Calligraphy at Left Bank

Simon Hall writes:
What is the relationship between the spoken and the written word? What is the relationship between the written word and the way we write it? These questions were bubbling under the surface as I picked up a piece of wood shaped into a primitive nib and tried to make a shape approximating to an Arabic letter. I was sharing a table with a very diverse group of punters - all complete novices - as we tried to get our minds and hands round the ancient practice of drawing words.

What made this particular session remarkable - in addition to the beautiful surroundings of Left Bank - was that the art was being done with a unique purpose. Gillian Holding is Jewish and local and Iman Meghraoua is an Eastern European Muslim, but they came together not just to teach calligraphy, but to demonstrate the common origins of Hebrew and Arabic script. If we share a script, can we not share our lives, they asked wordlessly as they gave unceasing encouragement to our group of faltering amateurs. As we hamfistedly tried to make beauty from the most basic of instruments we were being shown how much the romantic, flowing Arabic script has in the common with its precise - almost digitally precise - Hebrew sibling.

Just a few hours earlier, Gillian and Iman had welcomed young people from their own communities to share together and create huge collages of script to be taken to Israel/Palestine as a sign of peace and reconciliation. We, too, were able to make our own tiny contribution to the work. It felt hopelessly inept, tiny and insignificant, and yet here were two people from communities who are supposed to be at war with each other asking us to play our part. How could we refuse?

On your marks! Get set!

(Free House Event- Sunday 25 March)

Doug Sandle writes:

When I was a teenager I had pictures from an illustrated sports magazine on my bedroom wall alongside pictures of work by the likes of Paul Klee, Mondrian, Picasso and Magritte. While sport and the arts are often seen to occupy different and oppositional realms, as  portrayed in the popular stereotypes of the super fit  sports ‘jock and the arty ‘aesthete’, for me the arts and sport are twin passions. As an adolescent I wrote poetry and also ran cross country, played rugby and was a middle distance runner.  

So as a 'Beck Arts' contribution to the Headingley LifFest, following on from our 2011 Food for Thought, for this Olympic year it had to be the literature (and some songs) of sport as the subject of our presentation. As luck would have it, LitFest guest Anthony Clavane in his Sunday afternoon session talked about the often perceived divide between mind and body and the stereotypical assumptions that arts and sport necessarily inhabited different worlds. He argued that arts and sport had much in common and as an example cited author David Storey, who had been a Rugby League player for Leeds.  As I research the relationships between the arts and sport it is surprising how many artists, writers, dramatists, film makers, composers, dancers and poets have used sport not only as a subject  to be celebrated (and sometimes critiqued) but as a rich expressive and symbolic narrative of human experience. For Anthony Clavane, sport is theatre and a dramatic spectacle. For conceptual artist Martin Creed, whose piece entitled Work No. 850 in which every 30 seconds a runner ran through the galleries of Tate Britain, there is the implication that our experience of, and engagement with, art and sport may  have much in common. 

So in our sporty clothes and entering slow motioned to strains of Chariots of Fire we entered our arena (the welcoming front room of Richard Wilcocks's abode) to perform On Your Marks! Get Set!  to a full house. The performers who joined me were Sheila Chapman (who stood in generously for Lis Bertolla, who was unable to attend as advertised), Richard Wilcocks, John Milburn and Maria Sandle. The programme included poems on tennis, running, football, cricket and golf and readings of prose works on football and cricket featuring both well known and perhaps not so well known poets and authors. 

Richard also revealed in suitable dramatic style (in his piece The Führer's First XI) that Hitler had once had an interest in cricket and that he attempted to rewrite the rules and characteristics of the game. Following some particularly lyrical poems on cricket, John performed the poetic Roy Harper song When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease. Maria concluded a section on football with an example of a song that had had become ‘appropriated’ and associated with sport by singing The Fields of Athenry. This has become a feature of several sporting events and is performed by fans, notably for Celtic and Liverpool football clubs and also for Irish Rugby games. 

Some works, such as Lis Bertolla’s own poem Team Spirit (especially written for this event), reminded us that school experience of sport was not a comfortable experience for some, while nonetheless recognising its metaphorical import later in life. Other readings playfully poked fun at being too obsessed with sporting prowess and physicality or critiqued the celebrity culture of commodified sport. The performance concluded with a song and a poem about boxing, and we then moved on to indulge in the refreshments provided by Anna. It was a very enjoyable event for the last day of the main LitFest programme.

The Lingo of Sport in New Headingley Club

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Sunday Mirror sports writer Anthony Clavane spoke about his best-selling Promised Land: A Northern Love Story which is about the city, its football club and its communities, and about what it means to be a writer who wants to celebrate Leeds. We need to relish our ‘Leedsness’!

His heroes were not all taken from the sporting world: Mick McCann’s How Leeds Changed The World was mentioned, and David Storey was flagged up, even though he came from Wakefield, which according to Clavane is “almost Leeds, well all right, it’s West Yorkshire... well anyway he’s been a big influence and he wrote This Sporting Life on the train to London... every time I go down to Kings Cross on the train, which is often, I am reminded of how he wrote the novel sitting in a seat just like mine, on the train. He played Rugby League at weekends and was a student at the Slade School of Art during the week.

“The worlds of sport and art can be brought together. There are so many connections and so many false dichotomies.” He went on to illustrate his point.

There was Brian Clough, the manager who did not actually burn Don Revie’s desk, even though David Peace had him do it in The Damned United (look up David Peace in the search box above to find his contribution to the 2010 LitFest), and there was mention of Matt Busby, who once managed a certain bunch of footballers on the other side of the Pennines, and who described football as theatre: “...in which case Elland Road is the Theatre of the Absurd.”

“The Kop at Elland Road – remember? A Greek chorus!” We shared our memories of chants. He did not mention all of them because he considered that we were “a family audience”, which provoked one or two surprised looks.

Clavane aired personal anecdotes, of which he has a great archive, drawn upon extensively for the book. He once sold lollies and ice creams in the old Leeds Playhouse, one half of a sports centre. Quiet, significant moments in plays were often less than tense when the audience could hear the clink-clink of weights being hoisted and dropped by those training at the other side of breeze-block walls. “I saw Comedians by Trevor Griffiths and Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of An Anarchist when I worked there. Fo’s play changed every night because the actors had to react to contemporary events. You never knew exactly what was going to happen. As in a match.”

Questions and Answers was interesting, given equal time with the talk. He tackled a lengthy one about all sport being too male-orientated with professional skill and declared that he had given adequate space in Promised Land to the violent and racist elements who once gave Leeds United such a bad reputation, back in the seventies. “It’s changed such a lot. It’s more family orientated now,” he said. Someone pointed out that rugby had been like that for decades.

Promised Land is about to be adapted for the stage this summer by Clavane and co-writer Nick Stimpson. The adaptation will tell the same story through the eyes of Nathan and Caitlin, two young idealists growing up in mid-1970s Leeds, living in the same city but on opposite sides of a cultural and religious divide. Nathan is a third generation Russian-Jewish immigrant and a Leeds United obsessive who dreams of making it as a writer, and Caitlin is a political campaigner and a third-generation Irish Catholic immigrant. Against all the odds, they fall in love, united by their hopes and dreams – the kind of aspiration that drew their grandparents to the industrial city in the first place.

The play, which is going to be full of music and dancing, with a large community cast and a band, is a co-production between Red Ladder Theatre Company, Leeds Civic Arts Guild and The Carriageworks. It will be performed at The Carriageworks between 22 and 30 June 2012.

Endymion launch at the Flux Gallery

Sheila Chapman writes:

The Flux was its usual self on Saturday night: skewiff, tilted, slanted and full of poets. We greeted each other with immortal lines like, ‘nice to see you’ and ‘god it’s been a long time’, sipped/glugged our drinks, nibbled nuts and partook of divine cheese and pickle sandwiches.

The poetry and readings were divine too with ten artists taking to the floor to celebrate the launch of Endymion by Flux Gallery Press. Endymion is an Arts and Poetry magazine which is packed with poems, reflections, critique and illustrations. This first edition focuses on romance, not just the romance of love but romance in its broadest sense.

As the Foreword to the magazine says:

‘In its original historical context the word romantic encapsulated a richly nuanced set of meanings ranging from the revolutionary to the notion of the sublime. Above all, it stood for the complex of emotional and psychological responses that defined a new conception of humanity characterised by a heightened sense of individualism'.

Each of the people who read last night had contributed to the magazine and they brought it to life before us. Their readings reflected its wonderful variety taking us through a range of emotions as well as perceptive observations, inspired language, evocative imagery and great good humour.

Iakovus Brown, Dave Cooke, Cathy Galvin, Lisa Geddes, Tony F Griffin, Dougla Houston, Linda  Marshall, Ian Parks, Ian Pople, Pam Scobie,  and Angela Topping were the readers.

Des the Miner played their hearts out and we talked, laughed and listened our way through the evening. As an audience member said:

‘Superb. Convivial, intelligent, wonderful atmosphere’.

Endymion can be bought on Amazon, and Kindle is coming soon, subject to the resolution of some software problems!

Ross Raisin in the New Headingley Club

Poetry Under Occupation

Richard Wilcocks writes:

I discovered the poetry of Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski during the eighties, when I was working for the British Council at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. The discovery led to another one – the remarkably powerful interpretations of his work by the charismatic Polish singer Ewa Demarczyk. She is known as a leading practitioner of sung poetry, and has given her attention to a number of other poets, not all from the Polish canon, for example Goethe.

Here she is on YouTube with her interpretation of Baczynski’s Deszcze (The Rains)

This poem could be illustrated with many image-collections from Second World War Poland. I chose the heroic but doomed Warsaw Uprising of 1944 for my slide show, because that is where Baczynski died. I considered that the pictures projected on to the wall in the Shire Oak Room of the Heart Centre were necessary because the romantic and ‘catastrophist’ poems are best understood in a specific context: many people have just a vague knowledge of what happened in Poland between 1939 and 1945, when it was first of all carved up between Germany and the Soviet Union, each of which became responsible for appalling atrocities, then when it came under the complete control of the Nazis, with all the mass-murder which they brought with them. People outside Poland seem to know more about the equally heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, but little about the events of the following year, organised by the Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa), which prompted Heinrich Himmler, SS and Gestapo chief, to order that all the city’s Polish inhabitants should be killed and all the buildings flattened. Poles were regarded by the Nazis as Untermenschen, subhuman. Slavs were next on the extermination list after the Jews.

I read poems by one or two other Polish poets who have written about the War, leaving out quite a few which had been on my original list for reasons of time, for example the great Tadeusz Różewicz. As I told the audience at the time, my Polish is not strong, and much of the hard work on Baczynski was done in collaboration by Anna Żukowska-Wilcocks. When we translated our selection of poems a couple of decades ago, we could not find any English versions, but there are now several websites which feature them, and we have our preferences and criticisms in relation to these. I did not want to make the English versions too mellifluous, but to retain stark, staccato qualities, which is difficult when it is necessary to use definite and indefinite articles in English - not in Polish.  The reading included some of our translations (like Deszcze) which have been anthologized (the excellent Poetry of the Second World War edited by Desmond Graham) and some (like Miserere) which have not. Others could have been included, for example more of his love poems.

Many of Baczynski’s highly emotive poems cry out for dramatic performance, and it was a privilege to be able to do that.

Síle Moriarty writes:

I thought the Shire Oak Room at HEART looked lovely for this event. It had already been used for three community events during the day and now, through the efforts of Centre Manager, Mark and his staff, (ably assisted by LitFest volunteers), it had been transformed into a beautiful performance space complete with piano, stage lighting, microphones etc. plus table decorations (daffodils) and tea lights. It glimmered with light and was a pleasure to perform in.

Poetry under occupation is often considered to be war poetry but I am very aware of another type of occupation – the occupation of a country by an alien language. This has never been more true than of Ireland where the occupation by English has been so complete that some of the greatest writers in the English language are in fact Irish: Yeats, Joyce, Wilde, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland to name but a few.

But the Irish language is not completely dead; it clings on in the Gaelteacht areas, predominantly on the west coast, and as a subject taught in schools. It also has its own great writers and the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is one of them.

Nuala is passionate about the language; she considers that the loss of the Irish language is ‘... a psychic fault line, a personality cleavage along the different language lines (which) will return to haunt us’. She also says that Irish is ‘... the corpse that sits up and talks back.’

She wanted to write about the loss of the language but as a poet, not a historian or socio-linguist. She dug into the pre-Christian roots of Ireland, into is myth and folklore and came up with a metaphor for the language in the form of merpeople – mermaids and mermen. She wondered what would happen if they were forced to leave the sea and live on dry land. How would that affect their collective psyche? Would it warp their society, block access to their history and lead to strange beliefs and superstitions? Nuala wrote a collection based on this metaphor called The Fifty Minute Mermaid and it is from this book that my readings last night were, in the main, selected. When I was translating her poems (with the invaluable help of Maire Ní Ghrifín, my Irish language teacher) I became more and more aware of the power of poetry to express the human condition. As Adrian Phillips writes when reviewing the collection for the Guardian in 2008 the fifty minutes of the title refers to:

’… the so-called 50-minute hour of psychoanalysis, a modern therapy that is about our immersion in the past and our distortions of time’.

But the poetry is so much more than that; Adrian Philips again:

 ‘The naff banality of psychology, 'a real difficulty of boundaries', is played off against the extraordinary vision of what this may mean in practice, at its best. If everything in the language runs into everything else, it both crashes and blends. What the mermaid has learnt are the hollows of insulation. There is no romanticising of the past, no obsessive elegising in Ni Dhomhnaill's work. It is something far more disturbing than innocence or order she wants to recover.’

To be able to read from this extraordinary collection and in such a great setting was a real pleasure for me. Treasa Ní Drisceól read Ceist Na Teangan ‘as Gaeilge’ and sang a beautiful version of Fear a Bháta (despite suffering from the flu) for which I am extremely grateful.

It was an extraordinary night (the poetry of Krzystof Kamil Baczynski, plus the wonderful performance of Reem Kelani) and I am really pleased that I was able to contribute to it.  But what pleases me even more is that I heard Gaeigle spoken again (it has happened in the LitFest before) in Headingley.

Sally Bavage writes:

And so to the final part of the evening.  Reem Kelani came to Headingley LitFest hotfoot from a rapturous packed performance at the Howard Assembly Rooms sponsored by Opera North; she gathered her thoughts, soothed her voice and gave us a tour-de-force performance on our theme of Poetry under Occupation.  Manchester-born Reem was brought up in Kuwait and in fact qualified and worked as a research marine biologist before turning to music and poetry.  She now spends her time translating and performing literature, poetry and songs that promote some of the most significant Arabic works.

She dedicated her set of songs and poems to Abu Bakr Rauf, the young Respect party founder member who had so unexpectedly collapsed and died on Tuesday 20 March whilst out campaigning in the Bradford West by-election. Visibly moved, Reem praised the work of the young father who was Chair of the Bradford Palestine Solidarity Campaign.  Golda Meir, a former prime minister of Israel once said "There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist."  But as Reem pointed out, she sings songs and poems developed over centuries by the Palestinian people so how could they not exist? She works tirelessly to promote Palestinian identity and culture.

Around half of her songs and poems were Palestinian in origin, pre-1948 versions, from her first album Sprinting Gazelle (http://www.reemkelani.com/album.asp) and half from work by Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish (1892-1923).  Her project researching his work has taken the best part of a decade and, whilst working on what will be an album hopefully released by the end of 2012, she was in Cairo in January 2011.  She was there in Tahrir Square, saw the explosion of popular feeling against the oppression by a repressive regime and heard the songs of Darwish dominating the singing by the crowds.  The same songs sung in 1919 against the occupying regime of the British.  Same poet, different century, same hopes for freedom of expression.  The power of words again!

What a night we had! Accompanied by Bruno Heinem on the piano, they moved us to laughter and tears by turns with her poetry, her passion and his playing.  You couldn’t put it better than ‘The Observer’: “Kelani has a voice of amazing power and intensity, but it’s always controlled, and there’s a moving vulnerability there too.”  Here was another observer who was privileged to be part of such a special event.

Reem will be appearing again in Leeds on Friday 27 April at Seven Arts http://www.sevenleeds.co.uk/clients/sevenarts/MODULES/DIARY/DIARYMOD_item.asp?type=All&itemid=398 - do not miss the opportunity! 

Below, Richard Wilcocks, Síle Moriarty, Reem Kelani