“Jungelize my Days” – Agnes Marton and Midori McCabe

Posted: July 23, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Interviews | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Agnes Marton is one of the poets who contributed to the anthology. Here, she describes her collaboration with the artist Midori McCabe  (whose recent projects include the wonderful book Estuary). With the kind permission of Midori McCabe, below are six of her paintings, capturing the flows and reflections of water. Unga is inspired by the Navigli Canal in Italy, Dieforella by Schubert’s song Die Forelle (the Trout), and Odori  by the Pacific Ocean.

Agnes Marton: ‘Jungelize My Days’

“What made my collaboration with Midori McCabe easy and enjoyable is the similarity between our personalities: positive thinking, searching for adventure and challenges, dynamism (to the extent of restlessness), colour- and playfulness, freedom, absolute honesty; keeping emotions in the centre of attention; making the best of all what we have; finding beauty even in tiny things (a flower, a cloud, a lucky charm) and feeling the immediate urge to show them to others in our own way… A 19-year-old Mauritian poet, Ameerah Arjanee wrote this about Midori’s work:

“Her paintings have a transmuting energy to them, like phoenixes repeatedly burning and being born. Or like rain falling and then draining away.”

“And it matches Midori’s own words quite well:

“Nature inspires me most. I often wonder why; even though ocean waves are repetitive and hit the same sand, they are never the same; I am fascinated by things like this. I would like to paint by nature.”

“On the other hand, just like Björk (whose world we adore; and who is the theme of my poem written for pop culture anthology ‘Double Bill’, to be published in 2014), we would do (almost) anything against boredom; we can’t bear staying stuck. You know the Kerouac quote: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…” (On the Road).

“We have special projects.

“The images of Midori’s paintings are transferred into high quality silk using advanced laser printer and non-toxic natural dye colours. They are called dancing scarves because they fly beautifully in the sky. They were also showcased in Milan this May.* Midori had another exhibition in Milan this April within the Fuorisalone Milan Design Week, with one hundred of her digital images in glass frame created by “Le Cornici Di Luna.”

“Her forthcoming project is the “Free Hand” Exhibition at the Gallery House, Palto Alto, USA.

“The poem T-shirts I designed myself (using some key expressions from my own poems) have been exhibited in France, in Germany and in South Africa.

“I’ve joined various poetry projects (most recently the Like This Press Austen/Bronte/ Shakespeare Anthology edited by Angela Topping) but I’m editing anthologies (confluences of poetry and visual art) myself too, together with American sculptor/designer Harriette Lawler.

“Midori began studying music and painting simultaneously as a child.  She works intuitively, combining colors, textures, and forms into a fluid whole until she can hear the melody.

“Although her forms appear to be entirely abstract, she derives them from elements in nature, books, movies, songs, or everyday objects, each becoming characters in a musical play on canvas. Her artwork is basically her emotional diary. Even when she travels, she always paints in her head… Whatever she sees contributes to her art… colours, forms, movement… so she takes a note, or a photo, or makes a drawing.

“Similarly, I collect impressions and words everywhere… Strange sentence structures, patterns of leaves, traffic signs, evocative names… they might be used later in my poems, sometimes distorted, most often out of context, surrounded by my own word creations. I love writing about mythical figures too, for example about the Icelandic eight-legged horse, Sleipnir. Midori told me about Furaibo, somebody who arrives with the instincts but flies away soon: and Furaibo moved in one of my poems, just like shimenawa, the ‘enclosing rope’: lengths of braided rice straw rope used for ritual purification in the Shinto religion. It happens that Midori doesn’t even realize when she gives me inspiration with a word or comment. She posted some photos of Hollow Bean Beach – and later I used this name in my own way as Hollow Dream Beach; she mentioned some strange ice-cream names and this is when I started to write my poem Flavours:

No bounderies in those dreams.

You melt in my veins

from plates and scoops,

scones and cornets, craters.

I’ll never lose your flavours.

Aileron chevalier des vosges du Nord,

pommes de terre nouvelles et girolles.

Lalande de Pomerol,

Arbois Pupillin,

Gevrey Chambertin,

Clos des Mouches.

Citrussy, Bramble & Hedge Sherbet.

Miraculum Mundi Fudge Torte.

Shaved Ice,

Firework,

Wind Chime.

“Midori says, outside Japan people seem to see more Japanese in her work, and more western in Japan… but it is fine with her. As a child, she used to admire the work of European artists, their vivid colours and free forms… however her brush strokes might have been influenced by the form of Kana, full of curves, taught by her mother who is a calligraphy artist. Now Midori uses this kind of brush stroke with various colours. If it is black and white, it may look like Japanese style.

“I grew up admiring the rhythm of Hungarian poems and folk songs. I formed my own diction step by step, I started the recreation of the language for my own purposes, mainly to express the magical knowledge (I believe) I have.

“In my highly visual, dreamlike poems I make invisible processes (cores of life decisions, changes of emotions, birth and death of doubts and fears, the inner fight between our noble selves and our beasts) recognizable, and smile at them, using my poetic inventions (non-existent words and expressions, distortions, unusual punctuation, ’langwiches’ – mixtures of different language fractions) and juxtaposition.

“I talk about mysterious beings, snakes proud of their new, glorious skin, leopards lying in the middle of the canopy dreaming about their new territories and running free in the sunshine, passages leading to different empires, timeless hills of our private Edens… The word-sparing, airy compositions are full of music.

“As I write in my poem ‘Trespassers’:

‘My enladdered words / leading to secret vaults / of your senses. (…) Our bisons on rock walls / before we go on trace.’

“Both Midori and I feel at home everywhere (and lost everywhere, just a little bit, in our own worlds), have friends everywhere, work everywhere. It’s a very reassuring feeling that people in each corner of the world understand our art. It gives us new energy.”

(The title ‘Jungelize My Days’ is from my poem ‘Attraversiamo.’)

*“DA COSA NASCE COSA” Exhibition at Sala Biagi, Libreria RIZZOLI Galleria, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II

“I’ve tended to inhabit them, rather than allowing them to inhabit me”: poet Susan Wicks on the figure of the mermaid

Posted: June 9, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Interviews | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Susan Wicks is a poet who broke new ground with mermaid imagery back in 1992, with her  poetry collection Singing Underwater (Faber & Faber).

Wicks’ poetry specialises in the growing, the intricate, and the bloodstained, tracing everything with careful attention to detail, from roughnesses of rust on a metal bath to specks of blood on a polished floor. She deals very often with mythical figures, in particular the toads and mermaids of Grimm and Andersen’s fairytales.

Mermaids appear throughout Singing Underwater, as the speaker sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to her daughter underwater in a swimming pool, vengefully collects dead creatures during a fragile relationship , and watches a young woman growing up as she takes a bath. Her poem, ‘Mermaid’, is reprinted at the end of this interview. Her poetry is rich and often unflinching: ‘murder is a modest little need / You can prepare for…’ one of her speakers says.

She recently let us interview her, and took the time to tell us about what the figure of the mermaid means to her.

What was it that drew you to the figure of the mermaid? Rather predictably, we’re interested in your poem ‘Mermaid’ in particular, which begins ‘My daughter lies in her bath, / A mermaid in two inches’, and the picture on the cover of Singing Underwater, which is a Romanesque mermaid carving.

It’s such an intriguing image in ‘Mermaid’ when the speaker sees her daughter’s  ‘small fronds of pubic hair / combed parallel like so much / emerald weed’. This sounded to me at once so natural a transformation, but I was also struck by the idea of hybridity in the intimation that the hair is plant-life rather than human…

“I was a great reader of Hans Andersen in my childhood, and I’ve always loved that story for its strangeness and feeling of truth.

“It seems incredible to me sometimes that this man – a contemporary of Dickens – could have had the psychological insight to create this story of a young ‘woman’ forced to amputate part of herself in order to enter a heterosexual relationship. She comes from a world of sisters where everything is upside-down – where fish swim like birds and depth is measured in steeples – and enters a world where she walks on knives and is denied access to language.

“This is the ‘knife-edge’ I had in mind, and the seaweed image seemed to come naturally. I find it really interesting that you experience this image as a ‘natural transformation’. It seems to be understood intuitively by female readers, but when I was working on my final manuscript I had to fight a small but fierce battle with Christopher Reid, my then editor at Faber, to be allowed to keep that word ‘emerald’. (With hindsight, I can see it’s an image that would challenge most male imaginings of female nudity!)

“But it was Christopher, that same wonderfully scrupulous editor, who had the inspired idea for the book’s cover image – a Romanesque carving of a mermaid from Vézelay – so much in tune with the French Romanesque references in another poem, ‘Eve at Autun’.

“Yes, I think there is a rather strange embrace of the natural world – vegetable as well as animal. Again, I think it’s one that I – perhaps in common with many women, and maybe a number of men as well – enter into intuitively, and only later learn to feel embarrassed by.

“We are constantly fed stylised sexual images, and the result is oddly dehumanised and synthetic. Like Proust and Gide, I’ve seen no reason to censor the self-seeded plants and trees.”

 One of the most noticeable themes in Singing Underwater is maternity. Some of the images you use to describe this are powerfully unsettling (‘In my kettle I have a long head. / My nose swells like a drop of metal…’), and so many of them involve underwater transformations.

Could you tell us more about this train of imagery linking maternity, bodily transformation, and the sea?

“Maternity and family relationships have always been an important theme in my work. When I wrote most of the poems in Singing Underwater my daughters were quite young – about 11 and 8 – and Mara Bergman, a younger poet friend of mine, was just pregnant with her second child.

“Having a baby was the most overwhelming thing I’ve ever experienced: I was in no way domestic or ‘maternal’, and totally unprepared for it, angry too at what seemed a convenient social conspiracy of silence.

“Perhaps water was a way of softening that – for myself as much as for the reader: things naturally change their shape under water, partly freed of gravity or bent by diffracted light. I found the bodily transformations of pregnancy interesting – as I do the age-related transformations as I get older.

“They were an oblique way of approaching the mental transformations, the necessary adjustments (and demotion!) of one’s own identity in motherhood, which felt so huge.

“Now my elder daughter is expecting her first child in August, and I find myself writing new poems, vividly reminded of that time of sudden irreversible growth and change.”

In ‘Out of the Zoo’ the speaker looks after animals we would normally throw away or kill, for instance finding a dried up worm she says ‘I…made him a nest/ in the soft tissue / under my tongue’.

And in your poem ‘Swing-bin’ there appear all kinds of thrown-away things that could potentially be loved and cherished, such as ‘a twist of string (the kind my father used| to make us kites as children)’.

One of the most common features of the books we have reviewed for this project is that they all positively revel in listing all of the strange and wonderful debris thrown up by the sea. Could you tell us more about the presence of litter and detritus in Singing Underwater?

“These are in an unsignposted sequence of poems about a humiliating relationship, written by a vengeful ‘mermaid’ bent on riddance and destruction!

“And yes, a high tide can leave all sorts of unsightly and/or precious stuff. The lid of the swing-bin swings open and closed, letting you glimpse what has been jettisoned – some of it unexpectedly valuable, some of it an encumbrance – some of it about love, and some of it about sex or betrayal.

“I think the narrator of my poems was getting rid of a half-invented past she’d grown out of and trying to understand what she’d become.”

 ‘Second Coming’ is full of rats, caves, and conduits, and states at one point ‘you rid us of our children / piped them away cleanly’. How does the urban topography of sewerage, piping, rats, and underground rivers interact with, or map on to, the topography of the body (if at all!) in this poem?

“‘Second Coming’, with its nod from the world of childhood (the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which we had in a musical American version, on vinyl 78) to the ambivalent disturbing Messiah of the Yeats poem, conflates magic, music and sewage in that one word ‘piped’.

“Again, it’s an angry love-poem: I’m speaking as an inhabitant of Hamelin in a reversal of the myth: in my version the Messiah comes once to ‘pipe away’ the town’s children and never comes back, leaving it childless and overrun with vermin as a result.

“Yes, my mind’s eye did see urban sewers ‘under’ the Pied Piper’s mountain and rocks and sealed cave; I wasn’t consciously aware that those same images could be mapped on to the female body – but I was living in the US at the time and reading books like Alicia Ostriker’s Stealing the Language, and it’s obvious to me now in retrospect that they can.”

Picasso's drawing 'The Toad'

Picasso’s drawing ‘The Toad’

 You often use myths very subtly in Singing Underwater. For instance, in ‘Toad Rock’, are you evoking the Brothers Grimm’s tale of the frog prince?

The Grimms’ princess is at first frightened and repulsed by the frog, who invades her palace and lays claim to her in return for having dredged her golden ball from his pond. ‘Toad Rock’ ends with the rescued ball posing an invasive presence even though it is back in its rightful home: ‘the golden ball / sits denting my pillow / where my head should be, still dripping pondwater’.

Have mythological figures similarly become symbols of invasion for you? Do you feel that they lay claims on you, or the space of your poems, as well as feeling at home there?

“Yes, I was certainly thinking of ‘The Frog Prince’ in this poem! And yes, there is quite a lot of myth and fairytale in this book.

“But no, I haven’t ever thought of these mythical figures as invasive – more as a convenient mask, freeing me to express myself in a more elemental, less public, somehow less mediated tone. In Singing Underwater, as in the persona poems of my most recent collection, House of Tongues (Bloodaxe, 2011), I’ve tended to inhabit them, rather than allowing them to inhabit me – perhaps particularly because they allowed me to express anger, which, like many women of my generation, I’ve done only very rarely in my adult life.

“That being said, I wrote a poem called ‘Lebkuchen-Haus’ which appeared in Poetry London about a year ago, where the ‘I’ character is loosely based on the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. Again, I was writing half-unknowingly about motherhood – the poem is dedicated to my elder daughter and her (then) female partner – and it seems to me now almost to contain things I can only have been subliminally aware of at the time of writing. (You see how uncannily close to your stated preoccupations my own implicit themes were!)

“And yes, in the end maybe those mythical personas do lay claims on us – if they can lead us and our poems unwittingly into a deeper place.”

 

‘Mermaid’ by Susan Wicks 

‘Mermaid’ is published in Night Toad (Bloodaxe, 2003). It is reprinted here with kind permission of Susan Wicks and Bloodaxe

My daughter lies in her bath,

a mermaid in two inches.

As the water slurps and gurgles,

she giggles, sealed tight

into her tail, half-beached,

small fronds of pubic hair

combed parallel like so much

emerald weed.

Shall I go now, shall I

leave her, to her two inches

of ripples, long legs

forming like a woman’s

scallop of breasts, wet hair

flopping? But she slaps

her fish-tail on the bottom

and still wants me.

One day soon she will

demand a closed bathroom,

soaping her woman’s body

in silence, or quietly singing

and not call me

when she stands to step over

the side of the bath gracefully

as a dancer taking a knife-edge.

Singing Underwater and Night Toad

Singing Underwater is out of print, though it can easily be purchased online. Most of the poems in Singing Underwater are republished in Susan Wicks’ collection Night Toad (Bloodaxe, 2003).

About Susan Wicks

Susan Wicks has published six collections of poetry, three novels, a short memoir, and a book of stories. Her first collection, Singing Underwater (Faber, 1992) won the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize, and her second, Open Diagnosis (Faber, 1994) was one of the ‘New Generation Poets’ choices. Her third, The Clever Daughter (Faber, 1996) was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for both T.S.Eliot and Forward Prizes, and three of her other collections have been PBS Recommendations, including her most recent, House of Tongues (Bloodaxe, 2011). She has held a number of writing residencies in Europe and the US, including four at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.

She is also an active freelance teacher and translator, a previous Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Kent, where she taught between 2000 and 2008. Her educational background was in French and Swedish and her translation of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau’s Pas Revoir as Cold Spring in Winter was shortlisted both for the International Griffin Prize for Poetry and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and won the Scott-Moncrieff Prize in 2010. A second book of Rouzeau translations, Talking Vrouz, is due from Arc in spring 2014.

She is married with two adult daughters, and lives in West Kent.

Composer Leo Geyer and librettist Martin Kratz tell us about their opera ‘The Mermaid of Zennor’

Posted: April 10, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Interviews, Reviews | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

‘The Mermaid of Zennor’ is a chamber opera, performed to great acclaim in 2012. It was composed by Leo Geyer and written by Martin Kratz. More information about the opera can be found on the Mermaid of Zennor website and a video of the performance can be watched online.

Leo (L) and Martin (M) took the time to tell us (in italics)  all about moomaid ice creams, centuries old carvings, and what the figure of the mermaid means to them in the twenty first century…

‘The mermaid of Zennor’ is a nineteenth century legend, is that right? Can you tell us what drew you to the legend?

L: I think what really attracted us to the legend was the place itself.

Zennor is a small village in Cornwall; it is a beautiful place but also remarkably unchanged. The village buildings sit on a shelf almost on top of the ocean. You cannot see the beach from the village itself, as the land folds away so suddenly. At the centre of the village is The Church of Saint Senara, which is said to be at least 1400 years old.  Inside the church there is a chair with a carving of a Mermaid which dates back 600 years. Just below the villiage is Pendour Cove which is where the Mermaid was supposed to have lived. It is actually almost impossible to get down to the cove without some fairly heavy-duty climbing gear. So there seems something quite secretive about it. It is difficult to put into words but when you go to Zennor the mermaid tale suddenly feels very real.

M: Also, I think it’s true to say that the initial inspiration came from Leo eating a Moomaid ice-cream, while on holiday in Cornwall. He looked at the label (a sort of mermaid cow) and wondered what that was about, and checked the place out. Once you’re there, it’s impossible to escape the legend, the two seem inextricably bound up, as Leo was saying. I had a lot of trouble writing the libretto (in Manchester) until I visited Zennor, and then large parts of it wrote themselves.

Moomaid ice cream

Moomaid ice cream

One of my favourite passages in the libretto is ‘In the church above there stands a chair.| A carving, ancient and unreal.| In the dark, her face obscured,| scratched from our memory.’ Is this a description of the famous mermaid bench in St Senara’s church (I’ve never seen it)? Could you tell us more about the relationships between real and fantasised places in the opera, and especially the ways landscapes are created with words? I keep thinking of how Morveren keeps using words to change the landscape into a marine one, for instance by replacing the word ‘bracken’ with ‘kelp’ when she echoes Walker’s words: ‘Under the bracken tiny hearts| beat faster as I approach’…. 

M:  Yes it is a description of the chair! You should go see it, there really is something unreal about it. The echoing of the different landscapes (on land/ underwater) happened quite naturally. Something about Zennor, and perhaps the amphibious nature of the mermaid, lead me to write this constant echoing and mirroring of land and sea, reality and fantasy, memory and full presence.

L: The whole opera essentially explores the relationship between myth, memory and reality. The audience is left to decide whether the fisherman returns home with the mermaid or in his confused state walks into the sea and drowns.

M: In terms of how landscapes are created with words, those were my favourite parts to write, and my favourite parts of the opera. Those again are largely taken from my notes sitting on a rock in Zennor. I was really aware of the bracken hiding things underneath it. There was a distinct sense not only of you sensing the landscape, but also of you being sensed by it and I wanted to get that across.

 Could you tell us about the process of composition and collaboration as you worked to realise the legend onstage? Did the reality of staging it and materialising it change the way you understood the legend of the mermaid?

L: We spent a long time perfecting the story, and spent around a month and half throwing drafts around. I wrote some sketches, but didn’t really start composing the music till Martin had finished the libretto. When setting the text, I did have to take things away as well and occasionally reorder or reword (with Martin’s consent of course) phrases so as to work with the musical narrative.

I don’t think that our ideas of the story changed much when we staged it. But we were careful to consider the staging carefully when we were drafting the libretto.

M: Exactly, most of the staging considerations took place before I even started writing. The main themes of how we understood the legend, like that it was going to be a modern-day retelling, caught our imaginations quite early on, or things like the question of the tail, which we quickly decided to ignore…

Your image of shells splintering is also a compelling one. At one point as Matthew holds the splintering shells in his hand we hear ‘a memory’s edge is in his hand’ from both Walker and Morveren, denizens of two very different worlds. Can you tell us more about this image of the shells, and memory physically breaking through the skin? Matthew says ‘we are in some borderland| With these splinters in my skin’…

M: The ‘borderland’ is a response to the mermaid chair. If you look at a picture of it you’ll see the separation between fish tail and woman is this incredibly neat line, and I felt quite strongly, that in this day and age, we should know that those sort of neat separations are complete fantasy. So to make the mermaid ‘real’ it was important that the area between fish and human on her abdomen is not so clear cut, that the scales peter out gradually. In the end, the mess of tiny shell splinters remind Matthew of the scales on Morveren’s body, the way it looks on a ‘real’ mermaid, as opposed to the figure on the chair.

You talk about a ‘dramatic collision’ between the 21st century and the old Cornish legend. What does the mermaid mean for you in this context?

The mermaid bench in St Senara's Church

The mermaid bench in St Senara’s Church

L: I think mermaids generally are something we think of as characters of the past. Despite the age of legend, we wanted to capture how real the legend feels in modern day Zennor.

M: The opera also asks is there any room for mermaids in the 21st century. I suppose we are sort of saying there is (or we wouldn’t have done the opera), but now they are loaded with a whole new set of meanings: people’s responsibility towards the sea and the environment, ideas of storytelling and guarding our literary heritage (oral literature and written)… One of the most interesting discoveries I made writing the opera was that the logo for Starbucks is a mermaid. It would be a shame if the idea of the mermaid has been reduced to nothing but a paper cup floating on the ocean.

Biographies

Leo Geyer is currently on his 3rd year on the Joint Course at Manchester University and the RNCM, where he is studying Composition with Dr. David Horne and Conducting with Mark Heron. Recent projects include a commission for the Olympic 20×12 New Music Weekend at the Southbank Centre, an operatic aria for Opera North and a piece for the Manchester Camerata..  Leo has been awarded the SCYM Composition Competition 2009, DSO Young Composer Award 2009, Junior Trinity Prize for Composition 2009 and 2010, Finalist St. Giles Composition Competition 2010, Serenata Winds Composition Competition 2011, Rosamund Prize 2011 and the RNCM Gold Medal Award for Composition 2011. Last year Leo wrote an opera – The Mermaid of Zennor, which has been described by the Times as imaginative and beautifully shaped. Leo has conducted all four performances of the opera, including the sell-out premiere production at the RNCM in 2011 and the most recent performances at the Tête à Tête Opera Festival 2012 at the London Riverside Studios. In addition to conducting Manchester University’s orchestras and ensembles, Leo also co-founded the Constella Orchestra which has been described as one of the UK’s newest and most exciting student-led classical ensembles (London Student Newspaper, 2011). Constella have now completed their debut season, which has included a performance at the World Event Young Artist Festival 2011 and Beethoven’s Violin Concert with the internationally acclaimed soloist Simon Standage.

Martin Kratz was born in the UK, but his mothertongue is German. His poetry has appeared in The Rialto and Magma Poetry. He collaborates regularly with the composer Leo Geyer, and their work together includes the chamber opera The Mermaid of Zennor. He lives in Manchester where he is currently writing a PhD on the language of touch in contemporary poetry. An new article on writing a first libretto, will be forthcoming in Agenda.