Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

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Interviewer Intro: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Peter Pears Gallery and our 5 pm event, ‘Short-Take on Love and Death’, for which we are delighted to have with us Pascale Petit. Our theme then, love and death. Could we say that these are poetry’s only true subjects? We have been asking a number of our guest poets this today. Always a good question for debate, though I think in 15 minutes Pascale might have her work cut out for her. Who better to tackle it for us this evening? Please give her a warm welcome: Pascale Petit.  

[Applause] 

Pascale Petit: Thank you, and hello. Well, I missed the talk this morning because I was doing a blind criticism at the same time unfortunately. But I’ve thought about this and I wonder, is poetry an effort to make a home for ourselves on Earth? I say that because that’s what it is for me. I am trying to make a home in my poems. I don’t feel that I have a home, an actual home. I don’t know where my home is. And also the exile poet Yang Lian thought this too. He says in the introduction to his latest book, ‘Lee Valley Poems’, that he tries to make poetry his true home since he has no home in the world. He lives in London, and he’s an exile from China. Is this the true subject of poetry? Is it love and death, or sex and death? Yes, I’m sure it is because these are the main things, but maybe that’s too narrow a definition of poetry’s subjects. Maybe I’d call it the life force and the death force, which opens it up somewhat. That opens it up, I think, to include everything: war, violence, art, nature, and the death force, not just the personal death force, and war, but as I said, in society. I admire poets that take on really ambitious themes, so I’ve picked out three poets to discuss in translation. I think it’s very important to look at work in translation from elsewhere, from other so-called homes on the Earth. So I think that poetry’s big theme is home and what it is like to be human on this planet. I don’t know if you agree with me, but that’s what I find that it is. This planet in this strange universe which I don’t understand.  

00:03:03 

And I think this is what the Argentinian poet Alfonsina Storni is investigating in this very strange poem of hers, ‘World of Seven Wells’, where she looks at the seven gates of perception: the mouth, nose, ears, and eyes. So, I’ll very quickly read it. 

World of Seven Wells.  

It balances itself above  

On the neck  

The world of seven doors 

The human head. 

Round, like two planets  

Burning in its centre 

The first nucleus, osseous cortex 

Covering it. Dermal silt  

Sewn with the hair’s  

Thick forest  

From the nucleus entides 

Blue and absolute  

The water level of the gaze rises 

And opens the gentle door 

Of the eyes like seas in land. 

So calm, those great waters of God, 

That on them butterflies and golden insects alight.  

And the other two doors  

antennae curled up in the catacombs  

Where the ears begin, 

Wells of sounds, mother of pearl shells 

Where the spoken and unspoken word echo 

Tubes placed to the right and to the left so that  

The sea never quiets and the world’s mechanical wing keeps buzzing.  

And the mountain which rests above the head’s equatorial line,  

The nose and its waxy frames, where life’s colour becomes muted  

The two doors giving way to flowers, leaves, fruit, springs, fragrant, serpent. 

And the mouth’s crater, with its scorched rim  

And walls turned ash and dust, 

The crater that spews the sulphur of violent words  

Smoke-thick from the heart and its torment.  

A door of lavishly carved corals, through which the beast devours  

And the angel sings and smiles  

And the human volcano troubles.  

It balances itself above, on the neck,  

The world of seven wells, the human head 

And pink meadows bloom in its valleys of silk  

The mossy cheeks  

And on the curve of the forrid, white desert,  

Shimmers the distant light of a dead moon.’ 

Pascale Petit: So, I really like the multi-layered-ness of this poem, and the very luminous, glowing image of the face and the head as a double planet. I can read and read that poem and get more growing images out of it. And I particularly like ‘the human volcano troubles’, which seems to be at the heart of it. It really does trouble.  

00:06:40 

And the entry to the world, as depicted by the Israeli poet Amir Or. So, ‘Love, Sex, Birth Poem’.  

Love Sex Birth Poem  

Journey to the world. 

The spirit is falling.  

The small body shakes below  

With the big one. 

When a savage sea is pounding adepth  

Into both, and the casing is the interior,  

Grasping, shrinking, wiggling,  

Swallowing, like a throat, or an intestine, it’s prey.  

Electric pain throws him out of the womb  

Towards faces leaning over opening thighs 

To the sky of the room, and further  

To the room of the sky, rounded over his eyes 

Faces, faces, and more faces from the sea, 

The cities, the burning air.  

Bones squeak, crack, split under skin.  

Ants are crawling down the eyeholes  

Walls are changing into more changing walls. 

A cradle, a bathtub, a street, a grave, 

Down below  

a crying. 

Pascale Petit: A very powerful poem I think, and a different kind of look at being born from say, a number of poems by women writing about giving birth, or indeed, I’ve written a few from the baby’s viewpoint. So, it’s more of a metaphysical look at it, I think, and I love the way it telescopes at the end and becomes really vast, so you move right away from the Earth and somehow end up in a grave. A very strange thing he’s doing with time there. And then that crying, the baby’s first cry, but also, it’s, to me, that feels like being somewhere in space, hearing the Earth crying as it is, I think. For all the wars. And now to look at Yang Lian. A very small extract from his book, ‘From Home’. He writes a great deal about what it’s like to be an exile, and he lives very near me in London, in the Lee Valley just across the Lee River. And he looks at Walthamstow Marshes as though it’s the Tang Dynasty China, which, to me, is a totally fresh way of looking at it. I’ve lived there for so long and I haven’t been able to write about it, but there he comes from China, and is able to write about it wonderfully, and what it’s like to find a new home. So, this is a very small extract from that book.  

‘The cat who ought to be here strolls between the furniture, supplying a blank to the rainy day. Bottles are being washed, organs hanging shining outside the body. Each has a ringing pair of North and South Poles, binding ice and snow with absent lines of magnetic force. Another hour moves you and me into the spacecraft, holding hands, screaming, eyes closed.  

Your thin, shining snores circle far away. Night has a delicately carved, cut off comet’s tail. This house floats on water, following the form of water, continually darkening against the phosphorescence, sweeping the world away with a second-hand’s tongue.’ 

Pascale Petit: So, an amazing, surreal poem there. I just love the second-hand having a tongue, and that relating back to the cat. Such a homely image, the cat, but then they seem to be going to a spacecraft. I don’t know why they’re going to a spacecraft, maybe they’re making love, maybe they’re going to sleep, or maybe he sees home, the Earth, as a spacecraft. I don’t know. But they’re holding hands and they’re screaming, eyes closed. So again, I really like this kind of cosmic, expansive, large view. You know, as if another being has come to this planet and is absolutely amazed at us, at human beings, and what it’s like to be human.  

Pascale Petit: So I don’t know if any of you have anything you want to say in response to that. If you find the difficult poems I think I may have chosen quite difficult poems, quite surreal, because I personally quite like that. And Yang Lian is a difficult poet. But then, I think this is a difficult thing. I’ve just come away from a reading by Jeoffrey Hill, and you know, I find his poems quite difficult, but he is very ambitious, and he is taking on the big themes. So that’s what it is for me. And thank you very much for listening.  

[Applause]