Remembering

I suppose there was hardly a person on the planet who didn't - at some point yesterday - remember what happened on the 11th September 2001. And people are still asking Why? I spent almost a decade living in the middle east - working for an arab broadcasting network at one point - and was always saddened by its troubled politics. The roots of the conflict that led to 9/11 go a long way back - some of them feeding on the genocide that led to the terrible injustice perpetrated by western colonialism. Until this conflict is resolved, I don't think anything will change. But I think the poets say it best. I'd like to put up two poems, one by Israeli poet Yehuda Amicai and the other by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and I've lit a candle (amnesty international) for peace.


Half the people in the world love the
other half, half the people hate the
other half . Must I, because of those
and the others, go and wander and
endlessly change, like rain in its cycle,
and sleep among rocks, and be rugged
like the trunks of olive trees, and hear
the moon bark at me and camouflage
my love with worries, and grow like the
timorous grass in between railway
tracks, and live in the ground like a
mole, and be with roots and not with
branches, and not rest my cheek upon
the cheeks of angels, and make love in
the first cave, and marry my wife under
the canopy of beams which support the
earth, and act out my death, always to
the last breath and the last words,
without ever understanding, and put
flagpoles on top of my house and a
shelter at the bottom. And set forth on
the roads made only for returning, and
go through all the terrifying stations -
cat, stick, fire, water, butcher, - between
the kid and the angel of death?

Yehuda Amicai
____________

Earth Poem
A dull evening in a run-down village
Eyes half asleep
I recall thirty years
And five wars
I swear the future keeps
My ear of corn
And the singer croons
About a fire and some strangers
And the evening is just another evening
And the singer croons

And they asked him:
Why do you sing?
And he answered:
I sing because I sing
...................
And they searched his chest
But could only find his heart
And they searched his heart
But could only find his people
And they searched his voice
But could only find his grief
And they searched his grief
But could only find his prison
And they searched his prison
But could only see themselves in chains.

Mahmoud Darwish

Learning to be Astonished

I've recently taken up the poetry challenge - to read, thoroughly, a collection of poetry every month for a year. Normally I dip in and out of collections and anthologies in a lazy, pleasure-seeking kind of way. For this one I've got to be more thoughtful. And I have to seek out new voices I might not have read rather than being tempted by the poets whose work I know and love, so no Pablo Neruda or Yehuda Amichai. I also have to choose a wide geographical spread. So I've been trawling through bookshops and across the internet for new poetry - and that is how I found this poem, though I won't be adding the author to my list of twelve.

Mary Oliver lives in the USA and is one of its most distinguished older poets - influenced by Edna St Vincent Millay and Walt Whitman. Her work is intensely spiritual (too religious for me sometimes) and firmly anchored in the natural world. Too much of it cloys, because there's always a tussle going on inside me between the romantic girl and the sternly realistic woman. The former loves sunsets and cute kittens, the latter wants nature with tooth and claw. Mary Oliver's work is rather too cosy - I want something closer to the bone - but the Romantic Girl was attracted to the following extracts, in which Realistic Woman also found some truth. It's the same message as W.H. Davies 'What is life if, full of care,/We have no time to stand and stare'.

"Every day I walk out into the world / to be dazzled, then to be reflective."

"My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."

—from "Messenger" in Thirst (2006)

Image copyright Rachel Giese Brown

The Party-goers of Peralta

A terrace looking out over the Mediterranean with a backdrop of Tuscan alps. Candlelight, a full moon, a warm early September evening. An Irish fiddle player and a banjo are rehearsing jigs and reels. Oceans of sparkling Prosecco are fizzing in our glasses and on the table rolled turkey breast stuffed with lemon, oregano and thyme, a wheat salad called Farro, Tuscan borlotti beans, and chargrilled aubergines marinated in olive oil and garlic.

A light breeze is ruffling the napkins and tossing the candle flames around in their glass jars. Wisps of cloud blow over the moon and a thunderstorm is flashing over distant mountains. It is the end of summer here - a return of cooler weather and hoped for rainfall to save the olive harvest.

Soon I'm going to be on my way back to England - this time with a lot of regret. I've had almost two weeks of sunshine and space to write - met some fantastic people - and fallen in love with Italy all over again. But hopefully I'll be coming back. Someone has very generously offered to lend us a house for a few months over the winter and, if I pay for a broadband connection, I can do my Open University creative writing tutoring on-line, coming back to England only to run dayschools and sort out the logistics of the new book. It all sounds too good to be true at the moment. Fingers crossed!

Sun, Sea and Sand Sculpture

As you might anticipate, in Pietrasanta they don't build sandcastles at the beach, they do sand sculptures! And, of course, it's a competition. Neil was asked to take part, but couldn't fit it in this year because of a previous commitment, but we did go down during the afternoon to see what was going on. The beach at Pietrasanta Marina is an arc of volcanic Mediterranean sand with the marble mountains of the Alpe Apuane as a spectacular backdrop.







Near the edge of the sea, whole families were helping mothers and fathers to create works of art in the damp sand, just out of reach of the waves, to last as long as the tide allowed. One English sculptor had dug two long, diverging trenches which acted as an optical illusion when viewed through a hole in a piece of wood. Next to it there was a giant scarab beetle.



Further along a Polish/Danish bunch of grapes, a German abstract based on the internal structure of a shell, and an Italian sea-monster dragging its victim back into a hole.







Another abstract consisted of seven circles dug into an area of sand, which was patterned with a rake. A single set of child's footprints ran diagonally across - which looked good but was entirely accidental! One sculptor had dug down into the sand to create the interior of a basilica roof - very intricate and difficult.



It all looked great fun and I hope that next year I'll be there, bucket and spade in hand, as the sculptor's apprentice.

The Poet's House

Not so much a house, more like a small shed. But it’s clean and dry. Rather like sleeping at the bottom of a well - windows high up in the wall, light filtering down.

It reminds me a little of the Katherine Mansfield memorial room at the Villa Isola Bella in Menton - small, viewless and without facilities. Holders of the KM fellowship were expected to work there during their tenure, but until recent improvements, that was impossible. KM’s companion Ida Baker, who had lived with her at the Villa, was heard to remark disparagingly, after its creation, that the room had been a gardener’s shed when they were there and that KM had never even been inside it at all. Now it is a shrine to Katherine Mansfield's memory.

The Poet’s House at Peralta has been, until this week, a store room. But with the hamlet filled to bursting with Irish guests for a sixtieth birthday party, every room has had to be pressed into service. The Poet’s House has been emptied of old furniture and I’ve just spent two days painting it out in the traditional white, blue and terracotta of Tuscany and then scrubbing the floor clean enough to take a mattress and a chair.

So here I am. It’s a bit of an expedition to the loo in the night and I’m borrowing a shower - just like camping! But there’s a tiny triangle of terrace at the back between the room and Neil’s workshop in the tower. I’ve put out a chair and table and it’s peaceful enough to write, with views down over the valley. No one knows why Fiore di Henriquez, who restored the ruined, abandoned, hamlet of Peralta, called this little shed the Poet’s House, but the least I can do for her is to write a poem in it and, if I can get it knocked into some sort of rough shape, I will put it up on the blog.

Vazha, Sculpture and the Misty Mountains of Pruno

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I've just come back from the studio of Vazha Mikaberidze, who sculpts as 'Prasto'. Vazha is a Georgian, living and working in Italy. His work extends from the figurative to the abstract and even the conceptual and his studio is crowded with examples. Huge textured plaster sheets stand against the wall, with seductive tactile patterns. Vazha takes a rubber mould from the trunk of particularly interesting trees. He then cuts it lengthwise and opens it out flat to reveal the patterns of the bark, selecting sections to cast in plaster and then in bronze or nickel. In another corner a life-size man springs from the wall, arms spread out, his jacket flying on either side like wings. This is Sergei Parajanov - a Georgian film director whose work and personal
beliefs put him in a soviet gulag for more than six years. The plaster model, bursting with character, is the maquette for a bronze outside the opera house in Tblisi.


Around the floor are beautiful abstract forms - many of them referencing the natural world. Delicate figures form a circle around a pair of feet, like a corps de ballet - a sculpture that was actually made as a stage set for a ballet. It is part of a body of work that is a homage to the choreographer Balanchine which Vazha is currently working on though the project is on hold at the moment until the situation between Russia and Georgia is resolved.


Vazha's stories are a reminder that, whatever the problems of funding in Europe, the politics of art are much simpler and less dangerous here than elsewhere.


Afterwards we drove up into the Apuane to have lunch at a little hill village called Pruno, where you can have a plate of home-made pasta with wild-boar sauce for 6 euros and where the wine comes in earthenware jugs.


The weather is changing with the full moon. After two months of searing temperatures and no rain, clouds are gathering over the hills, and everyone is hoping for some wet weather. The trees are scorched to brown and the rivers are dry. Tonight it is so humid our clothes are sticking to our backs and the mosquitos are attacking every square inch of skin not coated with chemicals. Not quite paradise - but almost!

Pietrasanta and the Anti-art Movement

The small town of Pietrasanta (the name means sainted or blessed stone) has been at the heart of the marble industry in Italy for more than two thousand years. The five thousand foot mountains that surround the town have been chiselled away by centuries of intrepid quarrymen and from a distance you can see glaciers of glittering marble waste slithering down gullies towards the valley floor. On the precipitous roads, marble lorries thunder past like mobile earthquakes, leaving a drifting fog of white dust behind them.

You can still climb up to the quarry where Michael Angelo found the block from which he carved David. You can still see the old building where he may or may not have stayed while he was here. Pietrasanta lives off the sculpture industry and there are also several foundries where sculptors from all over the world come to get their work cast into bronze.


Henry Moore had much of his work cast here, as did Noguchi, and now Barry Flanagan, Kan, Bottero and Mitoraj all have work standing in the yards. The infamous statue of Saddam Hussein started out here too.

Residents of Pietrasanta are descended from generation after generation of artigiani, skilled at realising the work of others and turning plaster or terracotta maquettes into life-size works of art. The Anti-Art Movement, which began with Dada, wants to leave the traditions of the past behind and deconstruct all our notions of art. It too, is alive and well in Pietrasanta.


I’ve just been to the opening of an exhibition of Antonio Luchinelli’s work. He is one of those who can trace their ancestry back through the artigiani and he is best known for making moulds for the world-famous Kan. Antonio is a skilled mould-maker - meticulously reproducing whatever he’s given. This exhibition of his own work - a statement of his personal espousal of ‘Anti Art’ - is a series of pieces linked by a play on words, though I have to confess that I couldn’t engage with it at all, even when the linguistics were explained to me.

But then I’m on the side of art - with or without the capital letter - and I don’t believe it needs to be elitist - anyone can do it on any level, like writing. But I also believe that some people can do it better than others. I know I’m making a qualitative judgement when I say that; I know that everyone is entitled to read or look at whatever gives them pleasure, but - in my opinion - there is a lot of crap out there fetching huge sums of money. And there are an awful lot of people, in art and anti-art, who share the Emperor’s tailor.