Poetry - Cooler than Ice

For a while now I’ve been running a weekly creative writing workshop at HIV charity Body and Soul. My original aim was to provide some form of relief - when you wake up each day with a virus people don’t understand and don’t want to talk about, writing things down can be immensely cathartic. But what I hadn’t prepared for was the unexpected bonus - writers on the course were good.

So good in fact, that we wanted to share their work. On July 1st Body and Soul held a fundraising event, where the whole, huge B&S centre in Clerkenwell turned into an exhibition hall. Simple rooms grew into gigantic fabric forests, huge cinemas and festival-style performance arenas. Keen to share the experiences of our talented wordsmiths, we were faced with the eternal challenge of the poet: how to  grab ourselves an audience? And how to keep them interested?

Here’s what we came up with:

1. Poetic Bunting

A nod to this season’s most fashionable piece of nostalgia, poetic bunting instantly filled out the room with vibrant colour and atmosphere. On top of this, readers were encouraged to engage and interact with the poetry by following each poem as it spread from flag to flag.

I made the bunting double sided - on one side you’ve got the wordy, poetry bits and on the other scrappy cut-out triangles from magazines. This was far more serendipitous and exciting (and quick!) than the careful sewing that traditional bunting requires.

Once the two sides were glued together and cut into triangles,the flags were folded at the top and glued around parcel string and separated with bells.

2. Ice Ice Baby

One of our poets produced a really moving series of poems about the aftermath of her diagnosis, taking an the extended metaphor of trapping herself in ice to describe how she isolated herself from family, friends and home.

Always one for a literal interpretation, I got in touch with an old friend from the HIV lab at Chelsea and Westminster hospital, with access to the coldest freezer I know…

And voila! Frozen poetry.

Amongst other adventures, this experiment involved a gripping drive through London with a box of frozen poems preserved in dry ice, which gives off excitingly toxic fumes. It also led to a kind of ‘ever changing’ installation which slowly revealed more and more of the poem as the room filled up with people. I spent most of the evening mopping the floor.

Other pieces in the exhibition included a collection of hand written poems collaged into a giant sunset on a real, sandy beach; a life-sized door superimposed onto the wall (complete with hand-scratched poetry around the frame) and a pop-art style series of train tickets telling the story of one long journey…

Finally, we used the Therapy Rooms to create a series of listening booths, where guests were able to hear live recordings of the poets reading through their work. With the sound so clear you could hear the reader breathing, these were an incredibly intimate and intense way to connect to some sensational writing.

Readers read, listeners listened, people paid attention. A good job well done, and an amazing, truly inspiring event.

To read some of the poems (coming soon), or to learn more about Body and Soul click here. 

Body and Soul are a registered charity offering support, advice and a holistic approach to helping people and families affected by HIV. If you are interested in making a donation or becoming a volunteer, please get in touch at 0207 923 6880 or visit www.bodyandsoulcharity.org. 

Home-Made ‘Nutella’ Hazelnut Truffle in a Big Fat Pancake

These big fat pancakes remind me of the soybean filled ones I gorged upon in Tokyo this April. I always love the idea of biting into something so fluffy and pancakey at the same time, but the fact that the soybean looks like chocolate but tastes like something else has always been a crushing blow.

After drooling over a beautiful article on Poires Au Chocolat, I had to try making my own Nutella. Here I’ve edited the original recipe by throwing in a handful of darker, richer ‘truffly’ ingredients. Whilst it really is a whole mouthful of delicious, Nutella purists may argue that it doesn’t actually taste like Nutella anymore. For real-life home-made Nutella-tasting fun, I’d recommend having a go at the original recipe. Click here.

Bizarrely, the thing that really seems to set this dish off is the shot of lemon juice over the top of the pancake, which stops the chocolate mix from becoming too ‘claggy’.

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A Crown of Squash

One of my discoveries in Borough Market today was a new kind of squash. Not new as in, never before seen by human eyes (as far as I’m aware), but new to me. I don’t even know what kind of squash it is, but it’s small, round, and the kind of orange that you’d want to pull out of your paintbox and colour your hair with. If anyone thinks they can identify it by that description then please do let me know so I can buy another one…

I figured something so glorious and bright deserved a bit of a royal welcome, so I cut it into rings and placed it on a superfood throne

My brother Ollie was particularly appreciative (see http://blog.olliepalmer.com/my-sister-is-an-amazing-cook).  A mixture of warm and spicy coconut flavours baked into the squash added a real depth and surprise of flavour. Together with the splash of colour, the vitamin-packed goodness and the amazing contrast of crunchy, soft and chewy at the same time, this truly is a feast for kings.

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A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Victoria Memorial

There’s a lady being fucked from behind. The lady is white and the cock is big and black. She’s made up with those Amy-Winehouse style cat eyes that everybody seems to like these days, and her silicone tits are huge, defying gravity. The man with the penis is hardly visible. Really, he’s just a cock.

 This is a picture from a pornographic magazine. It’s been neatly cut out, pasted onto a piece of cardboard, and now, a smiling gentleman is holding it up to my face.

I’m still not entirely sure how we got into this mess. We were walking across Hooglie Park – a vast and dirty scrubland in the centre of Kolkata. Bodies lay everywhere, stretched out in the dusty heat. Aga and I had been playing a guessing game: ‘Dead or Sleeping?’

Somewhere along the way a polite young Indian guy had joined us. His English was pretty good and he seemed to want to practice. So far he’d been filling us in on interesting facts about India’s economy – potentially quite useful for a budding journalist such as myself. But a while ago he’d decided to shift the conversation:

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And then I landed

If you’ve ever watched The Jungle Book, you might be able to form yourself up a fairly good image of my first view of Kolkata. The ground emerged from beneath misty aeroplane haze. I saw luscious, jungly clusters of palm trees and odd, irregular-shaped houses. Deep jewels glistened and shimmered in the ground, eventually revealing themselves to be dark pools of water. But as we came to land I noticed that the rivers were filthy and strewn with litter.

This is a city of constant paradox. Rich vibrant colours scream out for attention, but are numbed and mattified by the relentless dust. Bejewelled, beautiful women sit barefoot in the dirt next to filthy, swollen nippled bitch-dogs. The rich/poor divide reaches out constantly to slap you in the face.

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Taste of India

This Tuesday, I’ll be jumping on a plane and flying out to Kolkata, India. Why? Because Child In Need Institute (CINI) have asked me to write an article on the work they do to support malnourished families. I’ll be finding out what it’s like to be a mother in a country where a child dies every fifteen seconds. Hell, I don’t even know what it’s like to be a mother back here. Am I nervous? Terribly.

But I’m also intrigued. Lonely Planet describes Kolkata as ‘Simultaneously noble and squalid, cultured and desperate…a festival of human existence.’ That sounds like a night at Poetry Unplugged. From the preliminary research I’ve managed to establish that whilst Westerners find the poverty immensely shocking, it seems that many of the families who live those lives don’t actually realise that things could be different. Several of the local doctors point-blank refused to believe that there are countries out there where malnourishment isn’t a major issue.

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TEDx London

I woke up early on Thursday morning, stinking of whisky and ideas. On Wednesday night The Hub hosted their very first (hopefully of many) TEDx London event, where a series of fascinating speakers came to share their ideas with the world.

And it wasn’t just the speakers who had something to say. In advance, the audience were all given an opportunity to choose a few key words which were printed onto badges. During the breaks we were all encouraged to take these key words and begin a conversation with a stranger.

This led to a whole load of people straining to see what was written on my breasts. Next time I’m going to ask them to make the print smaller…

Anyway, here’s my top idea of the night:

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Dear Simon Armitage,

I really enjoyed reading your collection ‘The Not Dead.’ Well, I didn’t enjoy it exactly. It hurt to read it. It hurt in the way that all beautiful things should hurt, like when you walk into a Catholic church and there’s Christ, hanging from the cross in all his majestic pain and glory with the sins of the world being poured down upon him and all you can look at is the glorious definition of his sculpted abdominal muscles. The pain makes it all the more beautiful. And the more beautiful it is, the more it hurts.

Yesterday I read an essay where they talked about Tolstoy’s clumsy repetition of words in ‘War and Peace.’ I’ve never read it. But the man who wrote the essay argued that in translations of the novel the repetition should be left as it was because it was clearly intentional, and indeed, it’s the clumsiness of the repetition that makes the sentiments expressed so raw and genuine. I bought the essay at the same time as I bought your collection ‘The Not Dead,’ and in the same bookshop. So maybe you’ve seen it. I like the idea that you’d know a book just because it was on the shelf next to your own. Like you go around bookshops looking for your own work. I’d quite like to do that one day.

What really hurt about your poetry was that I suddenly realised I could never ever write anything nearly as dark and delicate and fragile as that. Not ever. The real pain was the sudden realisation that now I have to try.

With Kind Regards,

Abi Palmer

Bernard Matthews Stole my Faith in Humanity

I want to believe the Holocaust deniers
I want to know that no man, no matter how angry
Or proud of his nation
Could lock the door on a chamber full of humans,
Then come back later
To stack up the bodies like meat.

But then I remember how we treat our meat
How living creatures sit
Raw-bellied, swollen, stacked
On shelves, the smell of dead
Flesh, grey, clinging to half-alive skin

I tear up fistfuls of battery method turkey,
Season it with salt and pepper,
And dress it up with garlic, I garnish
And swallow it down.

Photo © Ollie Palmer 2008. See www.olliepalmer.com to find out more

If KITT was a snail…

“Check out my Molluscular Bondage Shell!”