writLOUD on 8 February 2010 [gigs]

The next writLOUD is on Monday 8th February and features a panoply of Birkbeck’s writing talent, including Daniel Bourke, Tara Basi, Glenys Grant, Emma Dunton, Esther Poyer and Xavier Leret. Plus a mystery guest …

writLOUD is the place to be to catch up with what’s happening in the world of Birkbeck Creative Writing: listen to some great fiction and poetry, refresh yourself at the bar, and bump into old friends. There surely isn’t a better way to spend a Monday evening in the middle of winter.

WritLOUD Monday 8 February 2010, 6.30-8.15 pm, RADA Foyer Bar, Malet Street, London WC1E 7JN

poetry and song at the brockwell lido [gigs]

I have been invited to perform at the Brockwell Lido on 4th February. Drop in if you are in the area.

Poetry and song at the Lido Cafe

Writer/performer/lidoer Julian Fox (‘engrossing, endearing and wholly entertaining’ The Guardian) hosts a fantasmagorical cabaret of spoken word and music. This night of delights include the wonderful Francesca Beard (‘the queen of British performance poetry’, Metro) and, straight from Wilton’s Music Hall, beautiful French chansons from Robin et Tiffany, aka Jacques and Edith (that’s Brel and Piaf to you and me).

Thursday 4th February 2010

8 o’clock

The Lido Cafe
Dulwich Road
Brockwell Lido
London SE24 0PA

Click for map

02077378183

www.thelidocafe.co.uk

This Sky [Poem]

Many of the poems I have written about Guyana so far, have come from notions of the country, gleaned from my parents’ experiences; fragments of their stories and memories, that I expand and create a narrative around. But this poem came, while sitting in the yard at Mr. Ceres’ house, where I spent some time when I was in Guyana, last summer.

It’s only one sky, but this sky felt different…

This sky
black to nearly blue, like
sun soaked melanin.
One incandescent sprite, blinking among many,
and the Gods, peace pipe smoking.
Tropic insects, whisper a twilight
symphony, as home birds settle
on a land of many waters, a
nation of six races, a
home away from home

Not Smoking But Writing [Poem]

As it’s the start of a new year (new decade! Love it! There’s always such promise in new things), resolutions are bound to be floating about. So this poem is about smoking, rather, not smoking.. and writing. A response to  Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning.

NOT SMOKING BUT WRITING

Sucks. Not the way she used to

Long slow drags, full nicotine hit

Also best, first thing in the morning

And not smoking but writing

Poor cow. Eating like cake is going

out of fashion

refined sugar has turned happily into the

bestfriend

Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck I want to inhale

(still the dead one lay moaning)

diction will be the thing to save a life

And not smoking but writing

Protected: Do You Love Me [Poem]

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Great Expectations [Poem]

Is it too much, or
too unrealistic
to expect to experience,
deep joy on a more
regular basis?
A new baby, a marriage,
a son’s university graduation.
A hot air balloon flight!
Transformation.

Standing still,
the world spinning and spinning
as I glide, light headed
on the weft of a new height.
At least a few more times,
in this life. Or is this it?
Heading for the grave between
being asleep and being awake?

Promise [Poem]

When you were born, eyes wide open
deep brown enchanted eyes
I reached out eager arms,
your cradle

inhaled your scent, gazed as you suckled,
a gentle weight rested on softened belly

a chemistry that sealed a promise
a penny pressed into a palm
a fist that closed, and
holds fast.

This English Guyanese [Poem]

I am a English Guyanese
a Guyanese English
spinning you a soul food story
of culture and labberish

My parents did hail from Georgetown,
Guyana. My father
arrived first in nineteen-fifty
Nineteen-sixty, brought my mother

Number forty-eight George Lane
is where they set up home
across the road from Lewisham
A ‘n E, where I was born

I am a English Guyanese
a Guyanese English
spinning you a soul food story
of culture and labberish

At home the adult accents flowed
with the musical cadence
the so-called creole arrangements
of the Caribbean

of the African languages
from Ibo to Shabo,
passed through ancient generations,
cattle cargoed across oceans

I am a English Guyanese
a Guyanese English
spinning you a soul food story
of culture and labberish

I was raised on good an’ hearty meals
salt fish stew and sweet bake
pepperpot the national dish and,
Christmas-time was rum soaked black cake

Mauby, sorrel, and soursap juice
Roast chicken Sunday, rice and peas,
Green salad on the side
Dressed, with Heinz Salad cream

I am a English Guyanese
a Guyanese English
spinning you a soul food story
of culture and labberish

Friday mass at St Saviours School
The Lord is my Shepard and Ave Maria
Clap-hand Baptist on a sabbath afternoon
There’ll be light, there’ll be light,
There’ll be light at the river when we cross.

Bob Marley on Top of the Pops
The whole household called to sit
ceremoniously around the box
One, love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel alright

I am a English Guyanese
a Guyanese English
all you English fish and chips
played my mother chatting labberish

I am a English Guyanese
a Guyanese English
spinning you a soul food story
of culture and labberish

Creative New Year Resolutions [Resources]

Next week I am off to the Arvon Foundation for a productive and tranquil week of writing. I am taking the time out to work on my poetry collection. Yay!  I am so very looking forward it.

Yesterday, I blitzed the house. By this I mean I went into Spring cleaning mode (even though it is Autumn). Anything vaguely resembling garment type items went into the washing machine, I changed the beds, dusted, vacuum cleaned the carpets, mopped the kitchen, got rid of the Halloween costume that was still hanging about  from last weekend – the whole deal! I blitzed the place, and it’s tip-top tidy. During the week I sorted out the domestics (letters, bills, junk mail etc.) and checked and updated my diary. I am now ready and prepared to go off for a week, knowing I will be coming home to peace of mind and order. There’s not much point in retreating to a retreat only to be faced with chaos when the week is over, right?

Well this got me thinking. About what is possible when you put the preparation and the structures in place on the way to achieving a particular goal or ambition. The new year, is often a time when new ideas, new ambitions and aspirations spring forth, but we don’t always plan for them, moreover, set the right foundation that will increase the probability of the goal being achieved. With this in mind I have created an invitation to get prepared for those creative new year resolutions.

Click here for the details.

Warmest.

Esther

The Writer’s Territory [General]

“To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.” Allen Ginsberg

I came across this quote on Twitter, and I’m looking at it now wondering what made me email it to myself. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about voice, my initial thoughts were about the second half of the quote. In particular, “province” and “consciousness.” Province for me is about the territory from which a writer writes. The world view, that informs the writing.

I’d never really thought about the territory of it, I just write. Not until the session on my MA Creative Writing course recently, when this was the theme for the evening. It quite blew me away. What I have noticed, more strongly in the past few weeks are the themes that arise in my work. Women, sex, young people and childhood, motherhood and inner city life. I love all of these subjects. I genuinely think of them as really very interesting! Does that make me a self-obsessed narcissist? These ‘themes’ are my life, past present and no doubt future. That’s not to say, they are all I will ever write about, but as themes they recur. Who know’s I might come out with an off the planet science fiction novel one day. Yeah right.

I also write about, moreover from the perspective (because territory I think is mostly about perspective and point of view) of the post-colonial experience, with the eyes of a first generation black british woman. My parents are from Georgetown, Guyana. They came in the 1950’s, my father first and my mother in 1966. England is all I have known. But I know it from this, ‘dual’ perspective.

I grew up in a household, where the accents carried the musical cadence of a Caribbean culture. Some derivation of an African language that had been transported across oceans and through generations and transformed into so-called creole. An accent, that learned English while on its travels and mixed with the rhythms of Ibo, Ongota, Shabo, Kwali, Jalaa and an arrangement of other languages that probably, will never be known, buried in the hearts and mouths of my African ancestors. That which remained, sounds something like my parents, aunts, uncles and their friends.

I was raised on meals that consisted of fried Snapper, salt fish and bakes, curried goat and roti, dhal, chick pea channa, pepperpot stew and hearty soups with cowfoot and pigtail boiled together with the dumplings and barley. Rice and peas, fried plantain, roast chicken and salad, nearly every Sunday. Salad which I covered with Heinz salad cream, which is quite a funny parallel to my own amalgamation of culture. My father listened to blues and reggae, and of course calyso and soca music. So did I.

I mean, I wouldn’t say that British culture was a complete shock to the system when I went (out of the household) to school. Of course we had television. Top of the Pops, Coronation Street, the Generation Game, Are You Being Served and all of the news readers were white, Moira Stewart didn’t come around until quite a few years later. There were very few representations of black people, except for Nina Baden-Semper and Rudolph Walker in Love They Neighbour and other comedy programmes like Mind Your Language and Mixed Blessings. Not exactly bastions of positive or even vaguely realistic black images.

However, when I did arrive at school, 90% of the people outside of my household were white. Quite a different scenario from what I went home to every afternoon. Yet as children, we don’t notice or make judgements on these situations, you just try and fit in, which is naturally what I tried to do. My secondary school was a convent school in Greenwich, London, which has fairly affluent surroundings. My peers were mostly middle-class where I was in the top set and for most of my school life the only black girl in the class. There I tried less to fit in for fear of what my friends from the inner city area in which I lived, would say if I came dotting my ‘i’s and crossing my t’s when I spoke.

These layers of what I now coin as my ‘dual culture experience,’ very  much show up in my work. Not always in the subject matter but, certainly in it’s consciousness, or subtext. Julia Bell, my tutor at Birkbeck, impressed upon myself and my peers in that particular workshop, that the only way to explore and understand the territory from which you write, is to write. Only this, will reveal the truth of your world view. Good advice. Therefore, voice, I would surmise as a function of the territory of my writing. I like this because to me, it means I do not have to try to cultivate ‘a voice’ from some extraneous source. It is already there, within me, in my consciousness.

Ginsberg says, “To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. ..” Forget about having it heard! Well that’s all about to put my ego in check (ha!ha) My thing is all about writing to inspire others, otherwise, what is the point? But, how I interpret what Ginsberg is saying is that at, or in the moment of conceiving or creating the writing, thoughts and ideas about who is going to read it have to take a backseat. That actually works for me, because that provides a healthy level of freedom to simply write what is ‘there’ inside of me rather than attempting to write towards my own mind-made person or audience. This I think is different from writing to a muse, but that is another conversation.

If writing ‘without prejudice’ is to become a saint of my own province (territory or world view), that’s okay – I can work with that.