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