Reading in London on November 20th
I'll be reading at Blacks Club in Soho with Jacqueline Saphra whose collection All My Mad Mothers is up for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Hope you can come!
Here's a link to the Facebook announcement:
Recours au poème
Some poems of mine translated into French for the review Recours au poème: http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/essais-chroniques/beverley-bie-brahic/marilyne-bertoncini
This is only the second or third time some of my work has been translated, in this case by a translator and poet I met last June at the Festival de la poésie in Paris. It is exciting and a little strange to see your poems in another language. For one thing, you read them like a stranger, and you are not impressed... I'm grateful to Marilyne Bertoncini.
Back in Paris late last night. This morning cold and sunny and city noisy. Spent the day catching up on email and chores and now I am going out while there is still some sun. Did I say I don't like daylight saving--or rather I wish it would stay October all year round. I think it is my favourite season.
Finished Anna K. Found it fairly boring at the end. That is, I knew the plot, so could hardly be carried along by what was happening to Anna. The interest, for me, was mainly in the matters that are secondary to the Anna-Vronsky plot; ie, Levin and the changes in his life and what they say about his character and his attempts to find a meaning for life. One senses that the answer in the book (Christianity, doing good) is only temporary. Already he's wondering about Jews, Moslems and Buddhists. Also interesting the changes in an agricultural society and how he, as a landowner, tries to come to terms with haves and have-nots. Plus ca change, plus...
Simonetta Agnello Horny is a lovely writer. Again the Italian bookstore in the Marais, Tour de Babel, has put me onto a wonderful author.
Wind and Rain
Full moon, the weather’s changing, and not for the better, unless of course you remember how badly rain is needed. The wind got stronger in the night—I love the feel of a cold breeze blowing across my bed: you pull the quilt higher and decide not to go and refill the hot water bottle with hotter water.
That was a few days ago, and it rained, hard, for 24 hours (the roof leaked in 3 places) and since then we've had strong, cold winds (the 'mistral'). Our neighbour Paul says normally it doesn't rain with the full moon, "but times have changed."
We are sitting in the Kayser cafe/bakery in Avignon train station having a sandwich and waiting to catch a late train back to Paris. The station is open to the winds and it is cold. At the next table a white dog in a red vest is being fed a bone--chicken?--on the floor at its owners' feet. Have had a quick look at the news--a mass shooting in Texas, financial documents leaked from tax havens etc. Business as usual.
Picking Olives
My brother-in-law is picking his olives and sometimes we help him (not enough, and he gives us oil; I think of the little red hen). But there has been no rain since April and the olives are dry, not plump and oil-filled. Still, like our nextdoor neighbour, he hopes to squeeze enough oil out of the (abundant) olives to provide oil for the coming year. Last year there were worms—from Italy—in the olives and the harvest wasn’t great either. “Every two years,’ my brother-in-law says, ‘there’s a decent harvest. It’s a pattern. The life of a peasant is really not easy.’
Our neighbour says he’s not even going to bother harvesting the olives this year, but then he goes out and does it anyway, because he needs oil for the winter. How would he eat without olive oil?
A beautiful morning, crisp, sunny with bands of mist stretching across the Plain.
Still reading Tolstoy, and a lovely Italian novel called La Mennulara, and when we can get it—the village shop having closed for the holidays—Le Monde. And a strange mixture of Ashbery, Heaney, Douglas Dunn.
All Souls
It is the Toussaint (All Souls) holiday in France. Kids are out of school for two weeks, shops shut down, including the one and only village grocery cum café cum Post Office cum newsstand in the village. So if we want a paper (home delivery has never been a French thing) we have to walk or drive to the another, bigger town. Yesterday we walked. It’s 45 minutes downhill to get there and then, of course, (steeply) uphill returning. The shop that sells papers didn’t have any Le Mondes left. Needing my daily fix, I went to the village and downloaded Le Monde and the New York Times. Never again, I promise. I read Le Monde; that was fine, but today I broke down and read the Times, an overdose of the latest Trump stories. Trump rates a very few mentions in the French papers, always either amused or just plain negative; basically you can ignore what’s going on in Washington, and think about the rest of the world, Europe, for instance, Spain in particular at the moment. The ongoing Brexit story. Or local politics. It’s amazing how easy it is to drop one narrative (Washington) and pick up another (Europe).
No internet for 3 weeks. It’s good. It leaves a lot of time for reading other things. Of course, sometimes I miss it. But what I really like is reading a real paper newspaper again.
Today we had a long walk towards La Roque Alric through the woods, back on the north side of the mountain. It was glorious, vineyards yellow (though there is a vicious wind, which is tearing the leaves off everything) and red, olive trees silvery green and blowing. The moon is almost half full. I need to ask our nextdoor neighbour what happens when the moon is half full—perhaps some badly-needed rain?
In the Vaucluse
Today I worked on my manuscript in the morning. After lunch Ikea delivered the new sofa, which we put together, but it’s clunky, looks heavy along the wall. Well, it was cheap and it’s the right length. Perhaps with cushions or a throw it would look better? It definitely looks less ungainly when someone is sitting in it, so maybe that’s the answer…
The garden is full of big cardboard boxes. A kid could make a playhouse with them.
Around four I went for a bike ride and got all the way to Champaga without stopping. Had to push the bike up the last switchback, then made it almost to La Roque. And came home in one swoop, but it’s mostly downhill. I was proud of myself. I think if I do this every couple of days it will get easier. The first time, last week, I thought I’d die.
Shopping in Beaumes, then Caromb. Home. Cooking tomato sauce and gnocchis, cheese and fruit. Then up to the village hotspot to check email.
No US political news for 10 days now, pretty much. It feels like the world is working again.
Poetry Prizes
It is warm in Paris this morning, perhaps unseasonably warm. I think I saw something about an unseasonably warm weekend on the news on the treadmill at the gym yesterday. The sun is squaring its angles on the church across the street (I have just made the bed, which is my working space, legs up, books spread around me, the ideal surface, everything at hand), the pigeons fluff up their wings in the sun, the crows visit a buttress, looking for scraps from the couple who live in an apartment on the roof, whose Virginal (I wrote Virginia, the computer corrected) Creeper is flaming red. I have just checked for falling stones. Workmen are peering into a manhole, open at ground level. Maybe they are speeding up my internet connection?
I am revising my Baudelaire translation, which I'd set aside for several months, and have returned to with fresh--and hopefully more objective--eyes. Some of it strikes me as good, and some needs more work. It will always need more work, of course. Like everything else. Like the poems I might send to a competition at the TLS, or I might not. Poetry competitions are a mug's game. If this one is hoping to pay its prizes and its judges with the entry fees, there will have to be several thousand applicants for the honour of being one of three poets featured on the poetry pages of the TLS in the Christmas issue. I'm thinking maybe not.
Meditation?
At night, before bed, I meditate for 15 or 20 minutes. I took a mindfulness class some years ago, I have the tapes, I still use them. The voice calms me. I probably know the text by heart, but it crowds out the other voices, somewhat. But an empty mind? No, I don't really know how to stop the voices which, depending on day-to-day circumstances, are quieter or more vehement. People worry about becoming forgetful...sometimes I think it would be great to be able to forget things, selectively, of course.
There are techniques to stop obsessing about stuff. I'm learning, but it's not always easy.
In Palo Alto I meditate in front of a window that looks over a tree-lined creek, at the sky, the stars (that shine most evenings in California). Lots of houses on the other side of the creek, but the trees hide them. The stars put things in proportion, things like time and the importance of my little worries and ambitions in the vast scheme of things, if there is a vast scheme of things. Here in Paris I meditate on a cushion on a bathmat on the floor of the bedroom in front of a window that looks straight across the street at a church--a very big church--with a complicated roof line and stained glass on several levels. I'm looking at something human beings made, quite a different experience, I think, from looking at treetops, sky and stars. Or maybe not so different, because, I suppose, as Larkin wrote in his poem "Church-going" (I think it's that one), even if you don't think you are religious, you can still respect the fact that churches are places with a serious human purpose.
Yesterday, coming back from a bike ride along the quais of the Seine, after we turned our bikes into a bike-share station on the Quai Voltaire, we walked up the rue Bonaparte and stopped in to the church of St Germain des Pres, which is being restored. The first stage, the choir, has been completed and is open to visitors. It is very ornate, very beautiful (though I also love the very plain vestiges of an old church to the right of the entry). The vaulted ceiling is a deep blue-black like a night sky with stars.