Kathleen Jones's Blog, page 65

Rain, rain and more rain in Manila

I'm back in England for a few days and appalled at the amount of rain that's coming down.  I was in the West Country at the weekend, just in time for 40mm of rain in 3 hours and the next door village completely flooded.  Now I'm in Cumbria and the river, which should be only inches deep for summer holiday paddling, is brown, fast-flowing and several feet deep.  The Mill is surrounded by mud and puddles, but at least it doesn't look like this.

While everyone here is glued to the Olympics, rain on an Olympic scale is falling in the Philippines.  My friend Mel U, who writes a wonderful blog called The Reading Life, has sent me these pics of the floods there, which are now covering more than 80% of the entire country.  He lives in the capital Manila, fortunately on higher ground, but most of the city is now underwater and he has posted graphic pictures of the floods on his blog.  It's hard times even for those who aren't flooded, since shops and all essential services are underwater, schools closed and transport networks non-existent.  And it's still raining.
Do check out his blog and take a look.  We're thinking of you Mel.

Tuesday Poem: Derek Walcott, The Schooner Flight

As I worked, watching the rotting waves come
past the bow that scissor the sea like milk,
I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,
by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,
that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

You ever look up from some lonely beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind,
my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.

Derek Walcott, extract from The Schooner Flight


This is a very short extract from Part 1 of Derek Walcott's long, narrative poem which you can read here.
The central character is a man called Shabine who is compelled to leave behind everything he holds dear to sign up on the schooner and go to sea.  The analogies between sailing and making poetry continue through the poem and you can't help feeling that Shabine is simply a fictional identity to enable Walcott to tell his own story of leaving the Caribbean, being homesick, an exile, and yet compelled to do it.

There's an interesting exposition of the poem and of Derek Walcott's work by Mary Fuller called Myths of Identity.

It's the 50th anniversary of Jamaican independence this week - Derek Walcott is from Santa Lucia originally, but I thought it would be good to have a Caribbean poet and I love his poetry.

For other Tuesday Poems from around the world, please take a look at the Tuesday Poets Hub and check out the contributions on the sidebar.

Tuesday Poem: Derek Walcott, The Schooner Fllight

As I worked, watching the rotting waves come
past the bow that scissor the sea like milk,
I swear to you all, by my mother's milk,
by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace,
that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home;
I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

You ever look up from some lonely beach
and see a far schooner? Well, when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
my common language go be the wind,
my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.

Derek Walcott, extract from The Schooner Flight


This is a very short extract from Part 1 of Derek Walcott's long, narrative poem which you can read here.
The central character is a man called Shabine who is compelled to leave behind everything he holds dear to sign up on the schooner and go to sea.  The analogies between sailing and making poetry continue through the poem and you can't help feeling that Shabine is simply a fictional identity to enable Walcott to tell his own story of leaving the Caribbean, being homesick, an exile, and yet compelled to do it. 

There's an interesting exposition of the poem and of Derek Walcott's work by Mary Fuller called Myths of Identity.

It's the 50th anniversary of Jamaican independence this week - Derek Walcott is from Santa Lucia originally, but I thought it would be good to have a Caribbean poet and I love his poetry.

For other Tuesday Poems from around the world, please take a look at the Tuesday Poets Hub and check out the contributions on the sidebar.

Talking to Sophie Nicholls about The Dress

Sophie Nicholls has achieved the E-book equivalent of  an Olympic medal with her novel The Dress.  I'm talking to her about her success over at Authors Electric today.......

And wasn't Super Saturday fantastic?  I'm not sporty, but here in England you can't help being caught up in the atmosphere!

Sophie Nicholls: The Dress - an e-publishing Fairy Tale

Today I'm blogging over at Authors Electric - an interview with the lovely Sophie Nicholls whose self-published novel The Dress was one of the e-publishing sensations of 2012.  I was very anxious to find out how she'd done it.  Curious too, to know why, as a poet published by Salt (one of the best of the UK's independent publishers), she had chosen to put her first novel out as an E-book without even bothering to offer it to agents or publishers.  Her answers surprised me. . . Read more

Edinburgh E-Book Festival

Today is the first part of the rolling launch building up to the First Edinburgh E-book Festival which starts on-line next week.  Lots and lots of authors are lined up to be in it.  Take a peek at the website and put the date in your diary.

This is the brainchild of Cally Phillips, one of the Authors Electric group, and it's also on Cally Phillips Facebook page, so please take a look and click the 'like' button if you want to be informed of the programme.

Botero's Fat Ladies

Woman Reclining
Pietrasanta's current exhibition in the Piazza is South American sculptor Fernando Botero's bronze sculptures of women and animals.  Botero is famous for his depictions of obese (the correct art term is 'volumetric') forms - he's not much noticed in the UK but elsewhere in the world he's BIG!  He has a house in Pietrasanta and works here quite a lot, alongside his Greek wife, artist Sophia Vari.  You either like his work, or you don't.  I prefer his drawings and paintings to the sculpture - they remind me of Diego Rivera.

Europa being carried off by Zeus

Two Figures (and two tourists)
Woman on HorsebackTomorrow I'm off to the UK again for a family visit.  Not looking forward to the colder weather - you can see from the Botero pics how hot it is here at the moment - but it will be lovely to see the kids.  Probably should write a poem called 'Packing the Suitcases Again'!!   Will I ever get to stay in one place for more than 3 weeks?

Tuesday Poem: Skinny Dipping at Santa Isola

The lake is the blue green of glacial melt-
water, the mountain, upside-down
on its wrinkled skin, rocked by
our naked plunge.  
                          The fish fry,
little cannibals, nibble my toes
and arms trawl bracelets of weed.
Deeper in, millenniums of dark water
plummet under the blue mayflies that dart
electric above its liquid geology.  I feel
the tug of invisible vectors, the chill
of ancient ice. 
                           Skin to skin,
I am fish, trailing weed, a floating leaf,
a sleek apostrophe curving through
the sun’s piercings at the innocent surface.





© Kathleen Jones

I know, I know, I should know better ......   Sunday lunch, wine, and then swimming with no cozzie?  At my age?    But it was so hot and the lake was so cool and there was no one else there.  And what fun it was!   Swimming in the wild is so different from swimming in pools, or even the sea.  You get a real sense of danger, of being a part of nature.   I've just discovered that in Britain it's become a kind of cult and there's a website devoted to it at http://www.wildswimming.co.uk/


The poem is part of  the diary in poetry that I began to keep when I first came to Italy last July - it's supposed to be a record of my stay here and I try to write something at least once a week.  Not all the poems pass the editor's pencil, but I'm hoping that some of them will be good enough to make into a small collection next year.  This one still needs lots of work. 

For more poems from around the world please take a look at the Tuesday Poem Hub which you can find at http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com  and check out the contributions in the side bar.

Will you please be quiet, please?

It's hot here, with a lovely breeze that springs up in the afternoon, perfect for a siesta on the terrace.  Neil brought a hammock back from Cambodia and the plum tree and the olive tree are just the right distance apart to rope it up to.  And, of course, you've got to have the right reading material.  When I tiptoed out and discovered he had fallen asleep reading Raymond Carver's Will You Please be Quiet, Please? I just couldn't resist the pic!

We're very far from the Olympics and even the sports mad Italians aren't giving it much attention on the news - it's all about the financial crisis here.  Several regions of Spain, and now one of Italy's biggest , don't have enough money to pay their staff and are requesting government aid.  The price of fuel here is now nearly 2 euros a litre and there are demonstrations and planned strikes.

But stretched out on the terrace, eating a bowl of  sweet cherry plums from the tree above us, it's easy to pretend everything is ok. What, after all, can small people like us do, except get on with our daily lives?  Neil is pushing clay around in the studio he's erected in the wood and I'm trying to knock two books into shape to get them out on Kindle in the next month or so.  But there's a strange atmosphere in town, less tourists than normal and apparently they're all spending less, which troubles the bar and restaurant owners.  Definitely a whiff of fear. 
 

Katherine Mansfield Treasure Trove

It's National Poetry Day in New Zealand, but I haven't a poem ready - in fact I've been too busy to blog at all this week.  But there is news of one of New Zealand's most famous writers and poets, Katherine Mansfield, which I just have to share.  A Ph.D student in London has found three new stories buried in the archives at Kings College, and one of them sheds quite a lot of light on the most mysterious period of her life - the birth of her illegitimate baby in Germany.  All that was known for certain was that she  became pregnant by a young musician, Garnet Trowell, that he wouldn't/couldn't marry her, that she married her music teacher and then left him on her wedding night and went to Germany where she had a baby that died.   The Independent had a big news item on it today, so it's ok to talk about it now.

This is one of those, oh, I wish!  moments.  How I wish that these stories had come to light before I finished the biography.  But that's just how it is.  Other wonderful news is that the family of John Middleton Murry have lodged the remaining Katherine Mansfield manuscripts with the rest of the collection in the Turnbull Library in Wellington.  Now everyone can look at the most comprehensive array of paperwork ever assembled relating to Katherine Mansfield and her life. 

My Mansfield biography still isn't available in E-book form, so I'm thinking of bringing it out myself later this year, perhaps to coincide with the publication of the complete stories of KM.  Why are publishers still so reticent about the E-book market?


Please check out the Tuesday Poem hub, for three wonderful poems from the shortlisted poets for the New Zealand Poetry Book Awards and take a look at the sidebar where contributors are posting other NZ poets for National Poetry Day.  http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com