Cherry Blossom Tales - by Lesley Downer

Cherry blossoms at Yoshino. Katsushika Hokusai 1833. 
Met Museum, Rogers Fund 1922. Public domain

うつせみの世にも似たるか花ざくらさくと見しまにかつちりにけり
Like the world
Hollow as a cicada’s empty shell -
Oh cherry blossoms -
The moment that we see you bloom
You have already fallen.
                                Anonymous. From the Kokinshu anthology of poetry (915-929 AD)

April is cherry blossom season in Japan, when people gather to eat, drink, sing, make music and sometimes dance under the spreading branches of the beautiful pink cherry trees. For well over a thousand years the cherry blossoms have inspired poetry, art and stories and have held a special place in the hearts of Japanese people. 

Cherry blossom viewing on the hill of Tenjin Shrine. Utagawa
Hiroshige 1833. From the series Famous Views of Osaka.
MFA Boston. Public domain.

The most famous place of all for cherry blossom, all the way back to the time of the artist Hokusai and long before, is Mount Yoshino in Central Japan. In fact Yoshino is emblematic of cherry blossom. In poetry the word ‘Yoshino’ evokes cherry blossom and the word ‘hana’ (flowers, cherry blossom) evokes Mount Yoshino. 

Most cherry trees bear their blossom on leafless branches. First come single pink blossoms, then white blossoms, then double blossoms. The blooms last only a few days before they fall.

The Pathos of Things
The cherry blossoms are said to be like clouds as they bloom all at once and hang above the trees as if shrouding them in mist. They last just a few days before withering and falling, raining white petals all across Japan. The falling petals are often compared to snow. Their transience is what is treasured, symbolising the poignant evanescence of existence - the impermanence of all things, mono no aware, ‘the pathos of things’, the poignancy at the root of all existence, the fragility of life, beauty and love.

Cherry blossoms symbolize birth and death, beauty and violence. They are part of Shinto, part of the Japanese worship of nature, but historically they also signified the short but dramatic life of the samurai. The youthful kamikaze pilots were celebrated as being like cherry blossom, with its vivid beauty and brief existence.

So on the one hand they’re heralds of spring, of nature’s revival after the cold winter. They represent the beauty of nature, renewal of life, first love. But on the other the brevity of their existence gives them has a melancholy quality, a painful beauty.

Portrait of the Emperor Saga, Imperial
Collection, Tokyo, Japan. Public domain.

Gods inside the Cherry Trees
According to the eight century chronicle Nihon Shoki, there were cherry blossom festivals as early as the third century AD. The blossoming of the cherry trees marked the beginning of the planting season. Through the timing of the blossoming seers could divine whether the harvest would be good that year or whether the gods within the cherry trees needed to be propitiated. Worshippers made offerings of food and drink, then ate the food and drank the sake and thus the custom of eating and drinking under the cherry trees began.

In the Heian period, around the ninth century, Emperor Saga was so moved by the beauty of a particular cherry tree at Jishu Shrine (now within the Kiyomizu Temple complex in Kyoto) that he decided to hold a cherry blossom viewing party. There was eating, drinking, dancing, singing and poetry writing. Thereafter he held regular parties with sake and feasting under the blossoming boughs of the cherry trees in the Imperial Palace. 

Ki no Tomonori, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 
1840, William Sturgis Bigelow 
Collection, MFA Boston. Public domain.

People would write poems celebrating the flowers, like life itself, luminous and beautiful but fleeting and ephemeral, such as this waka (31 syllable poem) by Ki no Tomonori (850-904 AD), in the Kokinshu and also in Hyakunin Isshu (A Hundred Poems by A Hundred Poets), Japan’s most all time popular collection of poetry:

久方の光のどけき春の日にしづ心なく花のちるらむ
In these spring days
When tranquil light encompasses
The four directions,
Why do the blossoms scatter
With such uneasy hearts?

Cherry blossom features large in the 11th century Tale of Genji. The eighth chapter, entitled Hana no En (The Cherry Blossom Party) begins with a cherry blossom celebration with poetry, singing, drinking, eating and dancing. The party goes on well into the night. Afterwards the beautiful Prince Genji hears a lady singing a snatch of a famous poem. He catches her by the sleeve in his casual way and draws her gently inside, ‘closing the door behind them.’ Fortunately for Genji #metoo was still far in the future. 

Genji, Hana no En. Utagawa Kunisada 1857. 
From Lady Murasaki's Genji cards. 
MFA Boston. Public Domain.

The Biggest Tea Party of All Time
Up till now it was the imperial court and the samurai who enjoyed cherry blossom viewing. But then came the great warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi. He brought about the unification of Japan, then ushered in a glorious golden age of the arts. He particularly loved the tea ceremony. He twice invited the entire population of Kyoto to a huge tea ceremony and cherry blossom viewing. The first was in 1594 when he invited 5000 people for a huge party at Mount Yoshino.

For the second he invited 1300 guests. First he had Daigo-ji Temple in Kyoto renovated and had 700 cherry trees of different varieties brought in and planted along the approach and grounds.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi's cherry blossom viewing parade,
Daigo-ji, Fushima-ku, Kyoto Pref., Japan. 12 April 2009.
By Motokoka. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

The party began with a huge procession. Dancers led the way to the doors of the huge main gate. Then came Hideyoshi’s samurai followed by yamabushi mountain ascetics and feudal lords. Hideyoshi, beaming joyously, decked out in colourful robes emblazoned with gold, was carried aloft on the shoulders of white-clad bearers. His son Hideyori followed together with his wife Nene and his concubines, including the famous beauty Lady Yodo (also known as Lady Cha-cha), the mother of the heir.

The party kept stopping for entertainment and the ascent took hours. The women changed outfits multiple times and many teahouses had been set up to cater to the 1,300 guests. Finally the entourage reached the great hall of the temple and the festivities began.

How Many Many Things They Bring to Mind

Under the Tokugawa shoguns the cultural centre shifted to Edo (now Tokyo). Successive shoguns planted cherry trees around the city. 

The eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684-1781), was a particular enthusiast of the cherry blossom and wanted to make cherry blossom viewing accessible to ordinary folk as well as to courtiers and samurai. He had cherry trees planted along the banks of the River Sumida, across the hills of Goten'yama in Shinagawa and along the banks of the River Tama, to provide places where impoverished commoners could relax and enjoy themselves.

Blossoms on the Tama River Embankment.
Utagawa Hiroshige 1856. MFA Boston.
Gift of Anna Ferris. Public Domain.

Meanwhile the merchants grew wealthier and wealthier. The shogunate passed sumptuary laws to prevent them from spending their wealth on ostentatious luxury. So they spent it in red-light districts, on geisha, and on cherry blossom parties in public parks. They modelled their parties on the courtly cherry blossom parties of the Heian period when the Tale of Genji was written but of course there was considerably less courtly entertainment and considerably more drink and rowdiness.

The poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) wrote many haiku celebrating the cherry blossom and drawing on their symbolism. He wrote one melancholy nostalgic haiku when he had gone back to his old home in Iga Ueno. The cherry blossoms there reminded him of a dear friend who had died twenty years earlier, cut off in his youth:

さまざまの事おもひ出す櫻かな
How many many things
They bring to mind -
The cherry blossoms! 

All pictures in the public domain.

Lesley Downer is a lover of all things Asian and an inveterate traveller. She is the author of many books on Japan, including The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale of love and death, out now in paperback. She also appears on Netflix's Age of Samurai! For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Weaving Women's Stories

by Caroline Lawrence

I was going to post a different blog but have just been listening to a brilliant podcast for Classics Confidential. It was specially produced in honour of the Being Human Festival and in particular two events centred around ancient weaving: a poetry performance next Friday 16 November and a hands-on weaving workshop on Saturday 17 November 2018. 

Jessica Hughes with her book on Votives

Jessica Hughes the host of Classics Confidential starts out by interviewing Dr Emma Bridges (Institute of Classical Studies) who talks about the links we still make between weaving and storytelling in phrases such as ‘spinning a yarn’ and ‘weaving a tale’. The word texta, woven, gives us the word text. The ancient sources also used metaphors of weaving. For example, Odysseus ‘weaves a scheme’ in Homer’s Odyssey. 

Dr Ursula Rothe from the Open University talks about the different fabrics they used: wool, linen, cotton and silk, (which was a very expensive – and decadent – prestige product.) Camel hair and goat hair were used for bags and sacks and we know of felt workshops in Pompeii. 

Replica loom at Fishbourne Roman Villa

Because textiles were handmade – involving hundreds of thousands of hours of work – they were precious in both senses of the word. For many poor people their clothing would be the most expensive things they owned. This is why we have so many accounts of textiles being stolen, disappearing from baths and even being handed down in wills. (Many curse tablets are directed against the person or persons who stole a cloak, because this often served as a blanket as well as an article of clothing and could mean the difference between life and death.) 

Professor Mary Harlow from the University of Leicester is a Roman historian who specialises in textile production. Her own warp-weighted loom will be one of the focal points of the Being Human Weaving Women’s Stories performance and activity day. Mary started out dutifully researching all the literary and visual sources but it wasn’t until she went to Denmark to work at the Centre for Textile Research that she had a revelation about ancient textiles. ‘I had to rethink the whole process from the beginning,’ she says. ‘And in so doing I’ve also become a practitioner. I’m an avid hand-spinner and addicted to natural plant dyes… And most recently I’ve begun to learn to weave on a warp-weighted loom.’ One of her revelations was that the finished garment must have already been in someone’s head, because every stage is geared to the specific product. 

naturally dyed wool from Butser Iron Age Farm

‘Now I’ve started weaving,’ adds Mary, ‘the other thing I have begun to understand is the amount of inherent mathematics it takes to set up a loom…’ 

Almost all the ancient textiles we have are woven rather than embroidered. Weaving on a loom requires a huge amount of skill. When Mary considered the amount of mathematics involved, it led her to see the ancient texts in another way. ‘Philosophers use odds and evens to talk about the way the cosmos is developed… just like a warp-weighted loom.’ 

A warp-weighted loom at Butser Iron Age Farm

Mary mentions a friend of hers, the scholar Magdalena Öhrman, who is doing research on the sound a loom makes and the way the cadences of Ovid’s poetry possibly imitate this sound. 

Textile production was embedded in the ancient world. Everybody knew something about it and could use that knowledge. It would have been built in to everybody’s experience. ‘It’s a shame textile production is still not considered one of the very big themes of ancient history,’ concludes Mary, ‘because it feeds in to so much more.’ 

There are many other great revelations in the podcast. 

Penelope and her Suitors by J.W. Waterhouse (1912)

• Emma Bridges (again) shows how male poets like Homer and Ovid portray women who weave and also how the story of Penelope has been retold in more modern times. Emma points out that the loom provides a medium for women to express themselves when they are repeatedly silenced by men, e.g. the way Penelope is twice silenced by her son Telemachus in the Odyssey. Circe and Calypso both sing at the loom but Penelope is silent. So is Philomela, who is raped and then silenced by her abuser. Ovid has her ‘tell’ her story in her weaving. 

Emma talks about Waterhouse’s 1912 painting of Penelope and her Suitors and also an extraordinary art installation by Brazilian artist Tatiana Blass called Penelope. 

drawing of the Penelope-painter's name-vase

• Ellie Mackin Roberts (Royal Holloway, University of London) talks about the arrephorroi (the group of very young girls who lived on the acropolis for a year and wove a peplos for Athena’s statue) and what their sensory experience would have been. For example these girls of perhaps seven or eight might have been asked to card the wool. This would have made their hands greasy with lanolin this would have made washing at the end of the day a different experience than usual. 

Scene from Penelope (2009) by Ben Ferris

• Ben Ferris (Sydney Film School) talks about his 2009 feature film, Penelope, a fantastical treatment of Homer's tale of Penelope, depicting her psychological struggle as she waits twenty years for her husband to return from the Trojan War. 

• Anna Fisk (University of Glasgow) is a knitting practitioner and academic researcher in contemporary craft practices and implicit religion. One of her observations is that some women find knitting almost like entering into a prayerful state.

To hear the whole podcast either subscribe to Classics Confidential or listen on SoundCloud HERE. 

A performance of women reading original poetry inspired by weaving will take place on Friday 16 November 2018 and on the following Saturday there will be weaving workshops.  The afternoon session is sold-out but the morning drop in is free. 

I don’t usually emerge from my writer’s lair on dark winter nights but I’m making an exception for this and I am sure it will be worth it. I hope to see you there! 

Belfast 1918 -- A Poem by Sheena Wilkinson

Today is 50 years since the Civil Rights march in Derry  the reaction to which is generally thought to have sparked off the NI Troubles  I wrote this poem in response to a photo of Belfast 1918, but 1968 and what came afterwards was very much in my mind too. 

Belfast 1918

I was never here before

At least not in these black-and-white

Silent movie days.

I won’t be born for fifty years.

These streets are not silent. Trams clatter

Past blank-blinded brick terraces

These streets are not sepia.

Nor do they run with the blood 

Of the thousands who have lately marched

Down them on their way to the Somme,

Though they will in time run red. 

CP Cavafy and the essence of history

by Antonia Senior

I have written before about historical fiction in the form of poems, and how I value them (and, poorly, turn my pen to them). This month, I have been re-reading the poetry of Constantine Cavafy, and contemplating his austere brilliance.

The reason for the return to Cavafy was a book which landed on my reviewer's desk. What's Left of the Night is a novel by celebrated Greek poet, Ersi Sotiropoulos. Set in 1897 it follows the young Cavafy over the course of three momentous days in Paris. Not much happens, and everything happens. The young poet wanders Paris, interrogating himself. Who am I? What do I believe? How can I best say what I believe? And that question that anyone who has ever written a word for the public eye must and should have asked themselves: am I worth being read?

The book is wonderful, and my review will appear, all things being well, in The Times one week on Saturday. It is niche, and despite my rave words will doubtless sell far fewer copies than dozens of dreary, mediocre books called Watching You (with BIG Twist), or Is Woman's Husband Actually Evil? or Scmaltzy Crap about Ditzy Woman with a Big Heart, or whatever the latest tedious bandwagon is. So here is the link to What's Left of the Night so you can pre-order it: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Whats-Left-Night-Sotiropoulos-Ersi-ebook/dp/B07G63ZS8H/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536696044&sr=8-1&keywords=what%27s+left+of+the+night

CP Cavafy

But let's talk about Cavafy. He was born in Alexandria in 1863 to Greek parents. His family made money, then spectacularly lost it and the young Cavafy lived in Constantinople for a time and in England. He spent most of his life in Alexandria, where he lived an unremarkable life as a civil servant. He was homosexual, and his poetry is infused with erotic charge - he is unashamed but stifled by the world's mores. Here he is in He Asked about the Quality. A young man has seen a youth through the window of a shop, and goes inside:

He asked about the quality of the handkerchiefs
and how much they cost, his voice choking,
almost silenced by desire.
And the answers came back the same way,
distracted, the voice hushed,
offering hidden consent.
 
They kept on talking about the merchandise—but
the only purpose: that their hands might touch
over the handkerchiefs, that their faces, their lips,
might move close together as though by chance—
a moment’s meeting of limb against limb.
 
Quickly, secretly, so the shopowner sitting at the back
wouldn’t realize what was going on.

All poems quoted are translated by Edmund Keeley/Phillip Sherrard  and reproduced from www.cavafy.com

But it's Cavafy's historical poems that concern us here. They are primarily focused on Ancient Greece and Rome. They take a theme it could take an entire novel to explore, and distil it to its essence in that almost deadpan style of his. (Ersi Sotiropoulis is brilliant on Cavafy's quest for a unique and personal style. He rejects lyricism as flippant ornamentation. Rhyme and metre are a poet's crutch - they let him/her avoid actually saying anything.)

The poems are Janus-like, in the manner of all good historical fiction: they look backwards, and in doing so, tell us something about ourselves, and our immediate present. There are three layers of history, in effect: the past event, Cavafy's present and our own present - and the poems speak to each of these. This alone, I think, would prove their greatness.

There are so many to choose from to illustrate his layered brilliance. I have chosen two, which I offer without commentary - you don't need my banal witterings. The first is specific: it's addressed to Mark Antony on losing to Augustus.

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing. 



The second, Waiting for the Barbarians, is one of his most famous poems. I offer it again without commentary - bar the thought that it's the most interesting piece about Brexit I have read in months.

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
 
            The barbarians are due here today.
 
 
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
 
            Because the barbarians are coming today.
            What laws can the senators make now?
            Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
 
 
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
 
            Because the barbarians are coming today
            and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
            He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
            replete with titles, with imposing names.
 
 
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
 
            Because the barbarians are coming today
            and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
 
 
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
 
            Because the barbarians are coming today
            and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
 
 
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
 
            Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
            And some who have just returned from the border say
            there are no barbarians any longer.
 
 
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution. 

Purple cow - Michelle Lovric

According to their own originary myth, the dawn of the last century saw the birth of the ‘Re-Echo’ Club, a group of literary bon-vivants in the Boston area. Initially they were inspired by a poem about an unseen and unfortunate purple cow. The poet was Gelett Burgess. The poem went as follows:

I never saw a Purple Cow
I never hope to see one
But I can tell you, anyhow
I’d rather see than be one.

The project of the Re-Echoers was to re-render this masterpiece in the style of their literary heroes. They produced a book of their re-renderings in 1913. Discovering it in the British Library at least two decades ago, I thought it would be fun to do an illustrated version and so produced some sample designs with the talented Lisa Pentreath who worked with me on all my books for many years. Our revamped version never quite got published, but I came across the designs the other day, and started reading the poems, and was again impressed by the wit and invention. So here are a few Purple Cows for a dull February morning.

                                                                           The Keats version:


John Keats, anonymous portrait
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 A cow of purple is a joy forever
Its loveliness increases. I have never
Seen this phenomenon. Yet ever keep
A brave lookout; lest I should be asleep
When she comes by. For, though I would not be one,
I’ve often imagined ‘twould be a joy to see one.

John Milton by
William Faithorn
courtesy of Wikimedia
Commons

The John Milton reworking:

Hence, vain deluding cows.
The herd of folly, without colour bright
How little you delight,
Or fill the Poet’s mind, or songs arouse!
But, hail! Thou goddess gay of feature!
Hail! Divinest purple creature!
Oh, Cow, thy visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight.
And though I’d like, just once, to see thee,
I'd never, never, never'd be thee.

                                 

 Percy Bysshe Shelley too salutes the purple cow in characteristic style:

Hail to thee, bright spirit!
Cow thou never wert;
But in life to cheer it
Playest thy full part
                             In purple lines of unpremeditated art …

 

And Wordsworth has his gentle way with the violet one:

 

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dee;

                                                        A cow whom there were few to praise
                                                         And very few to see.
                                                       A violet by a mossy stone
                                                         Greeting the smiling East
                                                           Is not so purple, I must own
                                                        As that erratic beast …

William Wordsworth by Robert Haydon
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 Thomas Gray’s rendition:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea;
I watched them slowly wend their weary way
But, ah, a Purple Cow I did not see.
Full many a cow of purplest ray serene
Is haply grazing where I may not see;
Full many a donkey writes of her, I ween,
But neither of these creatures would I be.


And Swinburne waxes lyrically and purply:

Oh, cow of rare rapturous vision,
Oh, purple, impalpable Cow,
Do you browse in a Dream Field Elysian,
Are you purpling pleasantly now?
By the side of wan waves do you languish?
Or in the lithe lush of the grove?
While vainly I search in my anguish,
O Bovine of mauve? ….

I’ll spare you the second stanza.

The papers of the Re-Echo Club (1913) – plus those of a later edition The Diversions of the Re-Echo Club – are classified under the editorship of one Carolyn Wells. In my days as an anthologist, I frequently had recourse to her work. She was a kind of proto-Dorothy Parker, holding her own in a circle of male writers. She was also prolific – 170 books are attributed to her. She wrote children’s books, crime, short stories, newspaper series and articles, an autobiography and much light verse.

The Re-Echo Club convened a number of times. It also rendered into the words of the greats the following limericks

‘There was a little girl
and she had a little curl …’

 ‘There was a young lady of Niger,
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger …’

 And the nursery rhyme ‘Peter, Peter, Pumpkin eater’.

 ‘Lally’ Tennyson, ‘Dan’ Rossetti and ‘Teddy’ Poe gamely took on Cubism, encouraged by ‘Rob’ Browning: ‘I was born cubic. You see, you just symbolize the liquefaction of the essence of an idea into its emotional constituents, and there you are!’

But as we are betwixt the retail frenzies of Christmas and those of Valentine’s Day, I think I’ll end with the Re-Echo club’s re-rendering of Shakespeare on the subject of seasonal gifts.


To give or not to give, that is the question;
Whether ‘tis nobler on the whole to suffer
The old exchange of trinkets, gauds and kickshaws,
Or to take arms against this Christmas nuisance,
And, by opposing, end it? To buy – to give –
No more’ and by that gift say we end
The Christmas obligations to our friends
We all are heir to! To buy – to give;
To give – perchance to get; ay, there’s the rub!
For in those bundles gay what frights may come
When we have shuffled off the ribbon bows
And tissue paper! Who would gifts receive
Of foolish books and little silver traps,
That make us rather keep the things we buy,
Than get these others that we know not of!
This Christmas doth make cowards of us all,
And, notwithstanding our good resolutions,
Each year we bandy gifts, and follow out
The same old Christmas programme.


Michelle Lovric's website

Beaver Country - Michelle Lovric

In the late springtime of this year, nine poets went into a primaeval forest. Each one came out of that experience just a little different from the way they were before.

I was one of them.

I’m fortunate enough to be among the four women and five men who participate in the long-running poetry seminar led by Robert Vas Dias. Our time in the forest was part a retreat Robert had organised for us at Jaczno, an absurdly picturesque lodge perched over two lakes amid clusters of proper fairy-tale woods in the north east of Poland. The word ‘idyllic’ is too banal for the beauty of the place.

For the previous two years, I’d been working full-time on a hard-hitting non-fiction book, the partial object of which was to make sure that there was absolutely no poetry in the portrayal of a brutal crime. That would simply not have been appropriate.

So the week in Poland was a chance to retrieve anything writerly and poetic in me that had survived the project. Two years is a long time. I feared that I would be a disappointment to myself and the group.

But at Jaczno, it all came crowding back with a force that took me by surprise and wrapped me in happiness. To be in such a place, with such intelligent and creative companions, also had the effect of reminding me what my sense of humour is for.

All gateways were open, and beckoning. Everything was elevated. Some things were darker than the forest. Many things were just a little bit hilarious. Storks and mosquitoes became creatures of myth. Each of us produced a completely different response to a graveyard of seven faiths in Suwalki. To me, Rutka Tartak, a harmless little village, seemed the name of a Mata Hari with cheekbones like the steppes of Asia, tall red heels and a hungry womb, who smiled like lightning and fed like a shark. She became the protagonist of my first ever pantoum. And when I discovered that beavers are the totemic animals of the region, well, I just couldn’t help myself …

I have occasionally posted some of my poetry on this site, with the excuse that the poems in question had an historical bent. But I have never before posted a first draft written in a couple of hours.

However, that’s exactly what I am going to do now – just to show the effect of being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people, with all creaturely comforts provided too and a magical atmosphere of kindness.

When I next have some poet-time, this poem will be shortened and tightened so that it is less autobiographical and therefore easier on the reader – but it will never again be as good in the sense of pleasure it gave me as a writer to untether, be wild outdoors, and to play in the word Badlands without caution or constraint.

Beaver Country

A diligence of poets drove to Wigry
collecting hope-twigs in their notable books
for the typical infrastructures – thought-palaces moated
against doubt-wolves; dams to defend against block-bears.
Poets’ fingers grow continuously and
must be filed down by pressing on pens and keys
or they may become too long to be gloved.
Poets live up to ninety-five stanzas in the wild.
They generally have poor foresight, making up for it
with keen senses of tickling, trombone and liquorice.
Poets wear their hearts on their glands, recognise their kin
by literary secretions. They can smell blood.


Poets work late into the night, sometimes throwing up
an entire manuscript in the lifecycle of a single moon.
They have been hunted almost to extinction,
decried as an invasive species because of forests written off
to build their villanelles and canticles. For this reason
a poet has not been seen in London since May, 1812.


While more diligent poets forage in the forest,
she stays home nursing her delicacies.
But a disembeavered poem-shoot warm-noses
out of her wrist and begins to build a sonnet.
While she’s slapping that down, behind her back,
up lurches the scaffolding of a sestina,
stuttering on quaking-aspen and swan-bone
barely held together by Vaseline and irony.


Meanwhile, there’s a tapping at the back of her mind,
like the throb of a scaly tail slapping the hell
out of the serenity of a flowing transcript’s meniscus.
It’s reminding her she knows too much about poets.


In Venice, she taught Worshipful London Apothecaries
about castoreum, the yellow exudate of the poet’s heart-
shaped castor gland. Tinctured in alcohol, its perfume honks
a leather-bound must-note, which must be aged some years
for its harsh rawness to mellow. Only then is it
also good for hysteria, headache and that difficult second novel.


Dried poet testimonies were for centuries used to relieve pain.
Aesop himself footnoted that poets would chew off
their own testimonies to save themselves from hunters.
Because of the overlapping scales on their, pardon me, envois,
the Catholic Church defined poet-flesh as fish
so poetry may be consumed in godly fashion on Fridays.

Poet pelts have been bartered by publishers for centuries.
The European colonisation of Canada had at its secret heart
the quest for frontier poets, and especially their silky sub-texts,
the very best thing for making warm hats.


Enough! She takes a walk to get away from so much
involuntary beavering; promptly trips on a large white root.
Except it’s the thigh bone of Trogontherium, the giant
Eurasian beaver long since believed to be out of print.               



Michelle Lovric’s website.
Photos from the Jaczno lodge website; beaver/poet courtesy of Wellcome Images.

Door furniture - Michelle Lovric

Some years ago, I wrote, designed and produced an illustrated book called HOW TO SEDUCE, PLEASURE & TITILLATE IN CLASSICAL LATIN, working with classicist Jenny Quickfall. It was a follow-up to a surprise best-seller called HOW TO ABUSE, INSULT AND INSINUATE IN CLASSICAL LATIN, in which my collaborator was Niki Doxiadis Mardas. That book is still in print nearly twenty years later and indeed this week the publisher, Ebury, have asked for another reprint.

That request reminded me about one of the ideas explored in HOW TO SEDUCE: the paraclausithyron or “shut door poem” in Latin and ancient Greek poetry. I included some of them in HOW TO SEDUCE. In these poems, the lover describes being shut out of his mistress’s house, life, bed. Instead of lamenting the woman’s cruelty, he rails comically against the door itself. It is the door who must take the blame for everything and the brunt of the poet’s wit.

 All the materiality of the door, from lock to hinges, can serve as a metaphor or for innuendo.

 Lucretius (De Rerum Natura 4.1177-9) asserts:
at lacrimans exclusus amator limina saepe
floribus et sertis operit postisque superbos
unguit amaracino et foribus miser oscula figit
The weeping shut-out lover often buries the threshold in flowers and garlands, anoints the proud doorposts with marjoram scent and plants miserable kisses on the door.

Tibullus offers a classic example:
nam posita est nostrae custodia saeva puellae,
clauditur et dura ianua firma sera.
ianua difficilis domini, te verberet imber,
te Iovis imperio fulmina missa petant.
ianua, iam pateas uni mihi victa querellis,
neu furtim verso cardine aperta sones

A cruel watch has been put on my girl and the hard-hearted door has been firmly locked in my face. Oh door of a stubborn master, may the rain pelt you and lightning sent by Jove target you! Oh door give in to my complaints, open just to me and make no sound as you turn your stealthy hinge.
(1.2.5-10).

Propertius describes the ‘Dreadful door’ as ‘crueller by far than your mistress herself.’ He demands, ‘Why do you stand silent, outfacing me with such hard panels? … Will I sleep ignominiously on the cold-blooded doorstep?’ He continues,
If only a word of mine could squeeze through an open crack
And seek out those lovely little ears and ring inside them!
… But you are the one, the greatest cause of my pain,
Dreadful door, never won over by my gifts
The only one entirely devoid of pity for human suffering,
You answer me mutely with the silence of your hinges.

Walls sometimes come in for the same treatment. Possibly the best-known anthropomorphized wall is the one that separates Pyramus and Thisbe, first in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and later, via Chaucer and Gower, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

One reason why these poems were fresh in my mind is because I’ve lately felt extremely drawn to an aspect of Venetian life that might seem mundane – door furniture.

On a recent walk around my neighbourhood, I photographed the following examples and recorded my feelings about them. After a little absence from Venice, now that I am back I find myself revisiting the esoteric mental scrapbook that is the by-product of so many novels, an anthology and much life lived, felt and thought in the city.

 

The first one to attract my attention is this handsome one belonging to the Dominican nuns near the church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. The idea of nuns having doorbells seems somehow odd, thinking back on the days when they were sternly enclosed. Deliveries took place via ‘la ruota’ – a tall circular shelf that revolved inside the doorway, meaning that no one ever needed to behold a nun’s face, a sight reserved for her bridegroom, God. Food, money and unwanted babies were inserted into convents via la ruota. The nuns raised many orphans, including characters in several of my books ...

Nearer to home, by the church of the Maddalena, I loved this lion who apparently holds a writhing snake in his mouth. A winged lion is among the totems of Venice, but the snake is a novelty. Perhaps it is an eel? It was traditional to eat eel at Christmas in Venice – a fact recorded by Effie Ruskin in a letter to her mother on December 24th 1850. She described the Rialto market as ‘a perfect lake of blood,’ with the aproned fishmongers lopping off the heads of eels and throwing ‘the wretched beasts, still twitching, into the shopping bags of eager, festive customers.’

Many writers and several exhibitions have focused on Venice’s connections – mercantile, military and aesthetic – with the East. Here, on a palazzo in Cannaregio, I found a simulation of sinuous Arabic calligraphy on domestic door furniture.

 

 

This one made me sigh. How long is it since anyone in Venice received a telegram instead of an urgent email?

 

 Venice’s sense of humour is not the best known thing about her. I first discovered it in her earthy proverbs, which I began to translate as epigraphs for my first novel, Carnevale. But you see it, if you look, inscribed on her streets too. This panel of doorbells shown above is near San Lorenzo.

Next to a residential building, another kind of door furniture. I haven’t seen a rat in Venice for some time. But I still keep a children’s toy gun in my handbag late at night. The only thing it shoots is light and noise. It seems to work.


And lastly, my favourite piece of door furniture is not old at all. But I am very fond of it.



Perhaps some poet shall take against its door one day, but for the moment it offers only happy welcomes.

Michelle Lovric’s website