

Yaya Yosof attended a PEN workshop with me over a year ago, he has continued to attend our workshops and one run by the Poetry School, sponsored by PEN. Yosof writes, What a delight it is/
To walk on the rain/ Clouds are your umbrellas/......

Lizzie Mendy-Thomas came to my workshop clearly already an experienced and committed writer.
Here is the opening of her poem about water :-

The PEN Readers and Writers Committee is chaired by Lindsey Mackie

Philip Cowell is responsible for administering the programme, raising funds, finding projects to work with and then liaising with tutors.

On this set of workshops the tutors were myself, Malika Booker, Nii Parkes and Shazea Quraishi. We each ran an 8 week course. My workshops took place at PRAXIS a project based in the East End to support migrants and asylum seekers all over London. I was also lucky to have a volunteer, Pat Hicks, who was invaluable to all of us each week on the sessions.

I read a poem by Tesfu, who sadly did not continue with the sessions. Here is the opening of his poem about food.

I hungered for plenty

you were little and never enough.

Drought and war made you scarce.

You appeared for lunch

then disappeared for a day or two,

you made me cry and happy,

your lack made me slim.

your plenty made me fat and miserable.

At the end of our 8 week sessions Jacqueline said to me, "You have taken us from sad to positive!" It was a very powerful moment. Everyone took photos and went home with their folder of work and a certificate of attendance, sad that we were not continuing but positive and happy with everything they had achieved. Their words had been heard, written down and affirmed, they had made new friends and extended their English.

I do hope that many of our participants continue with their writing and attend more courses. Philip is currently raising further funds and planning to extend this fantastic programme even further. We all wish him every success and look forward to taking part again. All our words resonate across the world.

Painting and poetry in Highgate.

It was such a cold week in October when I came across the Chewing Gum Artist, Ben Wilson, in Highgate. I'd just finished running a workshop at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution (HLSI), one of the oldest independent libraries in London. HLSI is a thriving cultural centre on Pond Square with around a thousand members. It has a wonderful library with over 25,000 books, as well as many old prints and documents regularly consulted by scholars. One of its rooms, the Colderidge Room, is dedicated to the great poet who lived the last part of his life in The Grove, a few minutes walk from the square.I have been leading writing workshops at HLSI for several years.

So I was delighted to see Ben working on one of his wonderful miniature paintings outside our door.
Ben Wilson has become a familiar figure on the streets of London in his one man campaign to draw attention to the quantity of gum spat out on our pavements. He believes that the gum is a symbol of our consumer society. "People have too much of everything today and so don't take care of the environment," says Ben.
I have blogged about Ben in a previous post when I met him outside the Royal Academy.

"Will you do a painting for me?" I asked Ben.
"Of course," he said. He handed me the notebook he always carries with him and asked me to draw out what I wanted. But of course, I'm a writer, so I needed words. I told Ben how Coleridge and Keats had famously met in Highgate and shaken hands. Afterwards Coleridge had remarked that Keats "was not long for this world." Had he felt the sickness in Keats' grip? Keats died at the age of 25 from TB. Even Coleridge with his heart problems and addiction to laudanum did better than that, dying in Highgate at the age of 62.
How could we fit all of this onto a piece of chewing gum a bit bigger than a ten pence piece?

"No problem," came Ben's cheery reply.Spoken like a true artist.
First of all he took a picture of myself and fellow writer, Judi Sissons, shaking hands.
Then we agreed on all the wording, including Coleridge, Keats, Highgate, HLSI, my name and whatever else Ben could fit on.
We agreed that Ben would ring me on the morning he started the painting so that I could come along and see the finished product.
I went home on the bus thinking, This is madness, there's no way he'll fit all that plus the handshake onto a piece of flattened gum.
In fact I rang him from the bus and said, "Maybe leave out Coleridge and Keats."
"Fine," he said, "let's see how it goes."
But I needn't have worried.
Ben Wilson is a tremendously talented miniature artist and the final product was absolutely wonderful.

These pictures give an idea of the scale of the work. 

What a wonderful celebration of writing in Highgate.

Ben takes care of his paintings, returning to them over the weeks to see how they are surviving. Kids come up to him and ask him to do their graffiti tags. He enjoys commissions and accepts donations. It can take Ben two hours to complete a painting, lying on the freezing cold pavements of London. He lies so close to the kerb he was even hit by a bus once.
I feel enormously privileged that I have featured in a painting by the Chewing Gum Artist.
And here is the link to the article in the Hampstead and Highgate newspaper.

Poetry, New York and Ground Zero 2010

We went to New York this summer to stay with my husband's brother, the sculptor Oded Halahmy. Oded has a loft in SoHo. In the past decade he has set up The Pomegranate Gallery and his Foundation for Art, promoting peace across the Middle East. Oded and all of his family were born in Baghdad and went into exile with almost the entire Jewish community in 1950. But Oded had never forgotten his roots. His gallery provides a venue for artists from Iraq, Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East

The main piece above and the sculpture in the foreground are Oded's more recent work, expressing his desire for peace in Iraq and protesting against plans to split the country apart.

This is UNTITLED, 2003-05, collage on book cover, by Qasim Sabti, a Baghdad artist, who rescued damaged books from the Academy of Fine Art after the lootings in the Iraq war. Sabti collected the covers of the ruined books and worked on them to create his collages. "These books challenged me to bring them back to life from their graveyard floor," says Sabti. "These works of art are my attempt to gain victory over the destruction surrounding us in Baghdad."
We have one of these wonderful collages in our London home, a piece of Baghdad  from where my children's father was born on the eastern side of the Tigris river.  The Babylonian Jews were exiled from Israel 2000 years ago and were the oldest Jewish community in the diaspora. 

As soon as we arrived Oded announced we were going to Smalls in Greenwich Village to read our poetry! Fortunately he had copies of my collection, Cutting Pomegranate, in his loft.   Smalls is one of the oldest venues for jazz and poetry in New York and they loved my English accent!
This is the second time I have read my poetry in New York. The first time was at Oded's major retrospective in 2003. I read a poem about his life and work and it was translated into Hebrew this year and published in a literary magazine in Jerusalem.

We were also in New York at the time of the US Open. I've blogged about how I find the perseverance of our great tennis players an inspiration in the marathon of writing a novel.We went to the grounds on Open Sunday and had the amazing good luck to see Jimmy Connors and John MacEnroe warming up.

The temperatures that week rose to 110F but even though we nearly died we had tickets to see Nadal play his opening game. He was stunning. Come on Rafa!

I have been visiting New York since 1976, before I met my husband and his large and entertaining family.   I always rode the Staten Island ferry from the bottom of Manhatten Island, past the Statue of Liberty. I have written poems about my visits to New York which have been published in magazines and my own collections. One of the poems ( see below) was commended by Fleur Adcock in a poetry competition.

Riding the ferry always gave the best view of the 'apple' effect of New York and also of the Twin Towers before 9/11. In 1999 I took both my children to the top of the Towers to the outdoors viewing platform. It was spectacular.
In 9/11 Oded watched the Towers fall from the windows of his loft. The dust reached his street. He had many friends who ran to his home to take shelter and stay over.


I returned to New York in 2002, one year later, on the day they stopped all searches in the ruins. The city was quiet, subdued. My taxi driver told me how he had been near Ground Zero on that dreadful day. "Ain't something I'm gonna ever forget," he said quietly. When I rode the ferry and looked back it was like there was a huge bruise in the sky in the gap where the Towers had once stood.

The Big Apple

one year later

Silver layers of the Chrysler building

glint beneath a May blue sky

edged with cirrus, the ferry engine burrs.

We lean on the end chain

yards from skimming water

fix our eyes on the gap.

New Yorkers under siege;

Check your mobile, don’t step on cracks.

A maggot wired for mayhem

blew its cover,  sprawled its belly

twenty blocks over pretzel stands

subway booths, ten thousand panes of glass.

You say, ‘My friend got out, 85^th floor

her dad escaped the Nazis

they don’t give in so easy.’

I gulp sea air; feel brick dust in my lungs.

At Ground Zero strings of paper cranes

dangle from church rails.

Each Japanese schoolchild

folded one hundred and fifty

for peace.

But Ground Zero is changing. New towers and a memorial centre are being built. And the mosque? The mayor stated in the New York Times the week that we were there, "It wasn't Muslims who brought down the Towers, it was Al Qaida."

Exactly.

Of course no trip to New York would be complete without some writing time in a coffee bar. This was favourite place, Aroma, corner of Green Street and  Houston. ( Gosh, I even sound New Yorkan.)

And this is my baristo - Sergio, originally from Mexico City. He's been in NY for seven years, but he's quite homesick. Hopefully he'll go back and open his own coffee bar one day.

Another of our favourite places to hang out is The Olive Tree on McDougal Street. Its right next door to Cafe Wha where Dylan played in the 60s. The Olive Tree shows Chaplin films on a continuous loop and they have slates for table tops and pots of chalk. Artists go there to draw. 

But I'm a poet so I dashed off a few lines.

New York New York. Truly a city which never sleeps. 

Roller boot disco dancing in Washington Square.

The view from Oded's fire escape, 5.00am on a hot morning.

The West Village where all the writers used to hang out.