Notes on a Writing Life 40
August 14 2022
Dear All,
Whenever another artist asks if they can use a line of writing of mine in a work of theirs, I feel a thrill that the words themselves will be re-used, re-invented, translated into another field. It’s like that with translation, too. Here is my work alive in another language, made ready for another society and readers!
Poetry can easily be hidden inside another work of art. My friend Madeleine Strobel has taken a line of a poem I wrote years ago and included it in the piece shown here. I hardly remember writing the poem, but am moved to think it speaks to her today. Another friend, Claudie Hunzinger, an artist and writer who lives in the Vosges mountains in eastern France, once created an exhibition of ‘burned’ poems: the words themselves written on paper she made from mountain flowers, then tied into little bundles, and their edges singed as if someone had tried to destroy them, or they had been rescued from a burning house. We make art out of fragments, remains, the left-over, the partially destroyed – and this somehow seems appropriate again now, as so much in our world is being threatened or destroyed. I have always liked the hidden and the mysterious. Words hidden in matter are like code, or magic spells. This goes back to childhood, when I believed in that sort of magic, and tried (in vain) to practice it. It’s partly play, partly investigation of what is. And poetry, made up of words, can be dissected, its essences recaptured, created anew by other hands, other imaginations.
I’m home in Key West after a summer of travel – England, Italy, France. Nothing about travel is straightforward – especially in the UK these days. But I do love European trains, and on a long day in late June, traveling by train through northern Italy, the Alps and southern France to Paris, facing backwards all the way and simply looking out of the window as train tracks, mountains, rivers and houses receded into eventual darkness. It was like looking back on a lifetime; and it was a time to dream, muse, think – whatever we call it when our minds slip into another gear – and wonder what comes next, and what forms it will take.
Meanwhile, “Leo, Elena, Rose” is available still at a bargain price at Amazon, and from Open Boat Press. I plan to do a reading from it later this year, in Key West.
Thanks for reading!
Affectionately, Ros