Category: bird of winter

‘Words as pathways to freedom’: thinking how language can hold and release trauma, reading in support of Gaza by way of Pompeii’s ‘entombed cities’ and ‘absent peoples’ at Verve 2024 in Birmingham.

Some blogs begin upbeat. Others have to work their way towards hope. This falls into the second category. But stay with me, and we’ll travel towards a light of reclamation together. Like most of you reading this, I’ve never been bombed. I’ve never had to leave my home and live in a tent in a refugee camp. I’ve never fallen asleep on the ground not knowing whether the people I love will be killed as we sleep. In some ways, there is a gulf of uncrossable distance between me and the Palestinians who are being subjected to genocide by the current Israeli government in Gaza.  

But in other ways, less so. That is, I have some insight into aspects of what Palestinians may be going through. Partly as a result of reading the firsthand accounts that people are managing to get out of Gaza and following videos and news reports. But also because my late father-in-law, the sculptor Oscar Nemon, lost twenty-four family members to the genocide of the Holocaust during World War II, including his mother, his brother and his grandmother. The man I met in 1980 had lived by then for forty years in the shadow of that loss, and been transformed by its absences. The drawing below is a mourning sketch by Oscar Nemon, as is the image at the top of the blog, written on a ‘Don’t Forget’ notepad which he used more than once for these memorial sketches.

The German branch of my own Messel family of origin was similarly truncated by genocide. As a teenager in the 1970s, I visited two elderly relatives, an architect and his wife, who had escaped from Berlin during the 1930s, and by then lived in Swiss Cottage. Like my father-in-law Oscar Nemon, almost all their family members were transported to their deaths by the Nazis as a result of having been identified by the Third Reich as Jewish.

I also have some understanding of the longer term psychological consequences of what is taking place in Gaza. This comes from my own history of growing up being subjected to the powerlessness, and violence, of childhood sexual abuse. For these reasons, and because I am a human being, it haunts me to know the current Israeli government has chosen to put a neighbouring nation in hell – and keep them there, with long-reaching intergenerational consequences, even beyond any ceasefire.  

In mid-February 2024, preparing to read as one of three headline poets at the legendary Verve Festival in Birmingham, with the brilliant, ferocious Nicole Sealey and Rebecca Goss, the Palestinian fight for life and freedom has been very present to me, as it has been to so many of us. Drafting the text I planned to read, I continued to follow news updates and saw the horror worsen by the day, as food supplies in Gaza became even more insecure, notwithstanding the trucks lined up and ready to deliver essential aid at the border.

With this in mind, I built my set from bird of winter to explore ‘words as pathways to freedom’ from poems which held both my own childhood experiences, and references to the current occupation of Gaza. I wanted Palestinians to be honoured, and kept with us, through every word I said in Birmingham’s Hippodrome Theatre. I needed the progression and evolution of my child self from oppression and injury through to reclamation and freedom also to articulate our and Palestine’s hopes for their nation. 

During the week before Verve, writing and redrafting my linking words, rehearsing the chosen poems, I started to re-experience childhood injuries arising from the abuse like those described in ‘remnants/silvae‘, which you will see below. Through them, my adult body expressed its memory of what had been done to me fifty years earlier. Rather than backing off, I kept redrafting and rehearsing, while also take time out to safe-guard myself and swim. I recognised the oppression that had overwhelmed me when I was too young to refuse it, but knew I was managing it as a side-effect of generating the possibility of transformation and healing.

As I took the train up to Birmingham on Friday evening, where I was also going to lead a workshop on colour for Verve on the Sunday, a violet wash of sunset illuminated the dregs of the ending day. The sky seemed to sing hope and promise to the muted greys and the greens of the winter landscape. 

I took this as an omen for my Saturday performance with Rebecca Goss and Nicole Sealey, hosted by fellow poet and former archaeologist Jo Bell. The next morning, after catching Holly Pester’s brilliant Verve/ Poetry School lecture, I carried my script for the evening to the canal side, and sat on a bench in the sun rehearsing quietly. I asked for the day’s energy to illuminate the darkness in which Rebecca, Nicole and I would perform together, and bring from it light.

The words which I shared with a packed theatre space in Birmingham, on 24 February follow. What Rebecca Goss and Nicole Sealey read was no less searing, as you’ll see if you follow the links here through to their work. Rebecca’s poems illuminate what it can mean to lose a child, and then and live beyond that loss. Nicole’s ask us to face how institutional racism wounds, and that it destroys not only individual lives, but also the societies from which they grow.

As you read my own words spoken in the Hippodrome Theatre, which follow, imagine me swinging a sacred sistrum out over the audience to initiate the poems, then overarm-bowling a red rubber ball among them to be chased by the resurrected ‘dog of pompeii’. At the end, as ‘vesuvius’ closed, I joined my palms in a gesture of prayer, raising them up to eye-level, and then opening my arms out to form the branches of a tree, symbolising new growth and a healing future for all of us in the theatre and beyond.

words as pathways to freedom 

alice hiller Verve Poetry Festival, 2024

Thank you for inviting me to Verve.  It’s heartening to be here, particularly at such a hard time, as we witness the genocide underway in Gaza.  Like many of us making our lives beyond trauma, I rage, and grieve, that what is taking place under the Israeli invasion will continue to impact the Palestinian people for generations, even after their land is restored. I have chosen poems whose imageries stand in solidarity with their fight. 

When I speak of ashes and rubble, of ‘entombed cities’ and ‘absent peoples’, let your thoughts go also to Gaza.  When I ask that our streets may be ‘muffled with mourning’ think of their streets also. But when I speak of growth and reclamation, be with Palestinian peoples, who are fighting for their own secure future. 

Plaster casts of the fugitives, who died in Pompeii, fleeing the Vesuvius.

For all of us facing hardships, even on a lesser scale, words open pathways towards freedom. I hope to share one aspect of this process tonight, through the poems of bird of winter. They respond to my experience of sustained sexual abuse in childhood, but also of finding healing beyond a crime that impacts millions of us around the world. Whether in therapeutic, creative or social contexts, arriving at language that can hold and release trauma is, of course, tough. 

To speak, we may have to re-enter spaces of near annihilation, and reclaim the selves and memories we left behind in order to survive. Recognising the real dangers this represents, my work also plays out the opposites of what I was subjected to. Where I was without agency, my poems summon it. Where I was left in darkness, I claim light. Where I was hated, I counter this with love for the child and the teenager I once was, and the woman we have become.  

Because I want the collection to perform acts of resistance, and restitution, as well as witness, bird of winter interleaves the sexual abuse by my mother, and its aftermath, with poems honouring what allowed me to come through. I also celebrate the nurture I received, and still receive, from the world around me, having turned outward towards it very young, with no secure home for shelter. 

In bird of winter, this sustaining communion is channelled through found materials arising from the buried Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. I was first drawn to their histories as a child when the abuse was ongoing, perhaps because I sensed in them mirrors of my own experience. I’ve been deeply absorbed by them ever since. 

Taking us beyond injury into healing,  found materials from Pompeii and Herculaneum seed all the poems I’ll share with you. ‘o dog of pompeii’, which opens bird of winter, includes a plaster cast of a guard dog, and the charm bracelet found on a child in Herculaneum. Engaging with them let the poem rise up and take flight. The dog is below, and the charm bracelet concludes this piece.

Erasing an epigram by the Roman poet Martial, that featured before and after images of Vesuvius, allows me to honour the beauty inherent to my body and spirit as a child. It also suggests what was done to me. 

In bird of winter, the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius is a recurring expression of the onslaught of sexual abuse. The rock, into which that volcanic ash and debris hardened, solidifies also into the difficulties I meet, trying to dig down into my past. Against this, three shrines rescued from Herculaneum’s harbour, hold energies which sustain my spirit. Through them, I was ultimately able to face down what sought to destroy me.

The poet Statius was born near Vesuvius. His work helped frame my reflections on what it means to live beyond rape in childhood.  Written a decade after the volcano erupted, a fragment in his long poem Silvae imagines when the landscape will have healed, but asks what this new growth could hide.  I translated his Latin and then interleaved our couplets.

As happens for many abused children, while I was growing up, and the crime was ongoing, most people around me looked away. Aged thirteen, I was hospitalised weighing twenty-eight kilos.

Water is my healing element. I cleanse and rediscover my body with every immersion, every length I swim. Photos of a mosaic found in the House of the Faun in Herculaneum were the starting point for ‘sea level’.

The image above is of the charms taken from the ‘burnt child’ found on Vesuvius’s shoreline in ‘o dog of pompeii’. She was awaiting rescue with others in the harbour area. Many were good luck charms, presumably collected for her by family members who loved her and wished her well in her life, at least until that fateful day when the volcano began to erupt. The child was also holding the beautiful vase photographed below them. These objects moved me deeply when I saw them, because they gave us back her life, and her humanity, and the tenderness in which she was held. When I wrote the poem, these objects nestled a kernel of hope into the harsh images of what was done to me.

This hope is also present to those people currently trapped in Gaza, as they fight to stay alive day after determined day, as they have had to for so many years now. The last poem I’ll read comes close to the end of bird of winter. The force of the volcano has been reclaimed to represent the energy needed for change. With it, we stand at last in a place of healing and growth. 

 

The poems quoted are all from bird of winter, published by Pavilion Poetry, who are ten years old this year.

‘I am a spring/ The storm enters her’: Sarala Estruch on making art that transforms the silencings of family, history and diaspora.

Few journeys are ever single or simple. Whatever we leave behind often moves alongside us – whether as a source of harm, or healing.  In ways that feel radical, and necessary, Sarala Estruch’s revelatory debut poetry collection, After All We Have Travelled, invites us to look with new eyes at the complexity of diaspora, and how the violences implicit in empire may impact successive generations. The poems also reflect strong energies that arise in speaking beyond the silencings of history – as Estruch does here, through fragmentation and uncertainty.  

Published by Nine Arches, and edited with great thoughtfulness and care by Jane Commane, After All We Have Travelled is a collection which speaks additionally to me as someone who lost their father in childhood, as Sarala did. This is something about which Sarala and I have talked about briefly in person, and in more depth within the interview which follows this review. Because I feel that both her poems, and the themes she explores, will speak to many of us with multiple heritages or languages, and complex histories, in addition to reviewing her collection in this blog, I wanted to offer Sarala a space to talk about how about how the collection came together, and the thinking, and reading, and living which informs the poems.

Review of After All We Have Travelled by alice hiller:

After All We have Travelled’s prefatory poem, ‘On Sound’, notices how it remains at a “frequency / our ears // cannot touch/ but // the body / hears”. In the speaker’s history, this reverberation is true of the separation before she was born (at the insistence of his family), of her Indian father and European mother. ‘Starting from a Dream, 1983’ observes the speaker’s pregnant “mother-to-be” waking at night in a separate room, in his family’s home.  By day the family appear “as though they are // already / watching her leave”. At the close of the poem the speaker’s unborn self rises up into an act of self-claiming that fuses separate perspectives into a voice that is simultaneously scattered, and whole: 

All too soon, the “single star” of the speaker’s father has been extinguished by his early death. Elegising his gifts to her, and honouring the inarticulacy of childhood bereavement, ‘the things that remain’ is made up of fourteen tiny couplets, laid out as seven pairs, with a central dividing space running between them. Enacting smallness, the worn objects hold a potent residue of love alongside the grief through which they have been cherished:

Speaking to a theme to which Will Harris, Sarah Howe, L.Kiew, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Nina Mingya Powles and others respond, this second section also documents the complexity of growing up of mixed cultural heritage, and the fragmentations and dispossessions of self that can ensue. In ‘Freight’, these include “believing people/ were praising the whiteness/ in me when they called // me ‘pretty’.” Set alongside this is the confusion of travelling alone to India to meet the plethora of loving relatives who nonetheless chose to be strangers during her father’s lifetime. ‘Home/Home’ begins “It is hard to feel Indian when this country is as unknown to you/ as you are to her.” 

Like a tide flowing back, from the midpoint, the poems shift towards reclamation as the speaker understands what she has lived without, and becomes more able to heal. ‘how to talk about loss’ reflects “for // decades i’ve been a river-bed/ bereft ~ not a drop of// what i was made to hold ~ ”. Responding, ‘To leap’ is one in a sequence of passionately alive love poems encompassing an energy of deep regeneration. Opening with an epigraph from Toni Morrison, ‘I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.’  this honours “pitching your strength/ at every atom that has pressed// you down & soaring”, then ultimately  “learning to live// with doubt, learning to rise in it;/ learning to love like that.” 

The collection closes with multiple reintegrations. Arriving at “Indira Gandhi International Airport” in ‘Return’, the speaker and  her Jamaican husband are told by the immigration officer that their children are “universal.”   ‘Dear Father’ records a sense of homecoming in India when the grandfather, who originally refused her and her mother, now welcomes her husband and children, making her lost father also present again with them: “These rooms pulse with you, motes/ of thought and feeling still in motion.”

Three powerful poems directly address the harm resulting from the British Empire. ‘The Residency, Lucknow’, documents “crumbling walls pierced with exit wounds.” ‘Vaisakhi, Vaisakhi’ contrasts the speaker’s family observance of the Spring Festival in 2019 with the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, when the British Army killed somewhere between 400 and 1500 of the people who had gathered peacefully in Amritsar to celebrate, wounding many more. ‘Grandfather Speaks (Via Audio Recording)’ documents how the family dispossession of their home, in the Punjab during Partition, remains unspeakable by him even in the present day: 

The final poem, ‘Ghazal:Say/ After Will Harris’, centres around a memory of the speaker running to meet her father in a “garden”, and cutting her knee. Her spilt blood is both historical fact, and a metaphor for the redemptive interpersonal transactions that occur through the reactions of art-making and art-sharing, and the energies that they confer on those who create and receive them. In a way that encapsulates both personal experience and the reverberations of history, the speaker realises: “All I know is you’ve been gone these long years and, at the same time, you haven’t,/ you’ve been right here.” The collection ends with loss and connection inseparable from each other, remembering a father and daughter who have moved beyond fixed time into the resonant indeterminacy of art and memory: 

Interview between Sarala Estruch and alice hiller

alice: We both started out trying to write novels – then found our projects translating themselves into poems. I found the wildcards, and subconscious dark woods of poetry helped hold spaces in bird of winter that simultaneously required, and denied, language. What led you into poetry from prose, Sarala, and how did writing in this form help you realise After All We Have Travelled?

Sarala: Yes, ever since my late teens, I had been wanting to write about my parents’ story – how they met, loved, and separated. I kept trying to find ways into writing it. For years, I thought the book would be a sort of historical novel set in London in the 1970s and early 80s (where my parents met and then lived together for several years). Then, in 2016, after reading Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, I tried to write the story as an experimental novel or a hybrid work of prose/poetry, but eventually realised that what interested me most – where the energy really resided – was in the poetry. 

I came to see that I was less interested in narrative progression and more interested in language, specifically language’s ability and inability to explore the complexities of human psychology and emotion. Saying that, narrative is still important to me, and, in some ways, my collection could be described as a novel-in-verse, but the experience of feeling and thinking beyond the ordinary day-to-day parameters is more important, if that makes sense. 

And yes, as you’ve said, poetry is a place where it is possible to attempt to speak about things for which ordinary language doesn’t suffice – inexplicable loss, complicated and prolonged grief, devastating personal, communal and/or intergenerational trauma. Poetry helps us in our attempts to articulate that which cannot be articulated, to create a language (or a non-language) of the unspeakable. 

alice: That’s such a beautiful and thoughtful answer. I love the idea of the ‘language (or a non-language)! Following in that train, during your launch with Nine Arches Press, you referred to the voices of the poems in After All We Have Travelled as coming from their ‘speakers’, rather than necessarily articulating your single experience. I see my poems as speaking through and with me, but coming from a larger hinterland. Would you be able to say something about how your poems are voiced?

Sarala: I think when I insist that the voices in After All We Have Travelled are those of ‘speakers’, I am trying to draw attention to the fact that, while I have drawn on personal experience and family history, these poems are not purely works of autobiography or biography. The poems are works of invention and craft; throughout the writing of AAWHT, factual accuracy was less important to me than emotional and imaginative truth. 

In addition, a huge source of inspiration for my work, beyond my personal experience, is the work of other poets. The poems in AAWHT were created in conversation with the works of writers including Bhanu Kapil, Marie Howe, Emily Berry, Sarah Howe, Sandeep Parmar, Kayo Chingonyi, Ocean Vuong, Will Harris, and many others.    

alice: Those are all poets whose work has also been crucial to me in different ways. Some of them, like you and I, also operate in more than one language. ‘Bouchon’, meaning stopper, explores your work’s relationship to language, and to the blockages which also shape it, but moves beyond them towards a space of freedom and speaking. The poem ends ‘There are no stoppers –’  How has this journey come about in your own work and life as an artist?

Sarala: These are all such excellent questions – thanks so much for your care and attention to the work, alice. I think, in terms of ‘Bouchon’, the poem is speaking about how language can get in the way of experiencing things, how language can sometimes ‘stopper’ the world by making us see things in a habitual way, rather than allowing us to experience things afresh, as children do, without language. This poem is about having a complicated relationship with language, fearing how language can ‘hold things down. Its false claim / to ownership’ (which, of course, can also refer to the colonial impulse of ‘naming’ that which is ‘unknown’, but which may already have a name). I think this poem is about embracing the joy of not knowing; how there can be real joy in being in a place where you don’t have the language to describe the things around you, which takes you back to experiencing the world in a sensory, pre-verbal way. I suppose, in my work, I am interested in exploring ‘the nameless / things, a poet spends her life chasing and / never quite arriving at’. It’s a way of accepting that we can’t know or control everything; that it’s OK to ‘just be’ – this is also a form of belonging. You don’t need to know everything in order to belong.

This was a new way, for me, of writing about unknowing, which is a strong theme of the book and of my life, if I’m honest. There is a lot about my family history and  about my parent’s countries and cultures that I don’t know and that I often feel shut out or apart from, since both my mother and father immigrated to England before I was born (from France and India, respectively) and, also, as a result of the difficult, painful things that families avoid speaking about and which are enveloped in shame, such as my paternal relatives preventing my parents from marrying and being together. However, in this poem, the speaker is embracing the state of ‘unknowing’, how it can be a fertile and joyful ground to stand on. 

Of course, another important theme of the book (and one that is even more significant in my pamphlet Say), is the journey of moving from being unable to speak (about trauma, childhood bereavement, and complicated grief) to finally finding a language and the courage to be able to voice these experiences and emotional states, so yes, that is also another possible reading of the poem – thank you.

alice: Developing what you say here, poems including ‘The Residency, Lucknow’, ‘Vaisakhi, Vaisakhi’ and ‘Grandfather Speaks (via Audio Recording)’ address the ingrowing silences and shames that living beyond catastrophic loss may precipitate for some individuals, and considers the ways that art-making can offer spaces of communication, as well as commemoration and witness, which confer agency on both creator and recipient. Was that something which was important to you? 

Sarala: Yes, very much so – thank you for putting it so beautifully. Attempts at communication and connection are central to my work, as are attempts to create poetry of commemoration and witness. Trauma is carried in the body and passed down through generations, so speaking about and sharing our experiences of trauma, in a safe way and in a safe environment, can create space for reparation and healing, which is so important – otherwise we become stuck in cycles of suffering. 

Thank you for everything you’ve said here, particularly about the poems’ attempts to confer agency on both creator and recipient – this is such a vital component of the work.

alice: It is a collection which means a lot to me Sarala. I feel changed by reading it, which was part of why I wanted to share my response to the poems and ask you more about them. In reviewing After All We Have Travelled, I was strongly drawn to your experiments with form, and the freedoms these gave you, which of course generate agency for both reader and writer.  Would you like to say something about this space of deep play, perhaps with reference to ‘Camera Lucida/ After Roland Barthes’?

Sarala: Yes, I consciously wanted to include a wide variety of forms in this collection, having been inspired by Sarah Howe’s Loop of Jade, in this regard – Howe’s use of multiple poetic forms really highlights and illustrates the points she is making about the instabilities and multiple possibilities of language/meaning, and also in terms of shaking up the English canon and creating a space where multiple poetic forms (originating from various countries and cultures), languages, cultural myths and histories can sit side-by-side and be enriched by one another. Howe’s work also creates a fruitful space to think about the many possibilities inherent in cross-cultural and mixed-race relationships, and mixed-race identities. I was drawing on all of this while writing AAWHT.

It was also, as you say, a space for deep play – a liberating and (mostly) joyful (although, of course, at times highly challenging) experience to write these poems in the forms they asked to be in. 

‘Camera Lucida’ was strongly inspired by Barthes’ eponymous text on photography and mourning. The poem began because I had a memory of seeing a photograph in my father’s photo album which carried a lot of significance to me. I told Sarah Howe (who worked with me as a mentor on these poems) I wanted to write about this photograph but I wasn’t sure how. She suggested that I read Camera Lucida. As soon as I began to read Barthes’ text, I very quickly felt the urge to replace the word ‘photography’ with the word ‘father’ or ‘lost father’. Barthes seemed to be, from the very start, speaking directly to my experience of losing a parent, while, at the same time, speaking very intelligently about photography. I, therefore, played with Barthes’ words and incorporated many of them into the poem (the words in italics are direct quotations lifted from Camera Lucida) – so this poem is, in part, a found-poem. 

Early drafts of the poem included several parts, which were short and fragmentary, like discrete photographs. Then my editor at Nine Arches Press, Jane Commane, had the wonderful idea of drawing faint boxes around the separate parts of the poem, so that they would visually appear to be photographs in a photo album. In addition, I asked Jane to typeset the poem so that ‘the photographs’ slowly fade over the course of the poem, so that the final ‘photograph’ is only faintly visible, evoking how memory (like photographs) fades over time. At least, that is my reading of the poem. I am open to other interpretations; I don’t think an author has absolute authority over the meaning of their work, and, in fact, there is often a lot in a work which the author does not know is there, since it is as a result of the work of the unconscious mind. 

alice: I agree very strongly with what you say about the role of the unconscious mind in generating and shaping the work we make. Continuing with the theme of the deep experiences which inform our beings, I wondered if we might think alongside each other about early childhood bereavement, which I touch on in my review also, and is something my own work addresses. One of the most moving and profound journeys of After All We Have Travelled is towards finding forms of words to hold this succession of losses, which travel alongside a child as they grow towards adulthood and find their parent is absent also from the new places that are opening in their lives. Could you say something about the process of creative reclamation which your collection performs, and the sense of nurturing presence it generates? 

Sarala: Wow, alice, I can’t quite express how very grateful I am for your careful, close reading of AAWHT and what the work is trying to do. 

Yes, the central journey of the collection is the process of moving through life as a child who lost a parent, then as an adult and, finally, as a parent oneself, and all of the different and cumulative losses of growing up and living without a parent throughout the various stages of one’s life. However, as the closing poem ‘Ghazal: Say’ suggests, even while the person who was bereaved in childhood has keenly felt the loss of their parent throughout their life, they have also, at the same time, keenly felt their parent’s presence: ‘All I know is you’ve been gone these long years and, at the same time you haven’t, / you’ve been right here’. 

The creative reclamation of After All We Have Travelled is the acknowledgement and expression of what bereaved persons know to be true: when you lose someone important to you, at whatever stage of your life, the person never fully leaves you; they are still always here, with you, within you – in your mind and in your heart. They are always present in your life, just as the loss of that person is also, simultaneously, always present. Expressing this perplexing, contradictory, and yet strangely beautiful truth gave me much solace, and I hope that readers of these poems will find a similar solace. 

alice: I personally felt that beautifully realised, complex, tender solace Sarala, and it is one of the many elements of your work that I wanted to bring to others. Finally, and to close, can I thank you again for the gift of your poems, and ask what you are working on now, and where we may hear you read from After All We Have Travelled in the months to come?

Sarala: Yes, I am currently working towards a second collection of poetry, as well as a work of creative non-fiction. Both continue to explore and develop themes of identity, (un)belonging, and loss, which are so central to AAWHT, although in new and different ways. 

In terms of readings: I am reading at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Lounge (online) on Tuesday 27 June, at Ledbury Poetry Festival on 1 July (with Stephanie Sy-Quia), and at Deal Music and Arts Festival on Saturday 8 July (with Jessica Mookherjee). I am also teaching an online poetry workshop on writing poems about memory and family history for Verve Poetry Festival on 18 July.  

‘black river’ or ‘fiume nero’: exploring how meaning and sensation move across the boundaries of geography with poet and translator Piero Toto – who translated poems from ‘bird of winter’ for ‘Atelier’.

‘black river’ or ‘fiume nero’ : the Arno by night.

Studying Italian at school in England, I never dared dream that I’d write poems that would be re-created in the language of Dante and Fiorucci, Italo Svevo and cappuccino – by the distinguished poet and professional translator Piero Toto. I speak to him here about the larger project of travelling curiously between cultures. We also explore how meaning and sensation can move from word to experience across the boundaries of geography. 

River Arno by day.

Writers, clothes, food, Pompeii from my school textbooks, films with people riding fast through Roma on scooters – as a teenager during the late Seventies, for me Italy was the land of gritty glamour. Somewhere I longed to visit. A language I wanted to grow up into.  I got my wish the summer I turned sixteen, when I spent two months in Florence. After running away from my family of origin, I funded my trip by working in London as a cashier in a supermarket by day, and then a nightclub-come-restaurant by night. By July, I could afford to travel to Firenze on a hot, jolting sleeper train, pleasurably full of rucksacks and backpackers. 

Leda and the Swan at the Bargello Museum, Florence.

Florence in the hot summer of 1980 was not today’s tourist Airbnb honeypot which I revisited in 2019 to take these photos. Aged just sixteen, I found a shadowy city where men wolf-whistled me me on dark streets, followed me on hot summer nights, propositioned me, invited me into their cars.  But it was also the city of blazing, luminous sunshine, the city of train stations. I met a girl from Catania in Sicily, working as a secretary. She took me travelling on weekends. We came to share a room, drank our morning cappuccino standing up at the bar together. With her beside me, I was beginning to find myself in a body that had known sexual abuse in childhood, but was now coming to feminity, coming to maturity – as poems like ‘imprint of a young woman’,  translated for Atelier by Piero Toto as ‘impronta di una giovane donna’, record. Because I grew up between French and English, and then added Italian into the mix, I understand something of the challenges of translation, which made more valuable the gift of being able to discuss them with Piero.

Firenze dopo la pioggia / Florence after rain.

ah: Thank you so much for translating my poems from bird of winter, Piero.   It was a huge honour to be translated so beautifully by another poet into his mother tongue. I feel I am meeting my work with new eyes, new senses. Can I begin our conversation by asking you to say a few words about Atelier, for readers who may not know its work?  When did it begin? What’s its mission? Who are the team behind it? 

PT: First of all, thank you for accepting my invitation to be published in Atelier. Like I said in our recent pre-translation chat over Zoom, I knew we had to do something together the moment I saw you perform at the Forward Prizes back in 2021. Luckily the opportunity to collaborate came with my involvement as translator for Atelier, one of Italy’s most prominent poetry magazines. It is produced by Giuliano Ladolfi Editore in two different formats, online and in print. It was founded back in 1996 to bring attention to the new generations of poets, but also to feature critical contributions on 20th century poets and poetry in translation. Throughout the years, Ladolfi Editore has also published monographs, conference proceedings and other publications dedicated to contemporary poetry, critical essays on poetry and new voices in the European poetry scene. The current Atelier team is made up of poets, critics and writers who all contribute pro bono to both the online version of the magazine and its print sister. I am part of the online editorial team.

ah: It sounds like a hugely important and necessary space of cultural transmission. I know you have been collaborating with Atelier to showcase contemporary English-language poetry in translation. You have translated Andrew McMillan, Peter Scalpello, Anthony Anaxagorou, André Naffis-Sahely and Golnoosh Nour so far, with more poets lined up for 2023. How did this come about and did you have any particular criteria for the poets you chose to translate? I noticed that a number of the poets you have chosen identify as queer poets, as I do myself. 

Bacchus by Caravaggio, the Uffizi Gallery Florence.

PT: The main criterion I follow is to include poets that are little known or completely unknown to Italian-speaking audiences. The process for choosing them is very easy: does their poetry speak to me? Does their poetics or collection introduce something new for the Italian poetry scene (in terms of form, content, language, imagery, etc.)? UK and American poetry are very different from Italian poetry, which tends to be slightly more ‘lyrical’ compared to the more prosaic tendency of English language poetry (with exceptions of course). The other question I ask myself is: in my current position of privilege, can I use my voice to amplify (other) marginalised voices? Especially as a queer poet, I feel that it is my duty to make sure that I can support other queer poets’ work by offering them a platform – if I do not do it, who will?

In the early selection stages, a deciding factor behind the inclusion of a poet was whether or not I knew the poet personally, as this would speed things up: as a matter of fact the first two poets I published are poets I am close to and whose work I deeply admire. The later selections were based on whether the poets were known to Italian-speaking audiences or whether they had an upcoming collection. Apart from the poets’ own bios, I hardly introduce the poets or their work, so as not to influence our readers. When we decide to include a note or a short explanatory introduction (as I did for Peter Scalpello or with your own poems) it is because we feel that it is 100% integral to the poetry itself.

Luminous with young, female possibility – Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ or ‘Spring’ in the Uffizi.

ah: I was very grateful that you should have translated my note about living beyond grooming and childhood sexual abuse with the poems from bird of winter. Bringing words to this space where there has historically been so much silence is integral to my creative project. You bring to your translations both your academic background as Senior Lecturer in Translation at London Metropolitan University, and your creative process as a poet who writes in both English and Italian. Could I ask you how you set about translating poetry, as opposed to other materials? 

PT: I have been working as a translator for almost 20 years, dealing with a variety of materials, genres and clients. Compared to commercial translation, where most of the time it is the target audience’s needs that must be kept in mind when translating (depending of course on your clients’ instructions), with poetry I constantly try and remind myself of honouring the original poet’s voice, their lived experience, and this is probably more prominent in my case because I am a poet myself and I have been translated too, so I know first-hand how it feels to undergo the process of translation, and once again I felt that if I am in a position to be able to lend my services to introduce new voices on the current poetry scene, then I must do that. Other poetry translators will probably say differently, but for me this is my main mantra when translating. That is why I tend to approach contemporary, living poets with whom I can have a chat beforehand or whatever, feed off their energy and intuition, and then try and channel that in my translations. Basically, though, I just keep my fingers crossed and hope that everything goes well!! [joking of course]

Piero Toto, translator, academic & poet.

ah: In my own case, I found that your translations brought out beautiful textures and subtleties that the English could not deliver in the same way, being a terser language. From ‘imprint of a young woman’ translating “the husk of your voice/ musked my being” to “il graffio della tua voce/ muschiava la mia essenza” laid the lingering sensuality of that encounter down onto the page through Italian’s long vowel sounds, and whispering, sibilant consonants. It was a true gift. Following on from this, what was your own route into translation, and how did you decide on this as part of your career path?

PT: I believe I can be described as a xenophile and a citizen of the world rather than belonging to a specific nationality, so my need to explore different cultures and different countries as well as being able to put my language skills to good use, to be of service, are at the core of everything I do. This has motivated most of my personal and professional choices. 

Inspirational mysterious Etruscan female figure alive with power for my teenage self from the Etruscan Museum.

ah: You are not alone in feeling that way, Piero. In an interview in the current issue of The Paris Review, [243], poet Rita Dove looks back on beginning to learn German as a teenager in Akron, and thinks of it relative to the process of coming to understand poetry.  Dove was a Fullbright Scholar in Germany, and is a fluent German speaker, married for many years to German writer Fred Viehbahn. She speaks as someone used to moving between languages: 

At that time I also started learning German – Akron had a sizeable German population, so our teacher was a native speaker. I realized that figuring out how to talk about poetry was, in some ways, similar to speaking in another language – with practice it was something I could master but, ultimately, true understanding of a poem happened on a level beyond words. It was untranslatable. 

Would you care to comment on Dove’s insights, both as a poet, and as a translator?

PT: We often hear the traduttore traditore [translator traitor] expression in translation circles, meaning that there will always be a level of imprecision in our translations and ineffability in the original pieces of work which make the act of translation seemingly redundant. I would tend to agree with Dove: the superficial symbols (the language) that we use to write poetry can merely represent what has been revealed to us, what has emerged out of our experience of the world. It is in the interstices of those symbols that we need to seek meaning: it takes only one vibrational deflection from language to reveal its limits (its untranslatability) and at the same time its power beyond these limits. Meanwhile, though, we must make do with the instruments at our disposal (i.e., translation) to get by. Because, what is the option otherwise? 

ah: I couldn’t agree more with you.  I love your formulation of ‘vibrational deflection’, and the idea of meaning occurring at the ‘interstices of symbols’. Thank you for those Piero. As I mention in my preface to this interview, I learnt Italian for three years at school as a teenager, and lived alone for two months in Florence the summer I turned sixteen. Before that, I had grown up speaking French to my French grandmother from my earliest childhood. In both cases, I understood without consciously articulating it that I thought differently when I was expressing myself in a different language. In French you say J’ai peur, j’ai faim, literally translated as I have cold, I have hunger. It is if these sensations come bodily to inhabit you, rather than define you, as they do in English. Developing this idea, I loved the way the lines of my poems were transformed as well as translated in your transmission of them into Italian. I wondered if you might say something about how this came about?

Hills beyond Firenze

PT: Firstly I think it is important to acknowledge some of the basic structural differences between languages, and in our particular case Italian and English, in terms of grammar, sentence structure, etc. Having said this, poetry is probably the one ‘language’ that allows us to deconstruct those very same differences and take some liberties in order to honour the poets’ voice. When translating extracts from bird of winter, I considered the ‘mood’ of the collection and the vivid imagery contained within it. For example, when translating the first verse of the poem elegy for an eight year old, where the English opens with the subject “she” followed by a verb in the present form + an adjective to describe how the protagonist is sitting, I turned that into a past participle [seduta dritta] instead to create a vivid snapshot of the little girl and to put even more distance between the reader and the initial scene, which for me sets the tone of the whole poem. In this way, the reader is slowly shown the image described in the opening verses, as if it were a slo-mo camera approaching the eight-year-old girl. It also introduces the repetitions of “d’s” and “t’s” to enhance the soundscape. Compensating with other rhetorical/stylistic devices for what is lost in translation is an essential part of poetry translation, or at least for my own practice. In this case, however, I do not see it as a loss. 

ah: I read ‘elegia per una bambina di otto anni’ as both a miracle of subtle empathy, and a truly generous gift. In her recent memoir, Dandelions, writer and translator Thea Lenarduzzi reminds her readers of the weft of indigenous languages across Italy, from Sardinian and Neapolitan in the South, to Friulian in the North, that underlie and co-exist with ‘standard’ Italian. Do you feel that growing up in a country where the construct of language is in and of itself so diverse, and at times also so politically charged, helped shape your own relationship to communication as a space of nuance, opening and possibility, rather than fixed meaning? I know you co-edited Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom: Training the Doers, which published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. 

PT: I guess you could say that. When growing up, especially in the heel of Italy – which is where I am from – you are exposed to dialects, which are languages in themselves, with their own grammar and lexis. They are imbued in the fabric of society and carry a lot of history within them: my own dialect comes from Latin but has strong French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic influences, for example. So code-switching (almost without realising) is a thing!

Etruscan woman in terracotta from the Etruscan Museum in Florence – one of Italy’s many cultural inheritances.

ah: And indeed genre switching. After so much generous support of the work of other poets, could we close with a few words on your own career as a poet writing in English and Italian. You published tempo 4/4 in 2021 with Transeuropa Edizioni, and have published many wonderful individual poems in Italian, German and English periodicals and magazines from La Repubblica to Queerlings and harana poetry. For readers who would like to read more, would you like to say something about the themes which your own work is drawn to explore, and where you see your career taking you next creatively? 

Il Duomo, Firenze.

PT: I recently completed my first poetry collection in English, which I hope will find a good home soon. I am attracted to the value and meaning of human relationships, of existence per se, and the way our experiences forge our vision of life. In particular, exploring sexual identity and incommunicability. Constantly shifting between languages, harmonies, sounds and meanings can be a rather messy business… as I said on another occasion, I navigate through multiple cultural and linguistic identities inhabiting the world on its margins. I am not sure where I will be creatively in the near future, given the many hats that I wear (as a bilingual poet, as a translation scholar, as a poetry translator…) but poetry-wise I intend to look at the overlaps between poetry and the visual arts, specifically poetry-music and its digital fruition. For those interested in my work, you can check out my linktree.

ah: Thank you again Piero. I will be first in the line to buy your collection. It can’t come too soon. And thank you also for your generosity in conversation and in translation.

If anyone would like to join me in an online, hands on workshop exploring bringing our bodies into creative practice, I will be facilitating one for Tsaa with Roma on 22 June at 14 00 BST. There are free places available for those facing financial hardship.

Chaired by Jennifer Lee Tsai, I will also be performing live and online with Padraig Regan to explore ‘Form as Radical Midwife: Queering the Page’ at the Ledbury Festival on Sunday 2 July, 14. 00 BST, 2023.

The link to Piero Toto’s translations of ‘black river’, ‘elegy for an eight year old’ and ‘imprint of a young woman’ for Atelier is here.

You can find bird of winter here.

The ‘fiume nero’ of the Arno seen from the bridge at night.

Inviting the reader to collaborate dynamically in the act of reading – an interview and essay by alice hiller with Arc Magazine in India on how working experimentally can confer agency around complex materials.

Back in March, when spring was only beginning in the UK, Dr Pragya Suman asked me if I would contribute a short essay and three poems to Arc Magazine. I chose to explore what working experimentally can bring to those of us whose work responds to complex materials, and was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce ‘her door is missing’, ‘and now came the ashes’, and ‘tessellation’ to evidence what I was saying in practice. Pragya and I also explored the topic further in a mini interview. The beginning of the essay is quoted below, and you will be able to read it in full, along with the other powerful material featured in Arc’s spring 22 issue if you follow the link at the end of the excerpt or here:

alice hiller in Arc Magazine: When I was growing up during the 1970s, England experienced intensely cold winters. Walking through the graveyard of the parish church with my mother, I would sometimes find small birds lying curled in the snow.  Seeking shelter within yew bushes, they had frozen to death overnight, then fallen from their perches. Although I could not articulate why at the time, the hunched shapes of their still, undefended bodies resonated with me. 

During those same years of unlocking the church, polishing its brasses, singing hymns on Sundays beside my mother, I was also being subjected to penetrative sexual abuse by her. We had moved together to Wiltshire from Brussels when my father died, the year I turned eight.  In the English countryside, surrounded by darkness and silence, my mother took me into her bed. I was not able to tell anyone what came to pass between us for two decades beyond the physical abuse ceasing. 

Writing bird of winter in my fifties, which gives creative witness to this crime, also on behalf of the millions who are subjected to childhood sexual abuse around the world, I knew the poems needed to exist in relation to the white spaces around them. I wanted them to communicate at a somatic and an instinctive level, through the shapes they made on the page, as the birds’ hunched outlines in the snow connected with me to suggest my own body when I was word-less.  I wanted the freedoms of more experimental poetry to open pathways to healing. 

Working visually as well as texually in bird of winter, I invite the reader’s conscious and subconscious selves to collaborate dynamically in the work of ‘reading’, conferring upon them an agency that the abuse denied me. Through this they become discoverers, rather than recipients of this complex material, and participate in the collection’s journey into meaning and resolution. They can also calibrate their depth of engagement, as I hope these three featured poems reflect. 

If you would like to keep reading, please follow the link below.

Link to Arc Magazine spring 22 with full essay by alice hiller, plus interview and 3 poems.

Speaking a rainbow: performing live at StAnza Poetry alongside Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka.

St Andrews, Scotland.

Note: this blog contains non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse in a context of witness and healing.

Preparing to travel to St Andrews, in Scotland, for the StAnza Poetry Festival 2022, I flickered between nervousness and excitement.  It was my first long trip since October 2019. The traveller in me was thrilled to be seeing new places after so long. But I was going there to speak about ‘Erasure – what cannot be said and how we say it’, alongside Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka. Writing respectively about Ireland’s foundling homes, and Romania’s orphanages, and my own childhood experience of being sexually abused, our work does not hesitate to enter complex areas, while being strongly committed to healing through creative witness. I knew the event would be a powerful one, and would need to be approached carefully. I spent the days leading up to departure working on my talk and performance, which you can read at the end of this blog or watch via the video link on the StAnza website which includes Annemarie and Maria’s readings as well.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin

To reach St Andrews from London meant five and a half hours of constantly changing landscapes, and a succession of passengers sharing the communal table where I was working.  Around York, three generations of women settled in beside me, the same beautiful bone structure playing like variations in music across their faces as they laughed and chatted.  Later, a mother came with a toddler, who rode firmly standing.  He was mainly eating crunchy snacks or wailing the extremely convincing siren on his police car. This repeatedly turned heads down the carriage as we sped through roadless fields. Finally, from Newcastle, a woman whose hair made a waterfall over her face as she fell into peaceful sleep. So many strangers in close proximity, after months of limited contact, felt bewildering – but wonderful. 

Maria Stadnicka

Towards Berwick upon Tweed, the sea became the train’s companion. Winds had blown away the grey that we left London under, and the waves were turquoise under a blue sky. Beyond Edinburgh, as we sailed through the air over the Forth Bridge, the clouds returned and the sea became shades of pewter and silver. This same wind was blowing hard as we disembarked at Leuchars, then travelled onto St Andrews. It was whipping up the waves as I followed the street on which my guest house stood, down to the sea which lay beyond a fence and low granite cliffs. 

After watching events on zoom from London, the live festival began for me  with fellow Pavilion poet and former civil rights lawyer, Mona Arshi’s, inaugural address in the auditorium of the Byre Theatre in the centre of town. Mona’s subject was the Nationalities and Borders Bill currently passing through the UK Parliament.  If passed into law, it will reverse many of the key tenets of the 1951 agreement on refugee rights.  These were put into law following the genocides of the second world war.  With examples from poets, and guidance from a barrister who has written on the proposed changes, Mona left her live and online audience in no doubt about the urgent need to protest the bill. She explained that it seeks to criminalise and penalise the seeking of refuge in all but the most narrow and restrictive of circumstances, and make it impossible for people to arrive in England without prior approval, even when the channels for this approval are largely absent.

Mona Arshi

Why our cultures are so deeply enriched by travel and migration was borne out by the headline event for Friday evening.  Kayo Chingonyi, who came to the UK as a child from Gambia, and now lives and teaches in Leeds, and Safiya Sinclair, who originated in Jamaica, but now works and teaches in the USA, shared the stage with the Syrian poet Nouri Al-Jarrah, reading from A Boat to Lesbos.  As an audience, we were on the edges of our seats for nearly two hours with a short interval, as you can see if you view the recording via the StAnza website, where Mona’s is also available. At other events, brilliant Irish poets included my fellow Forwards judge Stephen Sexton, Gail McConnell, whose The Sun is Open, was one of my most compelling reads of 2021, and Padraig Regan, whose Some Intensity has just come out with Carcanet.

Safiya Sinclair joining from the USA

The following morning the clouds were gone and the skies were blue again. From my room, I could hear the wind was still blowing hard, feathering the sea with a lace of frothed foam.  I’d come down to breakfast shaken by the news from Ukraine, and nervous about my own reading. I found Stephanie Sy-Quia already in place, having travelled from France to read from her debut Amnion, which responds to her families’ multiple heritages, reaching around the world from the Philippines through Europe and beyond. Stephanie was followed in short order by the Latinx-British poet Leo Boix, who was performing both his own poems and those he had translated. We were then joined by Saturday and Sunday nights’ headliners, Holly Pester and Luke Kennard.  To breakfast amid so much kindness and friendliness was the best possible start to the day. 

Holly Pester live on Saturday night

Then it was time to thread through the streets of granite houses back to the Byre theatre again, to catch Pascale Petit and George Szirtes talking with Yang Lian’s translator about rendering Chinese poetry into English. They discussed the very different structures of the two languages, and also the implications in Yang’s poems of working within a literary tradition that extends back 3000 years. As a bonus, Yian Lian was on hand to comment, and read one of his poems in Mandarin before a Saturday evening showcase. For the travel-starved among us,  Pascale and George remembered their own journeys to China to meet Lian, and visit the Forbidden City and Shanghai.

George Szirtes, Annie Rutherford and Pascale Petit.

Pascale had mentored me very generously under the Jerwood Arvon scheme when I was finding my feet as a poet. Afterwards, we caught up as we walked her back to her room through sunny St Andrews. Saturday morning shoppers and university students were beginning to head out into the town’s coffee shops, boutiques and ice cream parlours. Next it was back to my room to run through my own reading which was due to begin at 2.00. 

My unimpressed audience of seagulls

To steady myself, I practised my set for an audience of seagulls, who were more interested in launching themselves into the gusting wind from the chimney pots of the rooftops opposite. Within the performance, the poems fall down into my personal underworld of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, before climbing back up into the light of witness and healing. Reading what I was going to say to a sky of rushing clouds helped anchor what I was going to share into light and life. I wanted to absorb and transmit that energy.  I had read, and loved both Annemarie Ní Churreáin and Maria Stadnicka’s work, but finding Annemarie waiting in the auditorium by stage, and Maria guarding us from the screen like an angelic presence, further strengthened my hope that we would be able to create something of value together. 

Annemarie opened with the foundling hospitals and mother and baby homes of the Irish state, remembering those who had brought their babies there because they had no other options. Helping us feel their great loss, and the loss also for Ireland as a nation, Annemarie set it within the larger wound of the country’s forcible colonisation. She also reached back into an early, mythological past to create songs of healing. Maria Stadnicka’s work is likewise a place where institutional and state actions are examined – through the impacts on Romania’s population of Ceausescu’s and the Communist party’s rule. Specifically the ban on abortions, and the resultant filling of state orphanages, where over 10,000 children would contract HIV Aids. Like Annemarie, her work engages with great compassion, as well as creative strength, in bringing neglected experiences to the page and through this into our lives. 

Annemarie Ní Churreáin reading from ‘The Poison Glen’

And then it was my turn, to introduce and then perform the full sequence of the erasure poems in bird of winter. As I mentioned, you can see the video of us all, on the Stanza Poetry website until 31 March.  To speak out of my childhood darkness into the light and warmth of the Byre Theatre felt like an act of profound transformation.  Closing, I led a safeguarding exercise where we could join together, to honour the space we had made between us by our co-participation in the works shared by Annemarie, Maria and I. 

Once the event was over, and the book signings and warm conversations with the audience were all done, Annemarie and I realised how very urgently we needed coffee and cake to put ourselves back together. Heading out with our StAnza chair Robyn Marsack, we were stopped short by a broad rainbow. `It was rising like a realised wish up over the blue sea, that lay at the end of the street down which we were heading. In that moment, it seemed as if the light we had created together through our readings had assumed a visible form. 

Annemarie’s and my conversation was as warm as it was nurturing. After, I wanted to get myself out into the sea air and feel the hugeness of the beach backed by dunes. Walking across the sands, lit by runnels of water holding the last of the light, that sense of being supported by the living world stayed with me as the sun dropped and the sky dimmed to the glimmering purples and greys of a Scots mid March dusk.  The following morning, before and after seeing Emily Berry and Fiona Benson perform for the Poetry Book Society showcase, I discovered the ruined cathedral and stone-walled harbour, and climbed down onto the small enclosed beach below the ruins of the castle, where the water swirled in over the coarse granite sand and luxuriant seaweed. 

I had slept fitfully, still caught up in the energies of the places my poems had opened, but being out in the North Sea air dissipated those memories and helped me re-enter the present more fully.  Boarding the train south again, albeit with considerable regret, I took with me the certain knowledge that, through the sharing of our work, Annemarie NíáChurreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I had brought about an alchemical transformation that we and our audience would carry forward into new adventures.  

Below you can read the text of my performed set at StAnza, together with recordings of the individual erasures. Play them by clicking on the title as you read through. The video will be available until 31 March here: 

If anything you read is difficult for you, the Mind website has valuable resources. 

If you would like to read the erasure poems I have recorded on the page, they can be found in bird of winter via this link. 

Erasure: what we cannot say and how we say it : text of performance by alice hiller 

Is it possible to translate silencing back into sound? To voice complex experiences, we need first to access them.  As some of you know, bird of winter, offers creative witness to my childhood experience of being groomed and then sexually abused by my mother, but also of finding healing beyond this crime. Like many, who share my history, the impact of what was done to me meant I wasn’t able to talk about the abuse until my thirties.  

When I came to write about it in my fifties, through bird of winter, I found that making hand erasures created scratch cards through to my unconscious, and allowed some of the toughest, but also most needed, poems onto the page.  The erasures also generated the fractured narrative spine of the collection, as I’m going to show you, by reading them in sequence. 

Before that, I’ll say briefly how they came into being.  All bird of winter’s erasures grow from texts about Pompeii and Herculaneum, which have absorbed me since childhood.  As an adult, the eruption of Vesuvius, and subsequent, laborious excavations of materials buried under the volcanic rock and ash, became central to how I understand the slow, often dangerous, recovery of my buried past. 

Each of the erasures I’ll read was generated over a day, circling words and phrases, and blacking out, allowing the poem to emerge. I was letting my eye see, my hand move – before my mind could censor.  Working through texts read by many people, over the centuries, also gives communal witness to this global crime, which impacts millions of us. 

Visually, the erasures in bird of winter ask the reader to hopscotch from phrase to phrase. But even as the islands of words travel towards revelation and reclamation, they co-exist with the blacked out passages witnessing the unarticulated materials which are also present.  Reading today, I’ll tread carefully,  to keep us all safe.  If anything I speak about is difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to go. I’ll close with a short, grounding exercise, to bring us all securely back into the present. In the meantime, if in doubt, keep breathing!

Erasure is of course a function of trauma.   Our brains conceal or remove what is too dangerous for us to bear, especially when traumatic events occur when there is no support, as happens in the poem, ‘black river’, remembering my childhood. 

black river

when the fingers came
at night your weeds rose up

when the rocks arrived
you rushed my brain’s sluices

when the day returned
no hurt could surface

‘the stupendous task’, my first erasure in bird of winter, directly answers ‘black river’. From Herculaneum, Past Present and Future, it takes Charles Waldenstein’s demand for excavation of the site as the collection’s manifesto and call to arms:   

the stupendous task

 The second erasure,  ‘destruction impact landscape’ grew from the poet Martial’s account of the eruption of Vesuvius.  As it took shape, I realised the poem held its own before and after, divided at a midpoint, like mirrored reflections. Taken together they signal that something is not destroyed merely because it is attacked. 

destruction impact landscape

The next erasure,  ‘gardens fountains’, combines Columella’s and Flores’  descriptions of Pompeii and Herculaneum before the eruption.  Explorations of trauma often focus on the aftermath of the crime. It was important also to witness the unhurt place, or indeed the innocence of a child’s body, where ‘spring flowers blossom twice’:

gardens fountains

From this stronghold of beauty, we drop hard down into an underworld of darkness.  The next erasure, ‘eyewitness’ emerges out of a Times article from 1863.  Describing two figures revealed by pouring plaster into the voids left in the ash that fell over Pompeii, it also gave me a way to show my mother and I in her bed.  Like the excavations, these plaster casts are central to bird of winter’s understanding of how artworks manifest  out of voids or absences, and make visible what otherwise remains unseen. 

eye-witness

Coming next, ‘remove the solidified mix’, responds to the difficulties of creating bird of winter. It began as a description of  tunnelling down to the Villa dei Papyri during the eighteenth century in Herculaneum: Italy’s Buried Treasure. This work was often undertaken by convicts and forced labourers because of its risk.

remove the solidified mix

What happened down one of those eight hundred dark tunnels is documented in ‘and now came the ashes’, erased from a letter by Pliny the Younger. His description of Vesuvius erupting becomes also my mother and my eight year old self in a cottage in Wiltshire. I was given permission by Pavilion to reproduce this erasure which you can see and then hear below:

and now came the ashes

and now came the ashes

As you’ll see, the lineation of the  poem breaks down at its centre point, as my own life did following my father’s death in 1972.  Indeed, beyond the word “death”, there is no single or clear path forward, playing out how trauma refuses a conclusive act of narration but in its fragmentation draws us back and back. 

‘and now came the ashes’ is spoken by my child self, but bird of winter is in fact a dialogue between past and present.  Immediately afterwards, the sexual abuse I experienced is revisited in ‘this happened during winter’, erased from Seneca the Younger’s Natural Questions. Here, my adult self asks the reader for their empathetic engagement within a process of transformation:

this happened during winter

From this shared, mutually supported place, reader or listener and speaker can take their final steps down into the darkness of the repeated rape of a child by an adult, which is at the heart of bird of winter. ‘Gladiatorial training school’ works through an excavation report from 1766 to open a pathway to the deepest substrate of memory. 

gladiatorial training school

In “the hole/ the/ bolt/ passed” the secret assault by which my abuser controlled and subjugated me is finally out on the page. From there, only one more erasure is needed to guide us together, back up into the light. It’s from Fiorelli’s 1830 account of entering the ‘House of the Faun’, with additional words by classicists Alison E. Cooley, and M.G.L. Cooley.  

the house of the faun

As I end, I would like you all to place your feet firmly on the ground. Take some slow, comfortable breaths, in and out, holding in mind that “decoration/ in the shape of dogs/ gilded protecting deities/ with various colours and with gold leaf.” Breathing comfortably, we are passing together up from the underworld.  Greeting us is “a large festoon of flowers and fruit” created by our mutual solidarity – online and in this physical space.

Where silence is refused, healing can come. 
Thank you all for travelling with me today. 
When we stand together, we stand strong. 

The full source details of the erasures are credited in bird of winter.  My deepest thanks to those writers whose works I have used.

Thanks to Dr. Katie Ailes for the final photo.

If you would like to buy bird of winter to see the erasures on the page you can here.

‘When we stand together, we stand strong’ alice hiller by Dr. Katie Ailes

Welcoming back ‘the little cat’: holding and healing the hauntings and recurrences of childhood trauma within the artworks we make.

Trigger warning: non-explicit references to childhood sexual abuse.

This has not been an easy blog to put together. I have written, and redrafted its plain sentences, bare as winter branches, but like winter branches, holding within them the promise of spring. For those of you who are thinking of reading further, I should warn you that I write honestly about the challenge of living with a complex history, and the fact that resolution can seem hard to find. But I work my way through these hard places, to arrive at a point of hopefulness, which you will hopefully also reach if you stay with me and with these words.

In life, as in art, we’re encouraged to think in terms of beginnings, middles and endings.  Progression and resolution give structure to stories. When an artwork responds to trauma, the requirements change.  Anyone who has experienced, or observed the impacts of traumatic events, knows that they continue to resonate and replay themselves for many years.  To generate a truthful creative transaction between a traumatic subject matter, and the work into which it is translated, calls for forms of expression which can suggest recurrences and hauntings.  Through this act of creative witness, we may begin to change their power and reposition our relationships to them.

Living beyond, and making art that responds to, my own experience of childhood sexual abuse, amongst other subjects, I face this challenge myself.  As the light dims towards the end of November, and the days grow shorter and darker, child ghosts walk again for me.  They remember and re-live my father’s death in hospital when I was eight, in 1972. These ghost-selves also re-experience the beginning of the penetrative sexual abuse to which I was subjected, very shortly after, when my mother, who was my abuser, and I moved from Brussels to Wiltshire.

Impacting both my physical and mental health, these hauntings can lead me to feel as if I am sinking down through waves of old sadness. Like heavy black sump oil, they seep into my thoughts and bodily movements. When things get really bad, they can make it hard to move – or even think.  Because this has happened every November and December since I was a teenager, over the years, I’ve developed resources to keep myself going.  I work beside my SAD light.  I try to be kinder to myself and organise my working life so that I am not too pressured.   I meditate, swim and walk my dog Ithaca, noticing the natural world around us.  I connect with people who love me. 

But all these strategies only ever mitigate the after-effects of the dreams which rise up at night.   In my sleep, I become again a scared, hurt child, taken back to a place between life and death by my mother. This was the case – very brutally – in November and December of 2021, as it had been in 2020, and all the years before that. 

None of us likes to speak of what we perceive as our vulnerabilities, for fear people will think less of us, or feel we are ‘seeking attention’ in some way. But in 2020, working on bird of winter‘s final manuscript alone with my dog Ithaca in lockdown, I decided to make an artwork that could enact being haunted by a traumatic past, and reaching beyond this towards a form of resolution. At the time, I was following an online workshop with Nina Mingya Powles around multiple language heritages with the Poetry School, which my fellow Forwards Shortlistee, Cynthia Miller, was also part of. I was also experiencing difficult dreams. They shaped what I wrote.

What emerged is called ‘je suis son petit chat il est mon papa 1972/ I am his little cat he is my daddy 2020’.  It’s a multi-form piece which exists simultaneously as a conventional poem, a visual work, a sound experience and a performance. It was published this January 22 in bath magg no 8, as you’ll be able to see and hear by following this link.

When I performed it at bath magg’s online launch, I began by saying a few words about the poem. The response I received made me feel there would be a value in expanding them into this blog, however inelegantly. Opening up the deliberately smudgy, troubled layers of the poem up in this way also gives me the opportunity to separate the two overlaid texts, and look at each one in isolation.  In the final print they are blurred across each other to play out how traumatic stories repeat and recur, as you’ll have seen from the fragment above, and the link to the full work at bath magg.

‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ begins in French and English, the two languages of my childhood. They refract and translate each other, but the work also makes complete sense in either language. In the first two lines, I’m waking up from a nightmare in 2020, aged fifty-six.  I’m also myself  in bed, aged eight, in 1972,  as my father lies dying in intensive care. From there it is back to 1972 and my eight year old self returning home to our flat: 

Underlay text of ‘je suis son petit chat’

Describing my life before my father died as if it was still simultaneously present, including my grandmother taking me to the hospital, and my father sending me drawings home, the narrative enacts how, in dissolving the boundaries of time, these dark hauntings also open opportunities for healing, by re-accessing a fuller range of memory. Next in the underlay text comes the nightmare at the heart of the poem, which invaded my sleep in the early hours of 22 November, replaying  the sexual abuse to which I was subjected as a child by my mother. As the poem reports, the terror of the dream induced vomiting and diarrhoea in my fifty-something year old self:  

Tough though it was to experience in reality, this act of voiding is also a release, which opens up ‘je suis son petit chat/ I am his little cat’ to new energies – whereby the recurrence of the trauma becomes an opportunity to reset my relationship to the original events. Resetting happens through a short poem in both French and then English, which is overlaid on the looping narrative beneath it in larger font and bolder text, as the extract at the top of the blog shows. 

Within its overlaid phrases, my adult self summarises the impacts of my childhood sexual abuse, including how it continues to haunt me.  Speaking directly to my abuser, I refuse the silence which she imposed on me throughout my childhood and adolescence, and for long years beyond that. This frees the underlying narrative to begin to move towards the light of a different ending, where the recurrences of physical voiding can finally come to a stop: 

The account of the nightmare, and falling “down a black tunnel” is repeated below the overlaid text, as when in nursery rhymes like ‘Oranges and lemons’, or ‘Frère Jacques’ in French, the verses come round again.  Following the earlier shift, the act of voiding is once again purgative, letting go of some of the blackness and shame held inside me, and allowing gentler and more nurturing memories of my loving engagement with my father to continue to surface in the segment which follows: 

Like many others with my history, for long years the trauma of the penetrative abuse in childhood separated me from being able to feel my own feelings, or know my own wants. Here, they begin to return to the child who lives within and alongside the adult.  She can say once again “I want my daddy” and by expressing this longing re-form a more authentic connection with herself.  My grandmother’s phrase translated means “let her through, let her through, she’s his daughter”.  She was trying to get me allowed into the intensive care unit, but the phrase also acts out the way I am asking for my child self to be allowed back through, to speak and know herself, and how she was once loved. 

‘Je suis son petit chat/I am his little cat’ ends in a place of quietness, with the possibility of integrating my separated selves more fully. Translating the “petit chat” nickname my father gave me into the English “little cat”, and laying it down on the page, the poem performs an act of witness to the co-presence of my child and adult selves. It also documents how, by reconnecting more fully with child-alice, adult-alice is able to begin to make a new relationship what made us who we now: 

Walking in Shotover County Park near Oxford in the last days of 2021, after some very tough weeks, I saw trees and misty light that reminded me of Wiltshire, and felt unkind old ghosts crowd around me.  But breath by breath, I drew the damp, cold air of the present into my body, and with it new energy.  With each out-breath, I tried to let what I no longer needed pass from me.  As I did this, the pearlescence of the fields and clouds became a wilderness of beauty, and the black branches of the trees uplifted themselves into acts of elemental resistance.  With my dog Ithaca scenting the damp leaves, and pulling us forwards, and the landscape saying that life would return, I felt how this difficult annual recurrence was also a gateway to transformation – that each year I must find the way through.

The link to ‘je suis son petit chat’ at bath magg is here if you would like to hear or see the work again in its entirety. 

If you would like to buy bird of winter, please follow this link.  Poems from the collection are also available on the blog. 

If you need support after reading this blog, https://www.mind.org.uk/ has valuable links and helplines.

Further exploration: four books and StAnza Festival

I often set a creative prompt after exploring one of my own poems for people to explore in their own practice. In this case the subject material is too dangerous.  Instead, for anyone wanting to work creatively with complex materials, or look at other examples of this practice, I would recommend four books which open pathways to new understandings, and new creative forms of expression, from the breakages and fractures of trauma.  I would also recommend the other brilliant poems in bath magg no 8, many which respond to complex subject matters – and make from them acts of beauty and reclamation. 

In terms of books, Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin creates provisional, shifting structures to hold the lives and reposition the representations of Irish women whose lives were appropriated by the Irish State and Church.  Documenting how the State invaded every corner of life in Romania under Romania, under Ceausescu and the Romanian Communist Party, for Buried Gods Metal Prophets Maria Stadnicka and Antonia Glűcksman assemble a living memorial that incorporates diary entries, photos, erasures, quotes from statutes, and building plans, as well as more conventional ‘poems’.  In Things I have Forgotten Before Tanatsei Gambura speaks through radical formal innovation of what it can mean to have grown up as a “Black Girl” in Zimbabwe during the 1980s – and how losing a country can form you as much as having one. Sasha Dugdale’s extraordinary collection Deformations explores trauma and PTSD, through fragments composed around Homer’s Odyssey. A separate long sequence responds to the sculptor Eric Gill’s work and life, within the framework of his recorded sexual abuse of his daughters. Sasha and I spoke about our work in Volume 48 of PN Review. Sasha has a hugely impactful new poem in bath magg 8 which you can read here.

Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Maria Stadnicka and I will be appearing at the StAnza festival on 12 March both live and online with many other brilliant poets in St Andrews. You can find more details here. Prices start from £3.00. Booking opens on 21 January. For people not able to travel to Scotland, many of the events are online and very reasonably priced. As well as performing, I’m going to be sure to pack out my schedule with hearing other poets and it’s a great way to check in with a huge range of voices and perspectives.

 

Letting new light in – setting your creative compass for 2022 and beyond with the help of a ‘Basque Whaler’

Letting new light in to set your creative compass: photo alice hiller

How can we resource our work in lean times? Where does inspiration come from when travel and and a wide range of live experiences are significantly curtailed, whether for financial, health or other restrictions? My steadfast belief is that we hold our own deepest and richest reserves within ourselves, accumulated through our lived experiences and interactions with the world at multiple levels. When more expansive possibilities are denied to us, to keep working, and generating new material, we therefore need to find ways to tune into this, both by nurturing ourselves, and also by finding new sources of ‘strangeness’ and intellectual and creative adventures to act as stimuli.

Basque poet Julie Irigaray Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21

Working with my fellow poet and cherished friend, Julie Irigaray, I set out to devise a solstice workshop, performance and conversation for the Voicing Our Silences collective that I founded. We wanted to deliver both these aims – of self-nurture and adventure. Core to the process were the two prompts we developed, which were designed to complement each other. Mine is a two-part process for setting your creative compass, which begins with a gentle breathing exercise, to clear your creative space, and then builds up your individual compass on the page – through a five stage guided prompt, which I lead participants through. There’s then a follow-up to be completed two or more days later. People who did it on the night we recorded the event have said how valuable they found it to be. This compass process can be used for a specific piece of work such as a poem or prose work you are developing, or would like to start. It works equally well for people looking to explore a new project, or simply to check in with themselves. Julie’s explores ways to expand your work dynamically through different forms of research and I found it gave me a breakthrough into a poem which had been hovering half-realised since the summer, so I warmly recommend trying it for yourself.

Frame for Setting Your Creative Compass to draw in central third of A4 page.

In addition to these prompts, we both performed two short sets of poems, and spoke to each other between them about how they came into being, going deep with where we resourced our work – whether from online resources including YouTube, books, museum catalogues, or other starting points. My poems came from my collection, bird of winter, and Julie’s from her pamphlet, Whalers, Witches and Gauchos. Because we were recording in the run up to the winter solstice, we structured our sets to rise from darkness into light, and both kept lit candles burning beside us as symbols of inspiration and resilience. The aim was also to share how although our poems appear to journey huge distances through time and space on the page, much of this travel is in fact realised without ever leaving home, whether we’re writing about Pompeii and Herculaneum in my case, or in Julie’s about the Basque heritage she explores in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, which she published this year with Nine Pens.

pistil by alice hiller from bird of winter

Julie also asked me about my practice of working with my childhood and adolescent medical notes, which have been crucial to my collection bird of winter, as with the poem ‘pistil’, given above. The poem is named for the female reproductive parts of the flower. It juxtaposes a quote from my medical notes when I was two, with a direct memory, which reflects how the grooming to which my abuser was subjecting me was already impacting my behaviour, and a photo I recall of myself at that age which my grandmother loved. I was very glad to have the opportunity speak about both the risk, and benefit, of working with documentary evidence such as medical notes if you have a complex history, as I do, arising from my experience of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, and finding my way towards healing beyond this.

As you will be able to hear if you check in with the video, I said how valuable, and painful it was in equal measure, to have factual corroboration of events that lived inside my memory. I explained how I had felt very apprehensive about engaging with my medical notes, for what I might find there, but was very grateful to see that events which my abuser had tried to deny, were in fact recorded in sober black and white. I also told Julie that reading these same notes had in fact provided a core source of motivation for my ongoing activism around changing awareness with regard to childhood sexual abuse. Driving this was how harshly the medical profession had judged my troubled teenage behaviours once the abuse had stopped. I wanted people to understand this adolescent acting out of harm done differently and more compassionately. In the questions which followed, Chaucer Cameron raised the query about notes being redacted, that is having sections blanked out, which has been her experience.

alice hiller Voicing Our Silences 15.12.21

Normally, when I record a Voicing Our Silences performance and workshop, I pause the recording at the prompt stops, and cut the audience participation, to keep the event around an hour. This time, however, we wanted to create an immersive experience for everyone who was joining us, and give the feeling of how the Voicing our Silences collective operates as a place of mutual creative nurture and adventure. Given that it’s a longer watch, I’ve therefore noted the minute timings of the different elements within the YouTube video, (which is captioned for accessibility), for ease of location. While they are managed safely, and there are no explicit references, this video includes discussion of grooming and childhood sexual abuse. If you need support with anything raised the Mind website is very helpful.

Youtube video: resourcing your work in lean times: setting your creative compass with Julie Irigaray and alice hiller

Please note, you will need a piece of paper and something to write with for each prompt.

0.00 alice hiller introduces
4.00 Julie Irigaray set 1: ‘The Basque Whaler’, ‘Six War Letters’, ‘Kreig’
12.00 alice hiller set 1 ‘bains de mer’, ‘pistil’, ‘three small shrines’, ‘in the vineyard’, ‘circular’, ‘joujou’, ‘libation’
21.20 Julie & alice discussion 1 including use of medical notes in poems
39.32 alice hiller prompt : setting your creative compass
1.00 audience feedback.
1.05.50 julie irigaray set 2 : ‘Red Card’, ‘Divine Seraphine’, ‘Via Domitia’
1.12.30 alice hiller set 2 : ‘the holly tree’, ‘vesuvius’, ‘benediction’, ‘o goddess isis’
1.20 Julie & alice discussion
1.35 Julie Irigaray prompt turbocharging your creative explorations
final questions from Voicing Our Silences collective

Julie’s poems include references to her Basque heritage, which is at the heart of her debut Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, published by Nine Pens earlier in 2021. In the spirit of expanding our horizons, Julie was kind enough to answer a few questions about Basque culture and history, which you can read below.

Photo of the Pyrenees in the Basque region of France by Julie Irigaray.

AH: Whalers, Witches and Gauchos opens with an epigraph from Thomas Jefferson about Basque fishing in the Atlantic. From what he said, Basque sailors and whalers were clearly active off Newfoundland and further south from the 1400s onwards.  Could you (briefly) tell us something of the history of Basque involvement in whaling? It is partly the subject of the poem ‘The Basque Whaler’, which you perform on the video, but it clearly has deep roots.

JI: The Basques started hunting whales in the 11th century because whales were used to create a wide range of products: candles, soap, cosmetics, to fuel lamps. In the early modern period, Basque whalers spent between six and nine months per year fishing cod and hunting whales near the coasts of Canada and Iceland, in dreary living conditions.

AH: I know the Basque territory is currently ‘divided’ between France and Spain, and there has been political and other forms of activism, including formerly armed conflict, to reclaim and redefine this cultural, geographical and linguistic identity.  Would you be able to outline this for us?

JI: The Basque Country is divided between seven provinces: four of them are in Spain, three in France. It has never been a unified country because it was always split up between the kingdoms of France, Navarre and Spain. The Basque language is not related to any other existing language, so some academics theorised the Basques were part of the first wave of human migration in Europe. The pronunciation and dialects of Basque are different from one province to another, although a unified Basque has been created by scholars. The armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization ETA emerged in the Spanish Basque Country in the late 1950s, mainly as a reaction to Franco’s dictatorship. But they kept on carrying out terrorist attacks well after Franco’s death, especially in the 1980s. I think it was particularly difficult to be young in the Basque Country at that time. But this is my parents’ story, not mine. I’ll probably write about it one day after doing more research. When I went on holiday to England fifteen years ago, there were still some people telling me “Oh! You come from the terrorists’ place!”

AH: Am I right in thinking that both your parents’ families are of Basque heritage?  Your surname, Irigaray, has a sound which stands outside what I know of both French and Spanish, and I know the final poem ‘Exte’, in Whalers, Witches and Gauchos addresses this? Note – you can read ‘Exte’ at the end of this interview.

JI: You’re absolutely right – and that’s why nobody outside the Basque Country apart from you knows how to pronounce my name! Three of my grandparents are Basque, and the final one comes from les Landes, which is still in the south-west of France. My maternal grandmother comes from the coast and a different province from my father’s family, so there are differences of pronunciation and vocabulary between their Basque. My paternal grandparents used to speak Basque to each other or with their neighbours, and my father has a good grasp of it as well. 

AH: One of the ideas that our Voicing Our Silences collective works with is how our difficult histories and experiences can be creatively fruitful, because asking us to find new forms of language to respond to them. ‘Krieg’ in an incredibly vivid, and subtle poem, imagining two former combatants from World War I meeting high in a Basque mountain pass, and reaching a form of understanding which hinges on the title word, which only the German officer understands initially.  Could you say something about this poem and the idea of how poetry can open spaces for things we might not otherwise be able to say and also comprehend?

JI: I always knew I was going to write about this family anecdote one day, but I wanted to avoid certain pitfalls, like making it too overly emotional, or depicting my French great-grandfather as the good guy and the German soldier as the villain. These two men cannot communicate because they do not speak the same language, but also because they were conditioned to think of themselves as enemies for seventy years, and fought against each other during World War I. The memory of World War II in occupied countries like France is still sensitive since so many unspeakable things happened. My family did not suffer more than average, but a variety of things happened to them which are difficult to talk about or even taboo, like a great-aunt who fell in love with a German soldier, or a great-grandfather sent to Czechoslovakia to work as forced labour for the German war effort – which was seen as treason by some. During lockdown, I have written a few poems about World War II from the point of view of several family members. I hate black and white pictures of a character, or moralistic views, so what I try to achieve with my poems is a sense of balance. I want to give a voice to both sides of the story without judging, as I did in ‘Krieg’. 

AH: ‘Their Common language’ addresses your great-grandparents’ migration to Argentina, and subsequent return to France.  Could you say something about the Basque relationship to South America and how that came about?

JI: On my father’s side of the family, several great-grandparents emigrated to Argentina with their parents or siblings because they came from a rural area with little prospects. As I explain in ‘Etxe’, in the Basque tradition, the eldest child (either girl or boy) inherited the family house while the other siblings were left with nothing. One of my great-grandfathers who emigrated to Argentina had thirteen siblings: three sisters ended up nuns, one brother a missionary in Madagascar. Back then, there were not many opportunities to earn a living apart from entering the Church or emigrating to America… In the late nineteenth-century, many Basques moved to Uruguay or Argentina to work as gauchos, others chose the USA to become shepherds in Nevada, California or Florida. The great-grandmother from “Their Common Language” worked in an hotel in Buenos Aires, like the great-grand-uncle who inspired the poem ‘Amerikanoa’. Some of them stayed in Argentina, but many Basques have a sense of nostalgia and preferred moving back to the Basque Country after a few years. 

AH: A number of your other poems also lean into this Basque restlessness, and sense of not-belonging to any single place, which I know you and I both share for different reasons, as do millions of people around the world, who have left their places of birth to migrate for economic, political or other reasons.  Would you like to say something about this experience of becoming un-rooted, but also of carrying your roots with you?

JI: Since I was a teenager, I dreamed of living abroad. Either for my studies or for professional reasons, I moved back and forth between the Basque Country, Paris, Ireland, Britain and Italy seven times in seven years, which had its toll on my mental and physical health. When I moved back to the UK for my first job, I felt terribly homesick, and for the first time. I started a series of Basque poems that made up the greater part of Whalers, Witches and Gauchos, probably because I felt completely unrooted. I found it more difficult than the first time I lived in England to study to fit in.  I think it was because I had lived in so many countries, and picked up some bits of each of their cultures, that I didn’t belong anywhere anymore. I’m still processing this. My poems interrogate cultural differences because it is a subject that I constantly think of. 

AH: I know you have been back in the Basque region of France during the lockdown, able to travel both to the Atlantic and the Pyrenees, when free of restrictions. How has it impacted your work being back in these landscapes?

JI: Unfortunately, few good poems came out of my lockdown writing, precisely because of the anxiety generated by the closing of all borders. The border between France and Spain remained shut for almost four months, and I have spent a day in Spain since Christmas 2019 because things are still not back to normal. Even during World War II or under Francoism, the border could be crossed, albeit illegally. I wrote a poem about a friend being in lockdown in San Sebastian (where the lockdown was extremely restrictive) and my panic at the idea that I could not see him for months because the border was shut. I wanted to capture this claustrophobic feeling. It’s difficult to explain this to people who live on an island, but sharing a border with another country is for us a natural right and a source of enrichment. I have also written a poem from the point of view of the border, and all the historical events it witnessed through millennia. But in the end, I did not write much about the Basque Country. I write better about a place when I see it from a distance, ideally when I live in another country. I wrote almost all my Basque poems while living in the UK, and during lockdown I wrote many poems about Italy because I felt extremely upset about not being allowed to travel back there.

AH:  Some of your newest poems are following your interest in military history, addressed in a number of the poems in WWG, including the ways in which countries who have denied citizens their rights nonetheless require them to die in their wars. This was the the case for many soldiers brought in from Britain’s colonised countries during the first and second world wars, as Sathnam Sanghera has explored in Empireland.  It was also the case for Basque citizens resident in France.  Could you say something about these poems, and the new ones which are forthcoming?

JI: I was looking for books on this subject, so thank you for recommending Sanghera’s! I would like to address the subject of the soldiers who fought for the French and British colonies one day as they were completely written out of history, but I need to find the right approach. 
I normally write a lot about women, but these days I am interested in the values conveyed by the army, especially with regard to masculinity. France is still a very militarised country. With the rise of the right and the French presidential elections taking place in five months’ time, some politicians have suggested the return of the military service for both men and women, and I don’t see it in a good light. There was also the bicentenary of Napoléon’s death this year, and I’m not fond of the idea of promoting the legacy of a man who invaded and subjected a whole continent and killed around three million European soldiers (and God knows how many civilians) for his campaigns. 
I am writing a couple of poems about these themes and the toxic myths surrounding masculinity. My poem ‘Six War Letters’ tells the story of an underaged young man who is enrolled in World War I in spite of all and stops idealising war as a way to prove his manhood. One English teacher told me she’d taught this poem to her boys-only class and that one pupil said it made him reconsider masculinity. I couldn’t be prouder! 
I also recently talked to my parents about my father’s and uncle’s experiences of military service or hazing when they entered their engineering school, and I found these testimonies deeply disturbing. As someone who was bullied in school, I can imagine the psychological impact of hazing in elite schools and universities, and I am outraged by the mechanisms used by the bullies to make their victims believe this is perfectly normal, and even desirable.

AH: Finally, I know you are also working on a PhD about Sylvia Plath and her relationship with England and Europe at Huddersfield.  What does 2022 hold for you Julie Irigaray, in so much as it is possible for any of us to answer this question?

JI: A lot of travelling, I hope! If Covid does not come on the way, I should attend several conferences in France and the UK. I am co-organising an online conference on Sylvia Plath (https://bit.ly/3yHGIW0) on 11th and 12th March 2022, and I will be a volunteer for The Sylvia Plath Literary Festival that should take place in Hebden Bridge at the end of October. I also need to write a couple of academic articles, so 2022 will be more PhD-oriented. But I will try to assemble a poetry collection as I have enough poems that satisfy me to create one now. 

from Whalers, Witches and Gauchos by Julie Irigaray.

If you would like to read more of Julie Irigaray’s work please visit her brilliant website.

‘Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing’: poems as pathways beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh.

On Saturday 6 November, I was asked to read and speak at an event on Poetry and Trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh 2021 with brilliant, radical poets Chaucer Cameron, Day Mattar and Tessay Foley, introduced by poet and academic Patricia Debney.  We have in common a background of having been subjected to predation and sexual abuse, in childhood or afterwards.  Our shared experience, and the fact that we have all made artworks which begin in this harsh place, set the stakes very high in terms of creating an event which could speak collectively to people with similar experience in their own histories. The link to the podcast follows further down.

Sixty-five people tuned in to join us mid-afternoon.  I don’t think anyone who was there will ever forget what was said and read. Both Chaucer and Day touched on their experiences of sex work or prostitution. Chaucer’s pamphlet In an Ideal World I’d Not be Murdered is part memoir/part fiction. It explores the impact of sex work on body, mind and spirit – through the voices of characters speaking to and with each other, while also questioning what it takes to leave this profession. Speaking of one of the female characters, who in real life was murdered, Chaucer said : “In my version she has her own voice, she sings her own song…and this is what it looks like.”  The same could be true of her performance of those extraordinary poems on 6 November. 

With real poignancy, and an ability to enter a child’s perspective, Day’s debut Springing from the Pews, with Broken Sleep Books, documents a six year old boy being groomed and then abused.  Interweaving confessions, journal entries, and multiple voices into a verse play, the poems follow this little boy into adult life, asking how we may live with, and beyond, this very difficult legacy. He explained “I struggled for a long time to write these poems… I had multiple voices in my head…responding each as loud as each other… contradictory, loving, manipulative.”  The results are astonishing.

Tessa Foley’s poems live in rooms where shadows rise up from the corners, even when the lights are on, and follow people down the streets at high noon.  Drawing both on family history, and her own experience of volunteering for three years at Portsmouth Rape and Abuse Counselling Centre, the poems of What Sort of Bird Are You? witness the greatest difficulties, but also document moving beyond them into a more hopeful and resilient spaces, engendered in part through acts of mutual solidarity and community. Her line “Just because there’s a fence, the garden don’t stop growing” could speak for us all. 

My own text is given in full below, exploring the idea of trauma as a wound, and how we may heal beyond it. I chose poems relating to water, to honour Aldeburgh’s seaside setting. To hear Chaucer’s, Day’s and Tessa’s voices testifying to experiences which I felt in my own body and spirit, had my heart rushing before I ever got to my own set. I was hugely honoured to perform with them. Inevitably, I needed to rebalance myself afterwards. Walking by the Thames later that afternoon, allowing the present world back into me as dusk deepened, I saw a footbridge lit up over the dark water. Watching it, I felt as if I had been given a visual representation of how we had, through our works, lit safe passages over places where we had once known great suffering.

You can hear the podcast of Chaucer Cameron, Day Matar, Tessa Foley and I reading together here which Poetry in Aldeburgh have just released.

If anything is difficult for you, the Mind website has helpful links.

As the set was an hour long, and very intense, I decided to record the audio of my poems and words separately as well – for people who wanted a shorter listen, or who might be hesitant around exposing themselves to the longer experience of the full set. The performance and comments from the audience set twitter alight for hours and days afterwards. My individual recording is 15 minutes long. I have put the linking text I wrote below it as a guide to what to expect.

audio link to alice hiller’s Poetry in Aldeburgh ‘healing beyond trauma’ set of poems.

To give a flavour of my approach, the words I wrote to link the poems are reproduced below in italics, interspersed by the poem titles. ‘phare d’ailly’ is reproduced as a sample of my work, because it has appeared in PN Review, along with a description of discovering ancient Herculaneum by Scipio Maffei. You can hear all the poems in full on the recording. If you face hearing challenges please contact me through the blog and I can send you a full text of words and poems.

If you would like to buy bird of winter, it’s available here.

alice hiller words and water poems on healing beyond trauma at Poetry in Aldeburgh:

As many of you know, trauma means wound in ancient Greek. My own collection, bird of winter, is partly about the childhood wound of being groomed and sexually abused by my mother.   But it’s also about healing, and opening our wings into wider, freer skies.  I’ll alternate poems which explore my difficult early years with others honouring experiences that helped me reclaim life.  Celebrating Aldeburgh, many of the poems include water.  First up is ‘bains de mer’ or ‘sea swimming’, remembering my beloved French bonne maman or grandmother.

bains de mer [performed]

Bonne maman represented a space of safety and unconditional love.  Because my mother was my abuser, danger remained omnipresent. Normandie is the backdrop to a photo taken by my father in ‘pistil’. Named for the female reproductive parts of a flower, the poem combines words from my childhood medical notes with direct memories. 

pistil [performed]

In addition to my medical notes,  bird of winter is framed by Pompeii and Herculaneum. Both were harbour towns, but water is not a place of refuge or safety in the abuse poems.  ‘let none of this enter you’ is spoken to my four or five year old self – with extra lines by Pliny the Younger describing the eruption of Vesuvius, which shapes bird of winter. 

let none of this enter you [performed]

Even though he worked long hours, my diplomat father had been my protector.  Once he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when I was six, power shifted.  I was eight when he died and my mother and I moved from Brussels, to England.  I saw my father as the lighthouse whose beams lit my bedroom in Normandie. 

phare d’ailly

papa the tide at vasterival was going out 
when you were carried from our flat as I slept

your jaw swung
open like a latchless door

the sea is now 1km from the site of pompeii 

The penetrative abuse began in England.  My erasure ‘and now came the ashes’ is from  Pliny the Younger’s account of Vesuvius : 

and now came the ashes [performed]

Traumatic events such as rape fracture our consciousness.   Scipio Maffei’s 1747 account of excavating Herculaneum offered a way of suggesting the injuries arising from raping a child, along with the difficulties of voicing this. The reader gets to puzzle out the imagery.  They can determine how far to engage. 

proceeding blindly through
tunnels and through narrow
passages much will be broken
much will be destroyed
nor will it ever be possible
to see the noble buildings
in their entirety

Scipio Maffei 1747

Even in very difficult times, the memory of my father, and my bonne maman’s love, gave my spirit a space of nurture.  This is critical for all of us who are subjected to wounding experiences.  ‘Rue de l’aurore’ was my grandmother’s address in Brussels. It means street of the dawn.

rue de l’aurore [performed]

I escaped the physical element of the abuse when I was thirteen by  stopping eating.   I was admitted to hospital – but this was 1977.  Eating disorders were not recognised as a possible indicators of childhood sexual abuse.  I wasn’t asked about, or able to speak directly of, what my mother had done.  The psychiatrist who saw me understood something terrible had happened.  Writing ‘tesselation’,  I instinctively sited myself between worlds, like water becoming vapour. 

tessellation [performed]

My mother ended all contact with this psychiatrist when I was released from hospital.  I was left very vulnerable.  With time, I reconnected with life and love again and began to reclaim my body. My final poem  moves between capture and release, remembering when I was seventeen. 

becoming your channel of pearl [performed]

I dedicate it to all of us who turn our faces to the light, no matter what darkness we have come through [end of set].

The Festival brought together a rainbow of poets from Andrew McMillan, Sean Hewitt, Kim Moore, Victoria Kenneflick, Dom Bury, Colette Bryce, Rachel Long, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Momtaza Mehri and Sarah Westcott, to name but a few. The podcasts will be up on the Poetry in Aldeburgh website over the next days. I really recommend checking in with them.

If you live in or near London, I’ll be performing live for Outspoken at the Southbank with Nick Mahona and Wayne Holloway-Smith on Thursday 25 November at 7.45 pm. I’ll be sharing poems about the bumpy teenage years that follow grooming and childhood sexual abuse, but also how these are the freedom trail that leads to reclamation and healing.

Tickets are here for Outspoken on 25/11/21 at 19.45 at the Southbank.

Multiple Ways into Words: Celebrating Being on the Forwards Prizes First Collection Shortlist of 2021

Caleb Femi, alice hiller, Holly Pester, Ralf Webb, Cynthia Miller

When you’re a debut poet, aged 57, you don’t necessarily expect to find your name on a prize list. I certainly didn’t.  I was overwhelmed when I discovered my bird of winter had made the first collection shortlist for the Felix Dennis Award of the Forwards Prizes.  Even more so when I found out that I had been selected alongside Caleb Femi, Cynthia Miller, Holly Pester, and Ralf Webb.  They are all poet-heroes of mine, whose work I had loved, and followed live, and online.  We have all been interviewed on the Forwards Prizes website, where you can also read about the poets selected for Best Poem, and Best Collection. The Best Poem list includes Natalie Linh Bolderston, who I interviewed on this blog talking about the family heritages and creative influences which shape her art-making.

Over the last week, in the run up to the Forwards Prizes Ceremony at the Southbank on Sunday 24 October, Wasafiri Magazine and The Poetry School have both published work about our Debut Collection shortlist as a group.  I wanted to take the opportunity to share it here, to celebrate us together as the shortlist of 2021. I also wanted to reflect my sense of how crucial Caleb’s, Cynthia’s, Holly’s and Ralf’s collections are, and how much they mean to me personally, as someone who has read and re-read them over the summer. No five poets can ever say everything, but between us we have a wide reach – geographically, creatively, and in terms of our subject matters – and share a commitment to making new work that speaks from deep places in ourselves and lives.

To read what Caleb, Cynthia, Holly, Ralf and I have to say about our work, please follow this link to the poet Shash Trevett’s insightful interview with us for Wasafiri Magazine.

By way of a taster, Shash’s questions throw light on how each of us wrote, and where we wrote from, amongst other topics. Physically – Holly Pester said in the bath, as well as elsewhere, and also from “My small intestine. My dreams. My lunch breaks.”  She also came up with a definition of making work which captures the experimental, provisional force of this adventure.

Holly:  “‘Tussle’ is a very good word for describing what writing poetry is; words, idea, time, speech, language, text, hormones, affections, all moving towards the recovery of a new thought in a barely held communion. It is a tussle! (It grew over about three years). “

Cynthia Miller spoke of writing from her mother’s Chinese Malaysian heritages – “I think of the long tradition of fortune tellers at temples. Star-charts and fortune sticks and divining the placement of the heavens.” She explained how this fed into work about displacements and migrations: “all the poems in my collection about stars are really poems about family, longing and displacement (such as ‘Scheherezade’, ‘Summer Preserves Haibun’, ‘Proxima b’), and how acute and destabilizing that feeling of disorientation can be.”  

Caleb Femi’s words bring out how his debut, like his film-making, speaks from a place of multiplicity and open-hearing:

Shash – “In ‘Barter’ you write ‘I was reaching for my voice box / I rarely use it to its full potential’. Can you talk about lending your voice to those who cannot speak anymore, or who are voiceless?” 

Caleb: “My voice is one of many that exists in my community. Each as intriguing as the other, we should all be heard. ” 

Ralf Webb made his explanation of the colour pink expressive of the range of tones and moods and slip-sliding transitions that his work encompasses – always with an eye to how our lives stack up ,and the social and political constructs which inform the shapes they take and make.

Ralf: “When I think of the colour pink I think of carnations, earthworms, anemic-looking plums; I think of the huge rose quartz crystals on my childhood bedroom windowsill; I think of pink moons and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon; I think of hematology and bone marrow biopsies; I think of Pepto-Bismol, pills, the skin under the nail; I think of how the sunrise would have looked to my parents, alone, driving to or back from work at dawn.”

Finally, I added some thoughts on “form” in its wider sense:

alice: “I use form to confer agency, even while navigating danger.  I drop the reader down, somatically, into the terror of my childhood, but offer ladders out…  Form also embodies childish play and mess. Some poems circle round. Within the erasures, white tunnels of words are dug out from smudgy, hand-blacked rectangles.  Elsewhere you have to puzzle out the links between the historical fragments as you jump from one to another – like stepping stones or hopscotch. Those sorts of engagements help generate active, empathetic readings.” 

Ralf, Holly and I also each wrote a ‘how we did it’ blog for the Poetry School, where I’ve taken many classes as my collection bird of winter found its wings.

My link is here, on writing ‘elegy for an eight year old’.

Ralf’s is here on writing ‘Love Story Discourse Goblins.‘

And Holly’s is coming shortly.

Romalyn Ante interviewed Cynthia and I on writing debut collections for the first episode of ‘Tsaa with Roma’, which also features chats over tea with Sasha Dugdale and Liz Berry. You can watch here.

Meantime, if you’d like to go deeper with any of the poets the shortlist, click their links below. Caleb’s includes links to his films.

Caleb Femi

Cynthia Miller

To see more examples of Holly Pester’s work at Granta.

Read Ralf’s Webb’s experience of writing here.

If you’d like to see the five of us live on stage together, on Sunday 24 of October at the Southbank, live and streamed tickets are available.

Book Livestream tickets here.

Book Southbank Centre in person tickets here.

Buy the Forwards Anthology here.

‘We know that the year – and more – of the pandemic was also the year of reading. And that means poetry as well as prose. It was a time when everyone was reminded how much we need to be exposed to the power of the imagination. And the short lists for the Forward Prizes 2021 are a reminder that the poetic imagination isn’t wholly introspective, although it cuts deep. It’s bold, limitless in ambition and it touches every part of our lives – our own hopes and fears, our communities, and the wider world that so often seems bewildering and over-powering. These poets find pathways into the deepest feelings and discover vantage points that take a reader (or a listener) to another place. In their hands we look at the world differently. This is a moment for poetry; and all these poets deliver. Read them, and take off.’

– James Naughtie, The chair of the 2021 Forward Prizes jury

‘sea level’ : the poem as miniature tornado – ‘bird of winter’ podcast no 2.

Like miniature tornados rising up off the page, poems move energy.  Working with words and sounds, they carry their readers, or listeners, into spaces which are new to us – hopefully without inflicting damage.   By involving us imaginatively, and creatively, they open our consciousnesses to transformative alchemies. Or that’s the aim. For those of us who work with difficult materials, the reader or listener can of course decide how far ‘in’ they want to go, and how much of the created world they allow to come alive.  When a poem has an element of catharsis, they can also choose if they want to become part of the shift this precipitates. 

Naples seen from above, with Vesuvius

To explore how this poem/tornado process might take place, my second bird of winter podcast rides the energy flow of ‘sea level’, which came together on a winter trip to Naples. Specifically, I engage with how the poem imagines worlds to generate forward and upward movement. In this case, it’s from a place of suppression and denial towards a place of comprehension and healing, and from underground darkness up towards the light of day.  If you’d like to listen to this as a podcast, with an optional prompt at the end for your own art-making, the link is here: https://youtu.be/pJLPHD5A2sE

If you’d prefer to check it out, developed for the page as an essay, please keep reading. The photographs are ones I took in Naples.  As a word of warning – this episode mentions sexual abuse briefly, in the context of the weight of silencing that can arise from this crime, and its potential for continued resonance in our adult lives.  I also explore how we can move beyond its heavy legacy towards reclamation. While I’ll be  tracking the energy flow through the individual lines of ‘sea level’, to hear the poem from start to finish please follow this link to my recording: 

sea level

Naples harbour at nightfall

For ‘sea level’s tornado to lift off, it needed both darkness and light. Real tornadoes require warm humid air, and cold dry air, to create the rotating updraft that leads to the formation of the funnel cloud.   In this case, I wanted readers to feel the oppressiveness of the silence and denial that abusers, including my own, force onto children.  These weights are carried by many of us whose experiences have been denied or dismissed.  Having encountered them within the physical landscape of the poem, we can enter into the relief that arises when they are released, collectively, into an act of witness and reclamation.

Back in December 2018, the day before I wrote the first draft of ‘sea level’,  (when I still had no idea it was coming to me), I’d visited the palatial Archaeological Museum, in the grimy heart of Naples. The city’s soundtrack is a symphony of car horns but the tight street grid in the old town dates back to Roman times.  Extraordinary finds, from statues, to frescoes, to objects from daily life including a charred cradle, were excavated from the volcanic rock that covered the ancient city of Herculaneum.  Key items are displayed in room after room, alongside equally dazzling, moving, and mundane, treasures from the neighbouring city of Pompeii.  They make you feel as if time is melting and you no longer know quite where you stand.

Wall painting of young woman from Archaeological Museum

While Pompeii was covered with ash that was relatively easy to shift when Vesuvius erupted, four metres of molten volcanic materials settled into solid rock over ancient Herculaneum.  To rediscover the city, the original excavators had to tunnel down, partly below the modern town of Ercolano, at great personal risk from poisonous gases and cave-ins, beginning during the eighteenth century.  Reading about them, and seeing old illustrations in my guide book, called to mind my own painful, stumbling, sometimes dangerous and destabilising, process of excavating my childhood memories. I embarked on this in my thirties, during the 1990s, with the support of a skilled psychotherapist.

Those same childhood memories were moving in the shadowed corners of my thoughts as I walked around the museum, trying to take in as much as possible, and then explored the tiny shops and tight backstreets of Naples while dusk came and people started to congregate in bars and cafes after work. While most people think of December in terms of holidays and celebrations, for me it marks the anniversary of when the penetrative sexual abuse began during my childhood, in 1972.  I was eight and a half. With my abuser, who was my mother, I’d just moved to a small village in Wiltshire following the death of my diplomat father.   Even decades later, whenever I can, I go abroad briefly at that time of year, to reset the light in England, which can intensify the return of flashbacks and nightmares. 

Eighteenth century anonymous illustration of visiting the excavations at Herculaneum

Despite the Southern Italian location, the night after I visited the Archaeological Museum, I woke in the early hours from a dream of being held down in the darkness, as had happened when I was a child.  Lying in the dark hotel room, cold and scared, the feeling the dream left me with,  after a day of imagining  the still largely buried ancient city of Herculaneum, and then walking Naples’ shadowy, narrow twisting back streets, somehow led to the phrase “there will always be the city/ beneath this city charted by no one” dictating itself. This became the first two lines of ‘sea level’. I was thinking of Herculaneum. I was also articulating my own underground memories, nestled beneath the surface  of my daily life, but swimming up to its surface again in the crack in time that the December anniversary had opened.

Jotting the words down, on a bedside scrap of paper, but also opening myself to the energy I could feel rising up, I next heard “where column of stone tears/ cling to the ceilings.” As a child, I could neither cry, nor cry out, in bed beside my abuser. When you visit underground cave systems, the stalactites and stalagmites can seem like frozen ghosts, caught momentarily in the electric lights of the present.   I knew these stone columns were my own emotions, unarticulated and unacknowledged, until my thirties – when I first started to thaw and allow myself to re-experience them with professional support.  Brittle and dangerous until that point,  they had hung within me like unwieldy stone daggers, triggering panic attacks and flashbacks, as is the case for many peoples who have experienced trauma.   But the image was by no means exclusively sad. Stalactites are also objects of great beauty. Crystalline structures, created from dripping water, they sparkle when illuminated, and make visible the accretions of time. 

Seeing the lines on the hotel notepad,  I felt again that tornado of energy rising within them, driving the narrative forwards.  What came to me next was an image that called back the lost inhabitants of my imagined underground city “whose people were once/ lost or vaporised/ their houses and temples/ buried and forgotten”.  This of course happened historically to the citizens of Pompeii and Herculaneum – whose lives we now know in considerable detail thanks to the works of recovery undertaken by archeologists, and scholars. Within the carbonised cradle, the feather-light residue of a baby testified to his or her former presence. In Pompeii, archeologists pour plaster into voids left in the ash where bodies decomposed, to cast out the shapes of the people who fell trying to escape Vesuvius.

Figures cast from hollows left in the ash at Pompeii photo Wikipedia

By the end of 2018, when I visited Naples, I had begun to share the poems which were my own creative acts of recovery. I was also being mentored by Pascale Petit under the Jerwood Arvon scheme.  Through the responses I was receiving from her and other people, I knew that by writing about my childhood, the spell of denial thrown over my own life was being undone.  This also happens when other denied and buried histories – including those of enslavement, persecution, and genocide – are recovered and documented.

Writers including Primo Levi, who recorded his experience of Auschwitz, and the long journey home, and Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou, who make work in response to the histories of enslavement and racism, and the impacts of colonisation, were integral to my own process of giving creative testimony, as was Pascale Petit. Also crucial to my ongoing sense of possibility have been works of exploratory witness from contemporaries writing alongside me including Bhanu Kapil, Sandeep Parmar, Isabelle Baafi, Romalyn Ante, Jenny Mitchell, Rachael Allen, Rachel Long, Caleb Femi, Will Harris, Nina Mingya Powles, Troy Cabida, Arji Manuelpillai, Karen Smith, Natalie Linh Bolderston, Holly Pester, Ralph Webb and Cynthia Miller – to name only a very few. 

Carried forward by so many powerful examples, scribbling in bad handwriting by the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtains, I felt myself caught up into the process of collective reclamation and voicing. This was the journey of the poem, from darkness to light, from silence to noise.  As it took hold of me, with the Bay of Naples moving as a wash of liquid blackness beyond the town, I heard “let these people  who are my people/ enter your lives again”.  What had been denied and pushed down was rising up now in a way that made me think of a different set of tunnels altogether. 

Oritigia, showing temple columns in the wall of the church.

These were the tunnels under the Sicilian town of Ortigia, that I had previously visited with Pen, the younger of my two adult sons. The town has existed since classical times, and its main church is made from a former Greek temple, whose columns are still visible within the walls.  Ortigia’s deep network of tunnels were used over the centuries for rituals, burials and shelter, including from bombing during the second world war.  They formed places of safety, as we discovered during a guided tour.  Going underground in the town square, the musty, twisting passages emerge from darkness into the light of day at sea level, where the white gold rock of the island meets the turquoise waves. It was this memory which informed the next lines – “and hope will shaft passages/ up through the bedrock”. The photograph I chose for the YouTube podcast was taken on that holiday.  Being with my own son, by the iridescent waters of the Mediterranean, was in my mind as the last lines of the poem came to me, as you will be able to hear again. 

sea level

alice hiller emerging from the tunnels in Ortigia, photo by Pendragon Stuart.

‘sea level’ moves from suppression and denial, into life and community, ending “until we swim free/ within the breathing harbour of morning”.   The double sound meaning of its final word – morning – holds within it an echo of the sorrow and loss which is also part of the process of the poem.  It gives the journey into the light an element of circularity, echoing the circling of energy which is also integral to the formation of a tornado.  Those of us who have known difficult times will recognise how this circling can be manifested in the return of memories and anniversaries of the sort which kicked off the poem for me. While such a legacy is not easy to carry, I understand that it forms the foundation of who I am as a person, and as an artist, and has become one of the deep energy sources that fuel my work and my political consciousness.

Sunrise over the harbour in Naples

If anything in this blog has been difficult, the Mind website has valuable links.

If you would like to read more about bird of winter please go to the page in this blog, where I explain its background, or follow this link to Pavilion Poetry’s website: http://bit.ly/birdhiller.

If you would like to try out putting your own journey poem or artwork together, the following prompt may give you a few ideas. 

The first stage of putting your own journey poem or artwork together will be to think of an experience, feeling or memory which will be your starting point. It doesn’t have to be taken from your own life, but it should be something that you can potentially travel beyond to a new place, physically, emotionally,  geographically or conceptually.  This is what will give your work its forward motion and form its primary energy source.

In my case, the journey was from my child to my adult self, from a crime taking place to its anniversary many decades later, and from an individual, silenced position, to a collective act of witness. Be careful if your explorations start to feel upsetting for any reason, and plan beforehand how to stay emotionally safe.  You might want to have a friend you can connect with, or a helpline you can call, or another form of support. 

The next stage is to select your recording materials.  You might want to write on a sheet of paper or in a notebook, or type into a new document on your computer, or speak into your phone using a voice memo app.  All are equally good.   Once you’re ready, set a timer for five minutes, and then write, or speak freely, and without censuring yourself, about the starting point of your experience. What you’re looking to capture is the emotional mood and colour of the subject, rather than any formal description. Rough jottings, phrases, and images are great. 

Naples from the island of Capri

The next step will be to repeat this writing or recording process for another five minutes, envisaging and describing the place where the journey travels to.   You could do this straight after, or you might want to leave it until another day, week, or even month.  Sometimes poems and artworks come quickly, but other times they reveal themselves to us more slowly and gradually.    When you’ve got the two sets of material, combine them into a single document, so you can see how they sit together.

Beyond this, or alongside the process, you want to start thinking about a physical terrain across which the emotional journey of your poem or artwork can realise itself.  In my case, it was the double set of tunnels in Herculaneum and Ortigia, which became a single joined underground landscape. They could be landscapes you know personally, or ones you have experienced either online or via film or television or books. They could be from the past, or the present.  

The sea off Ortigia in Sicily.

Once you have identified your landscape, or landscapes, you want to generate some words around them.  If they are nearby, maybe visit them with your phone to speak into, or paper to write on. Otherwise, spend some time just looking at them online or in books. As you’re engaging with the landscapes, notice the feelings and ideas that come up, and again jot down phrases and images.  Do it as a timed session if that’s feasible and helpful.  As before, be careful if this starts to feel upsetting for any reason, and plan beforehand how to stay emotionally safe.

Land travelling into water

The final step will be to bring together your two sets of words and images – about the experience, and the landscape – in a way that makes the journey of your poem or artwork travel forward through time and across geography to its place of arrival. 

Good creating – and thank you for reading. Please sign up to the blog if you would like to be notified of other bird of winter podcasts and materials, and writing and interviews more generally on the topic of working creatively and transformatively with difficult materials.          

                                             

Naples underground