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| Jenny Lewis with her 2007 collection, Fathom. Her next book, Taking Mesopotamia, is forthcoming in March 2014. |
This interview with Carcanet/OxfordPoets author Jenny Lewis was conducted by Maya Catherine Popa, a poet and a student on the Creative Writing MSt course at the University of Oxford.
Jenny Lewis trained as a painter before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and gaining an M.Phil in Poetry from the University of Glamorgan. She has been a singer-songwriter, an advertising copywriter, a children's author, playwright and screenwriter, a teacher and a civil servant, and she has also worked for the Commission for Equality and Human Rights. Lewis currently lives in Oxford, where she teaches poetry at Oxford University. She is also a Writing Tutor at Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, working with the Youth Theatre Companies. Her next collection, Taking Mesopotamia, is forthcoming in March 2014.
How do the poems in your pamphlet Now As Then (now in its second reprint) fit into Taking Mesopotamia, the larger, forthcoming manuscript?
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| Maya Catherine Popa |
Your verse play After Gilgamesh also engages with Mesopotamia in its invocation of the epic. Can you remember what first drew you to this story, and to this particular literary tradition?
I discovered The Epic of Gilgamesh when I embarked on the long journey to find out more about my father who died of a coronary thrombosis when I was a few months old. My sister and I discovered an album of photos taken by him, with a Box Brownie camera, while he was on active service in Mesopotamia-Iraq in WW1; so we have a private archive of photographs of the Bridge of Boats at Qurna (the original site of the Garden of Eden), the South Wales Borderer’s army camp at Kut al Amara, paddle steamers bringing the wounded from Kut down the Tigris and many more unique images, several of which will be published for the first time in Taking Mesopotamia. I became obsessed by Gilgamesh - the oldest piece of written literature in the world, written in cuneiform on clay tablets found in the library of Ashurbanipal (c 685-627 BC) when it was excavated in the 1850s – because although dating as an oral tale from around 2700 BC all its themes are still relevant today. It is the cornerstone from which all subsequent Middle Eastern and Western literature springs, and it predates nearly all themes in subsequent epics. Obvious examples are the Flood (almost identical to the Bible’s version only the survivor is Uta-Naphishtim, not Noah, and the Ark was shaped like a coracle which just rose on the waters); the hero quest, heroic feats and journeys to the Underworld (the Iliad and the Odyssey); dream visions, interpretations of dreams and such marvels as groves of jewels (Medieval texts such as Pearl and Piers Plowman). I've also been fascinated by aspects of the poem such as register and diction – especially in relation to the ancient Sumerian ‘women’s language’ or emesal which might have been used for invocation or for other specific purposes.
Your collaboration with Ramez Ghazoul and Adnan al-Sayegh on Now As Then has no doubt expanded and diversified the community of British poetry readers, and vice versa—your British readers can now say that they have read at least one contemporary Iraqi poet. What has it been like collaborating in more than one language, with poets whose inter-texts and literary canon differ from your own?
It has been a complete revelation. For a start, classical literary Arabic does not use punctuation, parentheses or capital letters and has many tropes and features (such as repetition) which aren’t common in contemporary English poetry. Adnan al Sayegh and I use a variety of translators and we always do the final edit together ourselves to make as sure as possible that we have done justice to each other’s work. The two new poems – ‘Now as Then’ (the pamphlet’s title poem) and ‘Song for Inanna/ Ishtar’ were written as a response to the artefacts in the Ancient Near East Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, where we worked on a two-month programme of creative writing workshops and readings to mark the 10th anniversary of the 2003 UK/ US invasion of Iraq. As to the effect of our ‘bridge-building’ between our two languages and cultures, we have witnessed the powerful emotional effect our readings have on audiences. We are translating as much of each other’s work as we can and hope to take readings, seminars, talks, lectures and performances to as many places as possible throughout the English and Arabic-speaking world.
How do you balance your research on ancient Mesopotamia with what we hear about contemporary Iraq in the news? How does Taking Mesopotamia engage with ancient and contemporary Iraq, and who are the speakers in this collection?
My fellow Oxford Poets/Carcanet poet, Jane Draycott, with whom I teach on the Oxford University Creative Writing Master of Studies, kindly says ‘Taking Mesopotamia is a truly memorable piece of work - a sustained, song-like montage of diary entries, testimony and ancient narrative from the landscapes of Iraq-Mesopotamia, illuminated through startlingly vivid new lyric poetry…’ and indeed, the book grew organically from a range of different sources. Entries from the South Wales Borderer’s War Diaries (which I studied for two years at the National Archives) such as
2/3/4 April 1916 there were violent storms, the mules bolted and men and mules fell into deep ditches and drowned. Blankets and greatcoats had been abandoned so men had to sleep six hours crouching or standing in trenches while the ground dried off. No firewood for cooking, drinking water could only be drawn at one point on which Turkish guns were trained.
5/6 April 1916 - Assault on Falahiya a strong N.W. wind drove the cholera-ridden waters of the Suwaikiya Marsh into the trenches of the Meerut Division…
led to poems like ‘Baptism’ (first published in Ambit, January 2012)
BAPTISM
They could have been made from stone, the same
stone of country houses with walled gardens spurting
valerian: they were freezing, coatless, cold as slate
when marsh water flowed into the trenches carrying
cholera and they went over the top in darkness to meet
darkness lit by enemy flares, stumbling and drowning
with the bolting mules, too numb to know what they
were doing or which way they were supposed to go:
back home the font was wreathed with laurel: it stood
sunlit, under an angel leading a child away from harm.
Balancing this are poems in the voices of young soldiers who fought in the recent Iraq conflict, including a woman mechanic, (‘May 2010, Georgia’ ) who says –
You can get killed at any
time. It’s hard to explain what fear in people’s
faces looks like - even the biggest hardest men
and the voices of Iraqi civilians taken from news reports such as in ‘November 2009, Kwater Sadeq’ an Iraqi girl -
when the war came
we had terrible suffering, shelling from the air,
explosions, tanks, suicide bombers: all the time
fear for me and my seven sisters: after our mum
and dad were killed by US bombs we came to the
al-Zahara Organisation for Orphans: and now I
try to throw my mind forward to school lessons,
the joys of music and religious songs: to a future
where I can walk to and from school in safety;
where I can follow my computer studies in peace.
My interest in language also led to poems such as ‘Non-Military Statements’, inspired by an interview with a General who admitted that euphemisms are used to distance soldiers from the reality of what they are doing -
Neutralisation [killing soldiers] is part of any war
as are soft targets [bombing civilians]
Life deprivation [killing anyone] and surgical strikes
[shelling and bombing] can be justified…
The poem ‘Lunette’ uses an old medieval form (the fatrasie) to explore dictionary definitions of the word – the military meaning is – ‘A two or three sided field fort,/ its rear open to interior lines.’ But it also has other meanings, including religious, where it is a ‘crescent-shaped clip that holds the host upright in the monstrance’. And, finally, there is a series of ‘found’ poems from a WW1 pamphlet at the Imperial War Museum ‘Hints for the New Recruit: what to do and
how to do it’ which includes ‘slinging the bat’ or using army slang -
if it’s Thursday, get ready for a POETS
but make sure you keep your tin opener in good order
or you risk an early visit to the stiff’s smoked haddock.
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| Taking Mesopotamia |
A ‘POETS’ means ‘Push Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday’ (ie. Friday); a ‘tin opener’ is a bayonet, the ‘stiff’s smoked haddock’ is (rhyming slang) for the ‘dead man’s paddock’ – or graveyard.
Bernard O’Donoghue says of Taking Mesopotamia that it – ‘controls its anger through an accomplished and flexible technique in verse and prose. It is compulsory reading, even for those who don’t normally read poetry: an eloquent rejoinder to those who say poetry can’t, or shouldn’t, concern itself with public matters.’
The Carcanet Blog Sale
Every week on the blog, we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
This week, we're offering 25% off Jenny Lewis' Fathom (2007) and off pre-orders of her next book, Taking Mesopotamia (March 2014). Just go to www.carcanet.co.uk and use the offer code BLOG (case-sensitive).