Dreams, Spirits and Visions: Pascale Petit in interview with Michelle McGrane

MM: Pascale, tell me something of your family origins and what you were like as a child.

PP: I was born in Paris and spent my childhood in France and Wales, was mainly brought up by my Welsh/Asian grandmother. My father vanished when I was eight and my mother suffered from severe mental illness, so I didn’t spend much time with them. I was a withdrawn child.

Will you describe the France and Wales of your childhood?

When I was with my parents we lived in the Latin Quarter, then Les Lilas, in Paris where they ran a brasserie and brewery business. We then moved to a flat in the Boulevard de Grenelle near the Eiffel Tower. My mother couldn’t look after me so I stayed with neighbours and her friends a lot. When I was five I spent a year and a half in a children’s home and later stayed with families in Germany. When I went to live with Gran in mid-Wales (where I’d also been as a baby) it was like going to heaven. She lived in a council house and there was no sanitation or running water so it was primitive but we were surrounded by farms and she had a large garden and many animals including seven cats. The river Severn was at the bottom of the lane. At the age of thirteen I went to live with my mother in Caerffili then Llanbradach in South Wales.

Tell me about your grandmother and your life with her in mid-Wales.

She was known as the local witch! She was a strong independent woman. When we first lived with her she worked in the Welshpool chippy, then she used to char for local gentry. She was a fortune teller at fairs. She had second sight and always knew when someone had just died. There would be a ticking in the wall which we could hear! And she would tell us about their ghosts – details such as how they floated just above the ground. The kids down the lane were terrified of her and her cane. We always wondered why she had a yearlong tan and spoke Urdu in her sleep but only found out after her death that her mother was Pakistani and she had been a love child taken in by her father’s family to keep house for them. Although she lived in Wales she came as an evacuee from Liverpool during WWII and was originally from Ireland.

Did you inherit your love of nature from your grandmother?

Yes I did. Her garden was my first Amazon and I loved working in it. My favourite place was the greenhouse.

When did your passion for art and words develop?

I first started to draw in the infant school in Paris. Maman worked late each evening at various glamorous jobs (at the Korean then Indian embassies and ESRO – European Space Research Organisation, where she was Professor Bondi’s secretary, and she worked for Salvador Dali at one point). I could lose myself in drawings and enter created worlds which I had some control over. Words came later, not then, because I hardly ever spoke. My first memory of loving words was when I had to learn English quickly when I was seven, as Gran spoke no French. I found it hard until someone gave me a picture book with the English words underneath. So I suppose it was the pictures that did it, and perhaps why I think of English as a pictorial language. I decided to become a poet and/or artist when I was fifteen and discovered Keats at school. I used to illustrate poems by him, Coleridge and Wordsworth. At thirteen I won an art competition even though I was the youngest entrant in my school, so the artroom became a special place for me. When I went to live with my mother I found I could escape from her in my created worlds.

Would you relate one of your most vivid recollections of the years you spent at the Royal College of Art?

My personal tutor was Professor Phillip King. He walked into my studio once and right into glass tendrils of an installation I was making. It was called ‘Bodytrap’! The sculpture school was in the sheds behind the Natural History Museum and we used to raid their skips. I found wax casts of monkey foetuses there.

I’m interested in the way art informs your poetry. You’ve written poems based on the work of Braque, Varo, Magritte, Marc …

Visual artists have influenced me more than poets, especially ones from Latin America: Guillermo Kuitca, Doris Salcedo, Remedios Varo and of course Frida Kahlo. And the art of indigenous peoples such as the Peruvian vegetalistas (plant-shamans), their visionary paintings called icaros – curing songs for illnesses. I also like Bill Viola’s video installations, especially the elemental ones of people in water or about breath.

Would you expand on the influence Amazonian mythology and indigenous cultures have had on your writing?

This is the biggest influence on my work. I spent many years researching the anthropology and ethnobotany of South American indigenous peoples, their myths and shamanistic rituals. It all started with a book Waterfalls of the World where I first saw a photo of Angel Falls. I had to go and see them! During two journeys there I met the Pemón who live in Venezuela’s Lost World.

Tell me a couple of your favourite memories of Venezuela’s Lost World.

Rounding the bend in the Churun river, to catch first sight of the kilometre-high Angel Falls – it’s the closest I’ve come to seeing a god. Everyone stood up and the canoe almost tipped us into the rapids. Camping on Ratoncita Island near the base of the falls, rising at dawn when the sun’s rays catch the falls so they are on fire against the rose quartz sandstone. The eerie roars of howler monkeys as the forest awakes.

The first sight of the falls in Devil’s Canyon from the air. Flying low over the table mountain Auyantepuy, the 275-square-miles plateau Angel Falls drops from, that long look at the otherworldly formations on the surface. Then the sudden whoosh over the escarpment rim to land in Kavac Camp. Kavac Falls in a cave in one of the talus cliffs, swimming through the metre-wide gorge into it next to a vine snake.

The giant anteater at the base of Mount Roraima. That moment when I reached the top and sat on the cliff edge with my legs dangling into space, looking out over the Gran Sabana with other tepuis (Pemón name for these table mountains) rising above the clouds.

You’ve travelled to Nepal too …

I’d always wanted to see the Himalayas and had written poems about them in my first book Heart of a Deer. I went to Kathmandu to launch the British poetry issue of the magazine Pratik I had guest edited. The editor Yuyutsu Sharma guided three of us on a three-day Annapurna Trek to see Machapuchere – Fishtail Mountain. The monsoon was late and we trekked up the foothills in rain and mud. At sunset of the second day the clouds began to clear and we all rushed up at 4am to see Fishtail’s double dagger ice-peaks silhouetted against the sky. The flight back from Pokhara to Kathmandu, with a panorama of the Himalayas all the way.

Have you visited Mexico?

The first time I went was to see Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, to check that the facts in my poems were correct. The second time was to take part in an international literary festival in Tampico, Letras en el Golfo, and the third was to launch the bilingual edition of The Zoo Father, in Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende. I made some good friends there and started writing my third collection The Huntress after visits to the Templo Mayor and Anthropology Museum.

In his review of The Huntress in Poetry London, Robert Minhinnick described you as “one of the most unEnglish poets currently at work in English". Do you think your rootlessness as a child, moving from place to place physically and psychologically, has contributed to your ability to embrace many different cultures in your work?

I think you’re right. I am curious about other landscapes, cultures and their poetics. I’m drawn to wildernesses all over the planet – the Tien Shan, Yellow Mountain and so on. Maybe I’m always looking for home and strangeness is home.

Do you have a writing routine? Do you write every day?

When I can I love to write every day. If I’ve slept okay I’ll get up early and go straight into my study. Anything feels possible then, there’s that feeling that I could write a new poem, and when I get going I often write a few in a day.

Where is your favourite place for writing?

At home in my tiny sunny study, in front of the back window. It’s important there’s a window and it looks out onto gardens rather than the front street and cars. I find it hard to write elsewhere.

Do you find each poem suggests its form as it emerges?

I write in longhand first, in large wide notebooks, two at a time. There has to be two so I can refer to one to write the next draft. The notebooks have to be wide so the form isn’t cramped, in case it has long lines. Large, so I can see as much of the poem on the page or double page spread as possible. How the poem comes out in the first draft is important to me, even though I might change it drastically afterwards, I refer back to it to see that first rush-shape.

How does the process of creating a sculpture compare with that of writing a poem?

I made figurative sculptures so a lot of time was spent making them well enough to suspend disbelief, making skin look like skin, etc. It was labour-intensive work, and usually involved wearing gas-masks, ear-defenders and eye-goggles. Noisy too, grinding away seams with the grinderette. There were times when it was like writing a poem, at the beginning of a work and near the end, when it came into focus, and the feeling of it might be trance-like. The rest of the time was hard labour. Poems are somewhat like that though ­– there’s the rush of inspiration, the idea, the tune, the first few lines. If I’m lucky the body of the ‘material’ will arrive intact. Or I’ll have another go at starting the poem so I have a few starts to work with. Then come weeks or months of grinding away at the seams of the poem, getting the form right, the images crystallised. This might involve removing a leg and recasting it in a different position, moving stanzas and lines about, inserting new ones. This also is labour-intensive, but worth the moments when I sense the poem is feeling true again, and hopefully alive enough to suspend disbelief.

Where do you do the research for your poems? Is it easy to source information about the fauna, flora, myths and cultures in which you’re interested?

My small house is crammed with books. I Google of course, and have used specialist libraries, such as the Zoological Society of London library, Senate House, Canning House (which specialises in Latin America), the British Museum, and specialist bookshops, in Paris and Caracas, where I found Pemón or Warao chants translated into Spanish or French. These days Amazon.com is very useful for specialised books.

How does the work in your most recent collection, The Treekeeper’s Tale (Seren, 2008), compare with that in your first pamphlet, Icefall Climbing (Smith Doorstop, 1995)? How have you evolved as a poet in the past fourteen years?

Most of the poems in Icefall Climbing were included in my first collection Heart of a Deer (Enitharmon, 1998). Both are long out of print. There are okay poems in this debut collection but in others there’s too much metaphor and not enough directness. Now I aim to write concisely and directly, to make my poems as alive as I can. To say what they are about. I made a conscious decision in my second collection The Zoo Father to do just that. I even inserted lines so that the ‘story’ of a poem was clear. This was a risk. Some of my ideal readers are people who may not have read poetry before (I love it when teenagers say they enjoy them). However, the story is not always apparent and some of the poems are more mysterious, but in this case I want the images and sounds to attract the reader, and to suggest what might be going on, to lead to the depths.

But the main difference as I see it, between my second and first collections, is one of dynamism. I hope The Zoo Father and the books that succeed it are more dynamic than my early work. This was more of a challenge in my fourth book The Treekeeper’s Tale, where the subjects and speakers of the poems are coast redwood trees and deep-frozen excavated warriors and horses. I don’t know where I’ll go from here. Meanwhile, there is this other collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo, which I’ve been writing on and off for ten years. I’ve given that one Frida Kahlo’s voice and I hope it’s as direct and vital as she was.

In ‘A Hornet’s Nest’ from The Huntress (Seren), you write:

“I taste carcasses and wings.
I flatten strips on the scorching stone wall
to dry in the afternoon of my life.
And cut my hornet-paper
into the pages of a diary.
Where now –
I remember and write everything.”

Has it been difficult for you to dig deeply into the painful experiences of your life and write about them with candour? Has it been liberating?

I don’t tell everything, just a fictionalised version! That’s the narrator speaking, not me. But the feeling of the poem is true to me. The digging wasn’t difficult. What is difficult is when the book is in the public domain. I know I take risks, especially writing in a country where many poets hesitate to use the ‘I’ or write autobiography. Readers and reviewers mostly assume it’s autobiographical, and while it is, as I said it’s fictionalised, so the ‘I’ of the poems is not just me, but a character I’ve created. It’s the transforming art I’m interested in rather than self-expression.

What feelings would you like readers to take away after having read your books?

I’d like them to feel the high I felt while writing, to be surprised, excited, moved.

Do you have a favourite collection among your work? Do you have favourite poems?

My favourite collection is the one I’m working on, so it’s What the Water Gave Me.

Seren is publishing What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo in May next year. Would you describe the collection?

There are fifty-five poems and each one is in Frida’s voice and has the title of one of her paintings, though some of the poems are about the same painting so there are series woven throughout. The book was written over ten years. I’ve concentrated on her paintings and the aftermath of the accident she suffered when she was eighteen, when a tramcar crashed into her bus, disabling her. A handrail pierced her back and exited her vagina, so I’m exploring that trauma which was quite sexual in nature and which stopped her having children. I’m investigating the aftermath of childhood trauma, though this time it’s not mine, but hers, which is liberating and allows me some privacy! What I’m most interested in is her vitality, despite the pain, the vivacity of those so-alive paintings that stare out at us.

I’ve used the paintings to make poems that at times have ‘flying’ elements, where Frida and objects (such as her bed) and animals glide into each other. She believed, as I do, that all living things are interconnected. Some of my poems are quite close interpretations of the pictures, but many are variations, parallels, as if I’ve painted my own Frida Kahlos, but I have tried to keep faithful to her spirit. I’m in there of course, but as her, which is fun. I’m hoping that readers who don’t know her work will also enjoy the pictures of the poems and perhaps look her paintings up, but I want the poems to work on their own.

In an interview with South African poet, Antjie Krog, she said: “It took me nearly twenty years of publishing before I comfortably called myself a poet … Poetry has an element that cannot be planned, or thought up, or achieved through diligence or intellect. And after every volume one is convinced that one is going to die, because one has absolutely no further use and anyhow one will never be able to write anything ever again." Is this something to which you can relate? Do you find yourself living through your imagination, through your poetry?

That’s exactly it – I live through my imagination, a recreated world. Life is painful and messy. The good bits are fleeting, art can extend those.

Have you received ideas for poems in dreams?

The Zoo Father all started with a dream. My father’s face appeared in a dream, in the mists of Angel Falls one night – gigantic, out of the blue. I hadn’t thought of him for decades. A few days later I received a letter summoning me to meet him again in Paris after thirty-five years. So I wrote the book as if he was in the Lost World, surrounded by its animals.

What did you learn editing Poetry London for fifteen years?

Poetry London gets a lot of submissions and this gave me an insight into how poems stand out, are distinct and memorable and make the reader feel confident in the voice and authenticity. I learnt to read poems with an open mind and to trust my instincts, encourage new poets who hadn’t been published before. I also published many poets in translation and this was mind-broadening. I was keen to encounter different poetics from around the world, to see what others are doing outside the UK scene.

What can Freeing the Imagination participants expect from your residential workshop at Chateau Ventenac next May?

Chateau Ventenac is in the most gorgeous part of the Languedoc, surrounded by vineyards and Cathar strongholds perched on gorges. We’ll draw inspiration from that and lots of other sources for new directions in poems. We’ll spend the mornings writing, the afternoons in tutorials and private writing time, and the evenings in readings and discussions. There’ll be ten maximum on the course, so everyone will get close attention.

This October I start teaching three more terms at Tate Modern in the galleries when they’re closed to the public. It’s a fun course to find new ways of tackling poems sparked by the art and the students produce amazing work.

How did you become involved in poetry translation?

When I came across Ted Hughes’ translation of Ferenc Juhász’ poem ‘The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets’ in Modern Poetry in Translation I was so excited by its visionary energy that I wrote my own version in The Huntress. Juhász’ poem is a dialogue between a mother and son, and I saw how I could write my own dialogue with my mother but use Juhász’ extravagant language and imagery – especially that miracle stag/son with his cosmic/electric antlers.

Then I was invited to take part in the Poet to Poet translation project in China and I started translating contemporary Chinese poets such as Zhai Yongming, Zhou Zan and Yang Lian. I later translated poems by Xi Chuan and Wang Xiaoni during the Yellow Mountain poetry festival in China and the UK. I’ve since translated work by the Israeli poet Amir Or and fado poems by the Portuguese singer Amália Rodrigues for an anthology commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation, edited by Mimi Khalvati.

What skills should an effective translator possess?

My aim is to capture the spirit of the original as faithfully as possible but to recreate it in my imagination as a poem that works fully in English, that reads naturally and idiomatically, using fresh language and imagery. It’s a tall order but worth the attempt.

You’ve translated four of Yang Lian’s poems from Chinese into English for his forthcoming collection, Lee Valley Poems. How did you and Lian work together to translate his poetry?

Lian lives near me, over the River Lee, the other side of Walthamstow Marshes, so we worked together at my house as well as in China. His poems are about the river but he’s brought Tang Dynasty China to the marshes! I think he is a poet of great power. I don’t speak Mandarin, so he talked about each line in his Yanglish. I grilled him until his sense, sounds and images were clear in my mind. Then I revised alone and checked further points by email and phone.

You are mentoring the Bangladeshi poet, Mahfuz Mir Ali, for Spread the Word’s The Complete Works project. What does your role as a mentor involve? Have you ever been mentored?

Mahfuz is a hugely talented poet, a dream to mentor. I’ve read the manuscript of his first collection in preparation and he’s an entirely new voice for British poetry. He’s a refugee from Bangladesh now living in London, and has an extraordinary story and lyricism. I’m privileged to be mentoring him for The Complete Works and fully support the project’s aim – to help further develop advanced Black and Asian poets. It’s much needed as they’re under-represented in publishing. The mentoring consists of six daylong meetings over two years, and email and phone contact inbetween. I also co-tutored (with Mimi) an Arvon course with the whole group of ten fabulous TCW poets.

I haven’t been mentored myself, though Les Murray, whose work I adore, has been encouraging for over a decade now, and this has been sustaining.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Do you think there is still a need for feminism?

There is still a need and I am a feminist. I was involved in the feminism movement in the visual arts in the 80’s, and took part in the women’s touring exhibition Pandora’s Box in 1984-5. I saw a lot of the sexism of the sculpture world and I think the same goes on in poetry though things have much improved in the past few decades.

I believe you’re working on a novel …

It’s about an artist and her long lost father and is set in London, Paris and Venezuela’s Lost World. It’s a more fictionalised and expanded alternative version of The Zoo Father…

Would you name five of your favourite poems? Why are they important to you?

I have so many favourite poems it’s hard to choose but here are six:

‘The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets’ (in Ted Hughes’ translation) by Ferenc Juhász, for the myth-making luxuriance, and its electrical, hypnotic charge.

‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by Keats as it’s the poem that made me want to be a poet when I was fifteen.

‘Kubla Khan’ by Coleridge for its icy otherworldliness.

‘A Season in Hell’ by Arthur Rimbaud for its genius.

‘She Had Some Horses’ by Joy Harjo for its mix of traumatic subject matter and Muscogee chant.

‘The War God’s Horse Song’ by Anon, Navajo, for its trancelike rhythm and celebration of horse power.

Thank you, Michelle, for your questions and I look forward to reading your collection, which is out soon, isn’t it?