Floater verse

PEN International  always strives to bring all communities of writers to the fore. Its work with those immured in prisons has always produced uplifting results; Louis Templeman: Villanelle to Pio

Louis Templeman was awarded First Place in poetry in the 2010 Prison Writing Contest. Villanelle to Pio  Speak to me. Tell me that I am not alone. In my voice only have I searched for truth. Am I not still breathing. Awake. Flesh and bone. Speak to me. Though you find me deaf as a stone, help me to find the lonely, bloody son of Ruth, who speaks to hearing ears that they are not alone. Do you find me tragic, scarred, but now atoned; atoned, yet now so old and of such little use. But am I not breathing, living flesh and bone. Take me to the victim sealed behind a stone. I ran from him. The voiceless. The accused. Speak to me. Sing, or else I stand alone. I tried to kill myself with pills, so white they shone, longing for words final as the hangmans noose. Instead words, breathing, made flesh a heart of stone. You, Pio, of one breath with beauty, renown Voice of fire speaking goodness, breathing truth, Will you speak to me, the naked and alone. Breathe into me, breathing flesh upon dry bones. Guernica is an award winning magazine of art and ideas.It has teamed up with PEN  previously in its its World Voices Festival of International Literature.  It features an online selection of poetry that is both aesthetically and politically relevant. [Like a nation’s bulk that has started] by Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Alistair Noon, February 2011 Like a nation’s bulk that has started to make the earth sweat, the dust-encrusted armada of the herd, with its many strata, sails straight into my head: its heifers’ tender sides, its tearaway bullocks, the ships of the buffalo looming into sight, and the bulls behind them, stamping up like bishops. 12 June 1931 Osip Mandelstam was born in 1891 and grew up in St. Petersburg. He traveled in the Caucasus, was exiled to the city of Voronezh, and was deported to a labor camp in the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938. He published two books of poetry, Stone and Tristia, in his lifetime, while other work has appeared posthumously as The Moscow and Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1930-1937. Alistair Noon’s full-length collection of translations of Osip Mandelstam is forthcoming from Leafe Press (UK) in 2011. He has also published translations of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and of the German poets Monika Rinck and August Stramm, as well as several chapbooks of his own poetry. He lives in Berlin. www.guernicamag.com Roger Sedarat was a participant in the Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature 2010.   Roger Sedarat is an Iranian-American poet. He is the author of two poetry collections: Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which was published by the Ohio University Press and won the Press's Hollis Summers' Poetry Prize [1] , and Ghazal Games (Ohio University Press). In his poetry, he frequently crosses the post-modern American tradition with the classical Persian tradition, reproducing his hybrid identity in his verse. His poetry and literary translations have appeared in such journals as New England Review, Drunken Boat, Atlanta Review, and World Literature Today. A poem of his, "High Q"was included in an anthology published by the State University of New York Press [2] He is also the author of, Pupils of the Gorgeous Wheel: A Lacanian View of Landscape in Modern New England Poetry (Cambria). Under the name of "Haji," Roger writes and performs political poetry that challenges oppressive regimes as well as the construct of "Poetry" in the 21st century. The following poem has been excerpted from Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic Agha D— When I meet the literary historian of a nation, he’s writing a book in his underwear, cutting and pasting the faces of poets into ruler-drawn boxes. As he holds each black and white face before me, he slices his throat with his index finger, showing one regime in the old country suffices as metaphor for another, substitutions for fear the written word with all its ambiguities might lead others to question positions of power. Take this poem, for example, designed to frame the missing men who surreptitiously appear under the wand of the critic’s finger, which also arrives as warning to me, another poet in a chain of being bound to struggle for his voice across the censor’s literal sword. www.sedarat.com

WORLD VOICES PEN

This is an intriguing account, of the tumultuous civil revolts that have transformed modern Egypt. Here Inji Hassab writes in Sampsonia Way of the daily trials that lead to revolution, and the hope and rage that brings absolute power to its knees.The Egypt I Didn’t Know

Scottish Pen's New Writing features Rough Sea by Alison Prince who began her career in TV, writing scripts for BBC children's programmes including 'Joe' 'Jackanory' and 'Trumpton'. Her books include an adult novel, biographies of Kenneth Grahame and Hans Christian Andersen and two volumes of poetry. She has won the Guardian Children's Fiction Award and many other prizes, including the Literary Review Grand Poetry Prize, twice, and holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Leicester University for services to children's literature. Her next novel, No Ordinary Love Song will be published by Walker next year. 'Rough Sea' is taken from her collection Having Been in the City, Taranis Books, 1994.

Rough Sea

Old deaths are one with air and spray,
The taste of salt and the scattered sun
Glinting like fish scales
On the body of the sea.

The dead are everywhere.
They are the curled life in the gull's egg,
The rain, the leap of dolphin
Or the whale whose vast tarpaulin back
Gleams briefly through the wave.

The dead live on while anyone
Shifts to balance the sea's heave,
Watches its surge loom up,
Lean and swing under
While the next wave looms again.
The dead have known this wet skin
And the muscles' ache, the sense
Of where the still horizon lies
Beyond these sea-hills.

I am the dead.
There is no fear of fear
In this wild sea.
 

Alison Prince

Another writer featured on Scottish Pen is Tariq Latif  who was born in Pakistan, Lahore, and spent a very happy childhood on his grandfather's farm before moving to Manchester in the early 70s. He went to Sheffield University and after various jobs decided to settle in Argyll to enjoy the beautiful scenery and write poetry. He has 3 books of poetry published. The most recent is The Punjabi Weddings, published by Arc in 2007. 'Mud People' was first published in his book The Minister's Garden

Mud people

Leaving Tesco with a boot full of food
we turn left into Broad Road.
Pebbles of light skim across the windscreen.

Listening to the World News on the radio
we coast past trees abundant with pink blossoms
as the voice speaks of the men and children

who were thrown in the river with their hands
and feet tied. Heads bobbed in the water. Pink
blooms in the car as somewhere else bullets

break bones. The car moves under the shadow
of grand willow trees. The news reader is speaking
about the floods in Pakistan. Houses of mud

swept away in the relentless floods. The winding
streets, the arteries bloated with the thick waves
of slush. Light glistens across the black water,

dark limbs fester. Slowly we turn into Temple Road.

Tariq Latif
 

PAUL MULDOON 

By Lauren Davis (P.E.N America)

Last week, Paul Muldoon, Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Elliot Prize winning poet and poetry editor of the New Yorker, came to visit the weekly class I teach at a prison here in New Jersey.

The classroom is in the basement of the prison.  Bright primary-colored squares on the floor tiles, and pale blue walls strive for a cheerful atmosphere, but the bars on the windows and the presence of large armed men just down the hall make it clear where we are. Now and again the PA systems squawks out orders for inmates to report to this place or that, calling the men to class, to work, to the administrator's office...

Paul, a wonderfully rumpled sort of man, with wild silvery hair flying every which way, wears a tweed jacket, shirt, and gray flannels.  He sits on a gray plastic chair in the middle of the room, with the inmates facing him in a double half-circle.  He looks a little exposed, with his belly hanging over his belt a bit.  The men dwarf the school-room chair/desks at which they sit.  They all wear the same khaki scrubs and work boots.

I've been preparing them for this visit for weeks, brought them Paul's poetry and his bio.  I'm not sure they entirely believed he'd really show up, being quite convinced, for the most part, that very few people on the outside think of them at all, let alone important people who are not getting paid for their visit.

M., says, "So, you written like a whole book of poems?"

I., sitting next to him, guffaws hugely, and slaps the poems and biographical information I'd given the men.  "One book?  He wrote a whole bunch of books!  Don't you read this shit?"

"Well," says Paul.  "I try to write poems.  I think people who write actually have more trouble with words than other people.  That's why we struggle over them so much.  But I do try."

I tell the men Paul is also a musician and was in a recording studio last night.  O. asks Paul what kind of music?

"Well, I will tell you I play very poorly," says Paul.  "just a bit of rudimentary rhythm guitar, but I like to write lyrics, and I try to write them."

I doubt the men know Paul has not only written produced librettos, but has written songs recorded by The Handsome Family, Warren Zevon and Bruce Springsteen.

A., a small talkative student, says he's brought a poem.  One he wrote for a class on the holocaust.  Paul asks A. to read it.  He's written it from the point of view of a Jewish concentration camp inmate.  It's not a perfect poem, but there are some lines of great power.

"That's what poetry can do," Paul says.  "It can put us in the place of someone entirely unlike ourselves.  It opens up worlds.  Well done!"

A. beams.

Paul talks about poetry.  O. mentions he began to write something this week but gave it up, threw it away, because it didn't go anywhere.

"Have you considered," asked Paul, "perhaps not trying to make the work go anywhere?  Have you tried seeing where it might take you?  Sometimes we can be out of control, discovering not what we want to say, but what the words might want to say through us."

To a room full of young men who have very little control, and therefore try to control everything possible, this is an unsettling concept. Paul talks about a poem he's trying to write at the moment, about two seemingly dissimilar things.  He says he senses a connection between them, and he is writing to find out what that might be.

Paul's gentle humor and deep humility win the men over in no time at all.  He wants them to try an exercise in being out of control.  Desks creak and rattle.  The men shuffle their feet and their papers and for a moment they don't make eye contact.  Paul hands a sheet of paper to each man.  On the top of each is a line of poetry, and numbered spaces beneath.  The men are to write just one line of poetry, responding to the line in front of them, then to fold over the line they've read, leaving just the line they've written visible, and pass the page along to the next man.  This causes a moment of panic.  Everyone's asking questions at once.  They don't understand.  What did he mean?  Do they hide the line they write?  Do they have to write lines on all the pages?  Different lines?  Different poems?

It is important to them they do this properly.  Doing things improperly has consequences in this place.  Paul goes over it again, reassures them it will all be well in the end, that something wonderful might happen.  Just go ahead.  Write one line of poetry.  Let the line you read sink into you.

"Think, but not too much," he says.  "Think, and then don't think.  Think.  Don't think."

The men begin to write.  Some are quicker than others, and T. soon has a pile of pages in front of him.  He's struggling.


Read more by this writer at:
 www.laurenbdavis.com

PEN PAKISTAN LITERARY JOURNAL

These are a few of the poems that have been published previously by the PEN Pakistan Literary Journal

Words and Gestures

By Jocelyn Ortt-Saeed


You have taken me
out of my own time
out of time altogether-
away from the high speech
wept and sung
when lovers whisper "forever"

Then tongues grow free
seeking the word
to chant an old refrain
of time,
the moving image
of joy and of pain,
around the birth of being
where time-space
has no meaning

But we have grown in our vision
conversing
in timeless gestures,
walking the steps
of a measure
between forever and never


Cobwebs in Space

by Bushra Naqi

Spiders spinning webs
into old and derelict corners
into tempting skylines
ensnaring bygones, slithering
into the cemetery of time

Overhanging cobwebs
tantalizing in space
images playing havoc
with an imaginative mind
fantasy diving into archives
of folklore and myth

Lurking behind every cobweb
a liaison with deceit
luring the past
into the lair of contemporary time
with a new-fangled facade
tallying with the colloquial

A legacy ground in genealogy
refreshes itself thorough time
in traditions and mores
and sacrosanct beliefs
like the monument of the kings
will a charade perform
of the splendor of the pyramids
within whose eternity is interred
all that is hollow and ephemeral.

Gratitude and Bliss

By Syeda Henna Babar Ali

I am away from you—

God wants to grow the distance—

I try to serve Him—

I submit and surrender

He teaches me to

Give up my will and accept

All He gives with gratitude

There is no one else in my life--- --- ---

I flow with Him and

The power of His presence

Overpowers me.

When He calls,

I submit and bow my head in prayer.

He is the ultimate giver, best friend,

Permanent companion and Beloved---

He folds me in His mantle,

It wraps around me,

I grow, blossom in his love.

Ideology

By Razi Abedi

The clothes I wear are not mine

The house I live in doesn’t belong to me

Nor is this my native land

My clothes are from the landa

My house is an Evacuee

Property

And my nation! Well nationalism

Is against my religion

Since we do not trade in idols

We are iconoclast

My ancestors were so excitable

The blood of foes and friends

So they were called men of blood

But their blood does not run

In my veins

In them there runs petrol, petrol dollars.

In my veins circulates

Arab chauvinism and 

Jewish greed

I live on interest

And pay my Zakat.

Beholding Stillness

By M. Salim-ur-rehman

A day of silence holding on to grief,

Divided into hours, the hours

Split into minutes, the minutes

Into seconds, unfaltering brilliance,

Scattered into smaller and smaller

Reckonings. Silence diminishing

Into grief or grief into silence.

All heard unheard. I turn a new leaf,

Mending the silence of the world

In a time of awakening, in a deep

Time of sleep, in a maturing of words.

How much more stillness can I bear?

Nothing seems to stir as the hours

Pass. Shadows and light sculpted

Into ruins of remembered

Unleavened days, unattended nights.

All I imagine to myself again,

The untouchable stillness existing

At each word’s core, the exact truth,

Beyond recount in its indefinitude

BECAUSE WRITERS SPEAK THEIR MINDS

It is a PEN International tradition to place an empty chair at public gatherings to commemorate those writers who are absent from our community due to imprisonment, exile or other restraints. This chair has been designed to commemorate Liu Xiaobo, a founding member of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre and this year's Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Liu was unable to receive his prize in person because he is serving an 11-year prison sentence in China

A quote from Liu Xiaobo (translated from Chinese into English)

This chair has been crafted for Scottish PEN by students and staff at Lomond School in Helensburgh, Scotland, with the generous sponsrship of Norwegian PEN.

Activities of PEN Pakistan

Book Launch 

“Dream and Reality” by Syeda Henna Babar Ali, President PENPC, was launched on November 16, 2002. The book launching ceremony was attended by a number of writers, educationists, and eminent personalities from different walks of life.“Dream and Reality” is the third book of poetry in English by Syeda Henna Babar Ali. Her first book of poetry, “Wet Sun”, was published in 1983 while the second, “Midnight Dialogue”, came out in 1990. PENPC arranged this function which was funded by Syeda Henna Babar Ali. 

Poetry writing competitions in schools 

For encouraging young literary talent, PENPC has organized intra-school poetry writing competitions among students of classes 8th to 10th in eleven high schools in Lahore since June 2003 (in 7 government schools in 2003, and in one government and three private schools in 2004). Prize winners received poetry books, and cash prizes of Rs. 500, Rs. 300 and Rs. 200 for First, Second, and Third positions, respectively (1US$= Rs.60 approx.). All competing students received “Certificates of Participation”. 

Based on the experience in Lahore in 2003 and 2004, PENPC decided to organize intra-school poetry writing competitions among students of Classes 9th & 10th in government schools outside Lahore. Staff of Training and Resource Centres (TARCs) of Ali Institute of Education, Lahore helped PENPC in organizing these competitions in one government school each in Bhalwal and Mustafabad in May 2005 and in Khanewal in June 2005. 

Poetry writing completions in colleges 

An intra-college poetry writing competition among students of Govt. College, Township, Lahore was held in February 2005. Prize winners received poetry books and cash prizes of Rs. 1,000, Rs. 750 and Rs. 500 for First, Second, and Third positions, respectively. All competing students received “Certificates of Participation”. 

Poetry recitation competitions among participants of weekly children programme of Radio Pakistan Lahore 

PENPC supported the holding of poetry recitation competitions among participants of children’s weekly programme“Honhar” of Radio Pakistan Lahore from September 2004 to May 2005. Upto 12 years old boys and girls participated in these competitions held on the last Sunday of every month. Prize winners received poetry books, and cash prizes of Rs. 500, Rs. 300 and Rs. 200 for First, Second and Third positions, respectively with “Certificates of Participation”. 

PENPC Best “First Book” Awards in poetry and prose for books published during 2003 

To nurture literary talent in Pakistan, PENPC, in 2004, invited nominations for two PENPC Awards of Rs. 20,000 each for the best “First Book” in literary prose or poetry published during 2003 (first edition) in Urdu, English or any regional language of Pakistan. The book had to be an original work of fiction, not a translation or compilation and the “First Book” of a Pakistani author in poetry or prose published during 2003. Separate panels of judges for poetry and prose, appointed by the PENPC Executive Committee, evaluate the entries received for these Awards on the basis of their literary and stylistic excellence. For the originality and freshness of his first effort, PENPC best “First Book” Award in poetry was awarded to Mr. Shanawar Ishaq for his Urdu poetry book “Iltabas”, first published in 2003 by Ilmo Irfan Publishers, Lahore. Ms. Kiran Azam was awarded PENPC best “First Book” Award in prose for her book “Dreams Can Come True” published by Ferozsons (Pvt.) Ltd., Karachi in 2003. This is an absorbing story of a teenager contracting a serious illness and then miraculously finding a cure for it herself, becoming famous and leading a happy life. PENPC Best “First Book” Awards presentation ceremony was held at Lahore on May 20, 2005. 

PENPC Newsletter 

PENPC Newsletter, highlighting the programmes and activities of the PENPC, was published in March 2004.

History

International PEN was founded in London in 1921 by Mrs. C.A. Dawson Scott. Its first president was John Galsworthy. The only worldwide association of writers, its aims are to promote literature, defend freedom of expression and develop a community of writers worldwide.

Because international cultural co-operation in the field of literature and the development of understanding cannot exist without freedom of expression, International PEN acts as a powerful voice in opposing political censorship and speaking for writers harassed, imprisoned, sometimes murdered for the expression of their views.

International PEN in its early years only had Centres in Europe, but writers of other nations joined International PEN enthusiastically and, in 1926, members from fifteen nations met in Berlin. Today PEN is composed of 144 Centres in 102 countries. Its membership is open to all published writers regardless of nationality, language, race, colour or religion. Each Centre acts as an autonomous cultural and intellectual organization within its own country; individual Centres organize regional conferences and seminars; and all Centres maintain links with each other through PEN's headquarters.

Among early members were Joseph Conrad, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells. Centres were soon started in Europe, with such writers as Anatole France, Paul Valery, Thomas Mann, Benedetto Croce and Karel Capek playing active parts in the life and work of PEN. Over the years members have included Nobel Prize winners and other eminent writers from all over the world; among PEN's Presidents have been Alberto Moravia, Heinrich Böll, Arthur Miller, Pierre Emmanuel, Mario Vargas Llosa and György Konrád.

PEN's highest Authority, the Assembly of Delegates, consisting of representatives from each Centre, meets at the annual PEN Congress, where, in addition to the work of the Assembly, cultural events and literary forums are held, through which seeks to mobilize the intelligence and imagination of its members in support of its ideals. The international and diverse character of International PEN is reflected in its Executive Committee, which consists of the President, the Treasurer and seven members elected from among PEN's worldwide membership.