January Writing Hours

Extra Homework from Kim!

This is our fourth year of running the January Writing Hours. We are now on Day 6 of what feels both like a marathon and a sprint, at various times throughout the month. This year Clare and I have S Reeson helping us with admin during the hour - transcribing our exercises into the chat for those that might have missed our dulcet tones the first time or drifted off (no judgement here - my mind often drifts away!)

Every day around 300 people have been logging in to take part. There is still something incredibly moving to me when I see people’s faces blooming on the screen. The faces still look like flowers to me, and it is still exciting to think that there are 300 people not only writing poetry, but reading a poem together. It feels like going back to the root of what made me love poetry in the first place, the moment when I read a poem so wonderful it made me want to write, or read a poem so perfect it stunned me into silence for the rest of the day.

At the end of today’s Writing Hour I shared a poem by Jan Wagner, translated from German by Iain Galbraith. The poem was called “Cheese and Onion Pasties” and it was published in Wagner’s 2015 collection Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, published by the brilliant Arc Press, an independent publisher based just down the road from me in Todmorden.

There wasn’t much time to discuss the poem so I set an exercise as home work. My friend and colleague Malika Booker calls home work ‘pleasure work’. Sadly I can’t say the word pleasure without sniggering like a fourteen year old so I will stick with homework for now! As soon as I read the poem aloud, I regretted not leaving enough time to talk about it properly. Here it is in its entirety:

CHEESE AND ONION PASTIES 
JAN WAGNER

I have a heart of stone, men say
but what do they know about stones
                                  MARIA BARNAS

what i know about stones is their weight 
in the bellies of wolves; and that on falling 
into the belly of a well they echo;
or how they seemed to ponder, one may night 
on the side of a hill, bathed in moonlight
and as pale as onions. what though do i know
of onions but their frocks, the way they sting, 
and layer by layer their retiring heart.

The first thing that attracted me to this poem was the epigraph. What a fantastic quote. At first we think Barnas may be admitting to having a heart of stone, until we reach the first comma but then she qualifies this - it is only something men say about her. In the second line, she dismisses this - “but what do they know about stones”. What they are calling stone-like could be something else entirely.

Maria Barnas is a Dutch poet, essayist and artist and I spent a happy few hours completely distracted by what I was supposed to be doing (preparing for January Writing Hours) and instead floating around on her website. The biog on her website says her ‘language-based work’ is presented in a variety of forms - as poetry, essays, films, art installations, objects.

I couldn’t find where the quote that Wagner uses in the epigraph has come from, but I did find this wonderful poem called “a tree you trust”. If you click on this link, you will be invited to read the poem whilst walking around a “tree you trust”. As soon as I read this title, I instantly bought into Maria Barnas world and that premise. Of course there are trees you can trust, and by default, trees that we can’t trust. How did I not know this before?

Back to Jan Wagner, one of the most important German poets of his generation, and also an editor and translator of poetry. I love this poem for the way it interacts so directly with the epigraph. Maria Barnas says what do men know about stones, and Jan Wagner says “hold my beer”. Well, not exactly, but you get what I mean.

The poem actually answers the statement not as a confrontation or to disagree or disprove, but by engaging with the argument on its own terms. I think he does this through the use of that small ‘i’ instead of “I”.I think with a capital “I” the poem would have felt in danger of starting in pomposity but it avoids this. The poem begins not with geographical facts or irrefutable information about stones, but in the land of fairytale - the weight of stones in the bellies of wolves, and the echo of a stone in the belly of a well. As I write this, I’m thinking about how the wolf and the well have a belly, how if the stone is standing in for the heart of a woman, then the heart of a woman can weigh down a wolf and speak in the darkness of a well. The speaker of the poem also knows how stones seem to “ponder, one may night /on the side of a hill, bathed in moonlight” and now the stone feels as if it is not just a stone, but a woman who is thinking, or more than thinking, she is pondering, and the stone (or woman) is ‘pale as onions’ which then leads us to the end of the poem, where the onion has both a frock and a retiring heart. That final word of the poem sends us back up to the epigraph at the beginning of course, and will send me back again and again to read and re-read the poem. A desert island poem I think.

And I haven’t even talked about the title, which is wonderfully English and strange (and is the same in the German original). What does this mean? Who knows, but he does have a couple of other food poems in the collection, including “Shepherd’s Pie”, “Quince Jelly” and the wonderful “Tea-Bag” which I’m going to share during the January Writing Hour this morning, completely impulsively, because I’ve just read it and fallen in love with it, and that is really what the January Writing Hours are about for me. Every year, they lead me back to poetry, and make me fall in love with it again.

If you would like to have a go at a writing exercise, I’d like to invite you to find an epigraph from a poet or artist or novelist you love and respond directly to it. Argue with it, reply to it, qualify it, dismiss it, expand on it, let it send you on a journey. This is a slightly different exercise to the one I set during the Writing Hours, because you will have more time to think about it and find an epigraph than the ten minutes that I give the brave souls that join us every morning.

If you would like to support a fantastic independent press that is unique in the UK in its range and scope of translated poetry, you could buy Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees direct from Arc Poetry by clicking on the link.

If you are tempted to join us for January Writing Hours, week 2 starts tomorrow, and you can buy a week’s ticket for £25 here or £70 for the rest of the month, or a “pay-what-you-can” ticket, all on the same link.