Paris, 30 April 2023

It is a quiet weekend, because Monday is a holiday: May 1, the Fête du Travail, Labour Day. Yesterday, out running errands, florists’ displays were full of Muguet, Lily of the Valley, traditional for this holiday, I even saw a cake shop with a chocolate cake in the window, lily of the valley in white icing on its top. It is sunny and, of course, if locals may have gone out of town for the weekend, there are lots of tourists as soon as you find yourself in a touristy spot.

I was in the kitchen, doing something for supper yesterday when I happened to look out the window and there, miraculously, on the black metal railing around the little balcony that overlooks the courtyard, a blue tit had perched. We have lots of pigeons but a blue tit? Never, as far as I can recall. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one anywhere in the neighbourhood, even in leafy parks. It felt like a visitation, a message about something. But then, as I was watching, off it flew over the rooftops. There must be a poem in this somewhere, but where?

'Celebration of Lament', 3 May 2023, Cambridge, U.K.

The poet Vona Groarke writes to say that the Cambridge (England) Group for Irish Studies will host a symposium on Lament on May 3rd at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Attendance (free) in person or online via Zoom; registration is required:

'Lament: A Celebration': a Cambridge Group for Irish Studies day-long symposium marking the 250th Anniversary of the celebrated Irish poem 'Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire' / 'Lament for Art O'Leary'. Talks, music, film and poetry honouring the Irish tradition of the Keen, and also exploring mourning rituals, improvised poetry, questions of translation, and women's poetic voices in the eighteenth century. Speakers include Prof Angela Bourke, and poets Martina Evans, Fran Lock and Paul Muldoon. In-person and online via zoom. Free, but registration required. Full details and registration tabs here: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/events/CGIS-Lament/index.htm

Back in Paris, 21 March 2023

I think we were lucky: our bus #63 was waiting at its usual stop, though the driver warned us that our route would be different with a first stop at the Institut du Monde Arab. Traffic was intense around the Gare de Lyon. Trash bins and bags piled high on the sidewalks, though fairly rationally piled, at least in the central arrondissements on both sides of the Seine. No rats at least in daylight.

And now, after unpacking and glancing at mail (the real kind, that doesn’t follow us), I went to the indoor market and bought some pot stickers for supper and Cantonese rice from the Thai place, and some broccoli and leeks and a branch of Tunisian dates from the Tunisian fruit and vegetable seller. Should keep us going for a day or two. Oh, and apples, russets that melt when I cook them, presumably because they don’t contain (?) too many preservatives. I like applesauce with yogurt. Cafes full of people having a drink after work. I revel in being back in a city where everything - I think this is true all over Paris - is five minutes away: groceries, cafes, bakeries.

I opened the latest PNReview, which had come while we were away, and found three beautiful poems by Nina Bogin, and an interview with the British poet, Carol Rumens.

Thursday 16 March.

A quick post, to recommend an excellent, short article by Craig Raine in last week’s Times Literary Supplement. It is about Rimbaud, in light of Mallarmé’s definition or description of Symbolism: “peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit”. Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces. Raine applies this statement to one of Rimbaud’s poems; I’m not sure I’ve ever read such a succinctly illuminating piece of criticism.

Sunday 12 March

I’ve been sitting in the garden in a collapsible deck chair for hours. First I was reading a very good book by Jhumpa Lahiri. Full of lovely clutter, but shaped, like the top of a chest of drawers scattered with things, but all of them held in a wide but shallow bowl. The sun was out, I dragged my chair to the back of the garden under the wall, protected from the mistral, which was blowing quite hard. After a while I got tired of reading, or rather I didn’t want to finish the whole book in one afternoon, I wanted some chapters in reserve. Not eat all the cookies at once. So I looked into the gravel around my chair and saw a weed, then another, and pretty soon I was down in the gravel pulling weeds, one of those mindless tasks that keep your hands busy and your head empty. My husband had put a vinegar weedkiller they said at the Co-op in Beaumes de Venise wouldn’t poison the ground and I didn’t need to weed. It was hard to stop.Yesterday we hiked with friends to the top of a lowish local mountain and I felt like spending a day in a deck chair and scooting across gravel pulling weeds, most of them just one or two blades of grass, hardly hatched. And now that the sun is lower in the sky I can see I missed a lot.

France, the Vaucluse, 7 March 2023

We’ve been in the Vaucluse for a couple weeks. I was thinking back to when we began coming in winter, rather than in the autumn, and how one of the reasons we changed seasons was because it had been so long since we had been here for the almond trees’ blooming (when we lived in Marseille we were often here). It is almost magical: everything is dead, the farmers are trimming the vineyards and olive groves and collecting the dead branches (the vine wood is good for fires) but there isn’t much sign of vegetable life, and then, across the bare countryside in the south, the almonds trees begin to bloom, some very early, others later, so they are staggered over a month or so, their colours white and or pink, or white shading to pink as the bloom starts and end. The bees come, swarms of them, there all of a sudden one morning in a tree, and so noisy! Right now in the vacant space out back there are at least 3 almond trees in various stages of bloom. Soon other plants will begin—yesterday, biking, I noticed the wild orchids beginning. Most of the almond trees are wild, or almost; only occasionally are there orchards of them, unlike in California’s Central Valley.

Bonnard painted a flowering almond tree. It is one of my favourite paintings of his.

Paris, 29 January 2023

It’s Sunday, 11 am, the sun is shining, temperature around freezing. Across the street, church bells are ringing, I suppose a service is about to start. I like the bells—who could not like bells? You really don’t need a watch here, there are always bells, sacred and secular, to tell you what time it is: time to get up, time to start work, time to meet a friend for a drink…

I’ve been listening to poets reading online, prompted by a comment I read about Plath’s gorgeous throaty voice. I’ve never heard Plath reading her poems, I thought, and of course, there are recordings online, and yes, she is a very good reader. This led me to Lowell, then Wilbur - a rabbit hole of poets-before-the-internet. I’ve also been listening to audiobooks: Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, really wonderfully read, now Ishiguro, also excellent, Joyce read by someone with an Irish accent, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The problem, if it is a problem, is that listening makes me fall asleep and miss half the story so I have to rewind and fall asleep in different places the next night.

Paris, 15 January 2023

Sunday morning, blue sky, sunlight bouncing off building facades. Last night, bedtime, pouring rain drumming on the zinc roof of the church opposite. We kept the window open at bedtime to listen to it. After living with California drought for years, I’m magicked immediately by the sound of rain, a sound from childhood in drizzly Vancouver, except then I hated it because it made my hair curl—frizz, rather. Now it soothes me.

My daughter has popped over from London; I’m trying to unload stuff on her, but no go, except for a kite I hung in a window until I fell for a bigger and more beautiful kite from Japan. Better than curtains and just as good, almost. She’s going to try it in her Hackney street-facing window.

Maybe a day for a walk along the Right Bank quay?