Snow fell across London last night. We used a 5th-century plainsong (“A Solis Ortus Cardine”) and before-and-after photographs from the woods behind our house as the basis for a new film-poem.
From the window of my office in Holborn, I watch the changing light of the London skyline with fascination.
Yesterday, with the help of an iPhone app, I propped my phone by the window for several hours and set it to take pictures six times per minute. I composited these images into video at 24 frames per second using Quicktime, then looped the clip back-and-forth, adjusted the colour, and added a panning and zooming effect using iMovie.
Valerie and I collaborated this morning on some accompanying words and music, combining it all together into another film-poem.
And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
There are many ways to settle in to a new place. One is to give them names of one’s own. Inspired by parodies giving alternate names to tube stations in London, I have produced a map whose stations take into account the poetic landscape. This is not intended to be the poet’s tube map, but rather a poet’s tube map–mine, representing my own thoughts and experiences at the intersection between London and the lyre.
I recently attended my first poetry reading since moving to London, and wrote about the experience for the Silk Road Review Blog:
As I travelled by tube to the Southbank Centre to attend the first event of the London Literature Festival, and my first poetry reading since moving to London two months ago, I took with me my American expectations about poetry venues: coffee shops, small community centers, the occasional well-appointed-but-out-of-the way theater or library hall. Seated facing the podium on the sixth floor of this clean, bright temple to art, I kept examining the layers of the backdrop as if it were a painting. First, a Union Jack. Then the London Eye. And on the far side of the Thames, the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. This was not a painting, however, but a window. The statement was clear: art, and for this evening, poetry, commands a central place in Britain. However, centrality means anything but homogeneity, as the four readers in this “Poetry of Place” event demonstrated.
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.”
The train that galloped up to the platform this morning, normally crammed with humanity, was empty but for the discarded newspapers lining the window ledges. I thought I had missed the memo about the start of the zombie apocalypse. Turns out the kids have gone back to school, and the tourists have gone home. So I spent some time on my morning commute thinking about the similarities between poets and werewolves.
Culture, like poetry, is so often about what gets transmitted between the lines. It is not, I decided, the bankers and CEOs who normally sit across from me on the train who hold the most cultural power. What we learn on our mothers’ laps goes deep, to a visceral level. What gets passed down, mother to child through generations, forms the culture of a people. Mothers, therefore, are also “unacknowledged legislators” creating and replicating the very “operating system” of a society–its culture.
Moving from California to London certainly feels like I have switched operating systems. Apart from the obvious fumbling as I seek to find where they’ve moved the new buttons and menus, this shake-up gives me the opportunity to discover what is universal among computers–er–people. Contrast is one powerful way to heighten perception and uncover commonality in the quest for what is essentially human.
I have also discovered, however, that poets are not entirely human. Continue Reading “An American Werewolf in London”
I came home tonight to a strange package from New York. In it was a copy of the August 11th issue of The Long Islander, bearing one of my poems. Regarding this historic American newspaper from England, it seems curious to note that its founding by Walt Whitman in 1838 was in the Victorian era, when our North London flat was built. And the location of “Ojai, Ca” beneath my name, once second nature, is finally beginning to feel remote.
I wrote this poem long before I dreamed I’d end up here. My relocation gives the title a new shade of meaning for me, as I seek to blend in with strange surroundings. Sometimes I am unsure myself just whose side I really am on.
Many thanks again to George Wallace for publishing this poem. Click here to read the clipping.
Robert Peake's poems have appeared in Iota, North American Review, Poetry International, Rattle, and are forthcoming in Magma Poetry.
